Article On The Rights Of Individuals Suffering From Dissociative Identity Disorder

Jared Slater (J.D. Candidate, University of Southern California Gould School of Law, 2015) recently published an article entitled, Can Dr. Jekyll sign for Mr. Hyde?: examining the rights of individuals suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder in civil contexts,  24 S. Cal. Rev. L. & Soc. Just. 239-265 (2015).  Provided below is an excerpt from the article:

Imagine individuals who, at different times and under different stresses or circumstances, believe they are someone else. Next imagine that these individuals believe it so much that their posture, speech, handwriting, name, and personal history change along with their identities. These identity swaps can be so severe that when one identity switches for another, the first identity has no recollection of the events that took place under the control of the second identity, resulting in significant amnesia. These are the primary symptoms of dissociative identity disorder (“DID”), a disorder that afflicts as much as 1-3 percent of the general population, with incidence rates that are even higher among psychiatric patients. However, both of these figures may underrepresent the true extent of the disorder, because DID can be difficult to diagnose due to a “lack of education among clinicians about dissociation, dissociative disorders, and the effects of psychological trauma, as well as … clinician bias.”