Is multiple personality disorder a real thing?

We all have things that affect us. While they may not be as severe as DID, when we treat the minds of other people as not being real, we ultimately remove the ability to treat any ailment that might exist in there.

This is tricky to answer. For both "yes" and "no" answers, it requires qualifications. And so the full answer is: "Yes, but not definitively."

Multiple personality disorder has been renamed Dissociated Identity Disorder (DID) as of the 2005 revision of the DSM-IV. It has become accepted that the dissociation is real, but as psychology isn't an exacting science, it's difficult to tell when people are faking it and when they're not (though there are some ways to validate it either way).

The exact primary cause of DID is unknown, but in most individuals it comes from having a set of traumatic experiences in which dissociating the events from a person's own involvement was needed, such as the case with some forms of ritual abuse, child molestation, or even killing (such as the case with some child soldiers). Such horrific events lead a person to have to temporarily become someone else in order to survive. And when this is reinforced, DID tends to result in certain individuals.

For those who are sincerely affected, the changes in personality follow certain archetypes: there is the innocent child, the guardian/protector, the persecutor, and the victim. Each has a unique trigger: an emotional state, a physical sensation, or some other event which causes them to switch personalities to a new identity. Many have different names. Some even believe that they are different genders, leading to problems with gender identity and social interaction.