It’s Not A Good Wedding Without At Least One Multiple Personality
With this, Hank Pym (among all his other problems) joins the list of super-heroes who have multiple personalities, including the Hulk, Thorn, and Crazy Jane.
There’s a few problems though:
1) Schizophrenia and Multiple Personality Disorder (now called Dissociative Identity Disorder) are two entirely different diagnoses. To oversimplify, individuals with schizophrenia have difficulty with reality: they frequently have delusions, experience hallucinations, and have disordered thinking. They only have a single personality, though. This is very different from Dissociative Personality Disorder, which has none of the abnormal thinking and delusions associated with schizophrenia. However, a person with Dissociative Personality Disorder has at least two distinct and separate personalities.
The diagnostic criteria for Schizophrenia
The diagnostic criteria for Dissociative Identity Disorder
2) One current theory is that multiple personalities develop from mentally traumatic experiences. The traumatized person protects themselves by creating an entirely new personality to escape into. The Hulk (at least as written by Peter David) is a close fit to this theory: he saw his father murder his mother, and developed separate personalities to help him cope with what he witnessed. Similarly, Rose saw her parents murdered and this ultimately gave way to her developing two personalities: the quiet and compliant Rose, and the violent and aggressive Thorn.
What about Hank Pym? What trauma did he experience? He had a lab accident. (Technically, it was a lab accident wherein he inhaled some experimental gases which led to his developing the Yellow Jacket persona. This actually rules out Dissociative Identity Disorder, as it cannot be caused by “the direct physiological effects of a substance.” What Hank Pym actually has is a mental disorder brought about by drugs — just what the public wants in an Avenger.)
An earlier post on Harvey Dent,Two-Face, and multiple personalities
June 18th, 2007 at 7:38 am
According to psychs I respect, “the current theory” is that DID is a purely iatrogenic complaint. That is, it’s a delusion largely created in hysteric patients by their “therapists”. It’s like diagnosing someone with “Genital Retraction Syndrome”. The patient may believe his penis is withdrawing into the abdomen, but it’s a delusion, just like having Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice living in your head, and Alice is lop-eared rabbit.
(Have you heard the one about the Zionist penis-melting electronic combs?)
June 18th, 2007 at 8:02 am
Official Comment
That’s a good point, and there’s no doubt that many multiple personalities are — let’s say “aided and abetted” — by therapists. On the other hand, I’ve yet to be convinced that there’s no such thing as multiple personalities.
I addressed the controversy surrounding DID a little more at length in the Harvey Dent post, linking to an extensive post at the Skeptic’s Dictionary. A recent article in Newsweek (and republished on MSNBC) addresses some of the same points (and my thought after reading it is that there are going to be a lot of pissed therapists out there).
June 18th, 2007 at 8:17 am
As someone who majored in psychology, writers saying schizophrenia when they really mean multiple personality disorder has always been a bugbear of mine. The confusion generally stems from the term ’split personality’, one of the other names for multiple personality disorder. Schizophrenia literally means ’split (or broken) mind’, referring to the disassociation from reality.
Mind you, I’m really more concerned about Jan. She must have really low self-estem if she’s willing to marry someone who was horrified to be marrying her that his mind had to construct a completely seperate personality to be able to go through with it.
June 18th, 2007 at 8:40 am
Official Comment
To say the least, Jan’s always had some major self-esteem issues — she’s pretty much worth a post on her own. But then, almost all the classic Avengers had their psychological problems. Just off the top of my head:
* Iron Man - Alcoholism, Narcissism
* Scarlet Witch (original) - co-dependent, (current) - dead, but before that schizophrenic
* Quicksilver (original) - co-dependent enabler (current) - narcissistic
I think a lot of it comes down to the Marvel style in the early to mid-60s, which was to give all the characters flaws in one way or another. When it worked — Spider-Man, the Thing — you got great and memorable characters. When it didn’t quite click, you ended up with whiners with clear psychological problems.
June 18th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
DID is a controversial diagnosis, with some psychiatrists who don’t believe in it at all, but it is probably not purely iatrogenic. True DID is quite rare, though, so as a psychiatrist-in-training I kind of pooh-poohed it as a diagnosis until I started working in a clinic alongside people who see gobs and gobs of “complex PTSD” brought on by childhood sexual trauma, etc.
The people I’ve talked to say it’s more useful to think of people with DID lacking one cohesive personality, rather than that they have multiple personalities per se.
I suspect that most of the psychiatrists who don’t believe in DID probably haven’t seen the right patient — it’s kind of like how it’s hard to imagine how someone can really have catatonia until you see it in person (except that catatonia is more common than DID).
With regard to the issue of whether it’s a delusion and the comparison to koro — in the case of DID, people don’t usually have “I have multiple personalities” as a chief complaint when they walk into the office. In fact, they may well not even be in any kind of treatment at all. They might present with complaints of lost time, or they may have complaints related to PTSD but not obviously to DID (like nightmares, flashbacks, panic attacks, avoidance, or more conventional dissociation episodes) and then it comes out over time that there are times that there are gaps of time.
Scott’s point is well taken — no matter what you think of DID, it is totally different from schizophrenia in terms of etiology, neurochemistry, symptomatology, treatment, and prognosis. Totally different!
June 19th, 2007 at 8:16 am
Well, Pym may be schizo, but he can change the size of his genitalia, which is a big plus with the ladies…
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