Have you ever met someone with multiple personality disorder?
What’s the worst mental illness you’ve seen in your lifetime?
MPD? Not officially, no.
The most shattered and completely destroyed person I have ever met was a very bad case of Borderline Personality Disorder. At age 28, they had already had 13 suicide attempts and many hospitalizations. They appeared to have MPD in a way because of how they seemed to flash through different personalities, but they never talked about the alters. This person had an absolutely horrendous childhood, something out of the movies. No meds or therapy worked on them.
At times, they appeared psychotic, but it was hard to diagnose or figure out if they were really psychotic or just fantasizing or imagining things, and it never lasted long anyway. It was more like the “brief periods of psychosis” Borderlines are said to have.
I’ve dealt with a few people who had schizophrenia or some sort of psychotic disorder, and they were far healthier than this Borderline. With someone with a psychotic disorder, you can put them on meds and they can get a lot better. There are no meds for Borderlines. No meds work on them.
For the life of me, I do not understand how anyone can even begin to put this person back together again.
Imagine a person is a vase. Drop the vase on a concrete floor, and watch it shatter into 100 pieces. That’s what this person was, 100 pieces of sharp and jagged bits of psyche scattered all over the floor with no way to put them back together again.
