“Personally, I am getting the vibes of a sort of dissociated personality type who genuinely cannot fully integrate the horror of the alt personality”.
Such an interesting statement. It’s a very good insight. What the heck, human psychology. Staggers the mind.
I wouldn’t claim it as much of an insight, having studied psychology this guy’s entire known profile is a perfect match for dissociation. And after I posted this, another news story came out claiming to have found quotes from him, about ten years back, saying more or less that he had no emotional affect and felt nothing. The most frequently cited reason for development of this sort of personality is emotional or sexual abuse or trauma in early childhood. So I find it rather interesting that the father shows up to shepherd the guy home, possibly a family recognition of a troubled personality or any number of other possible reasons that could shed further light on this murky situation.
It’s not so much a defense as an explanation of something that is otherwise hard to explain. Of course there are a lot of people out there who are damaged and have a diagnosis, but will never snap to this extent or do anything to come to the attention of law enforcement.
I’ve read criticism that multiple personality disorders are being exaggerated in their frequency by means of over-enthusiastic psychologists suggestively leading patients into confirmations of what would have gone un-noticed a generation earlier. The incidence of such persona in the general population is thought to be around 1% but with a range of 0.1% to 2.5% being possible. That would mean 3.5 million Americans and obviously nowhere near that number reach this level. Even if it’s 350,000, same comment applies. Like autism there’s a spectrum of this sort of abnormal mental state, so a lot of people could have a mild case of it. The diagnosis becomes difficult because in mild cases, a lot of people have “different sides” or see themselves as a composite of identities but the clinical diagnosis depends on a dysfunctional outcome of which one of the more salient examples is a lack of memory of all aspects of the multiple personae so that acts as well as thoughts can go unrecalled or at least suppressed. It’s seen to be a coping mechanism for severe abuse.
Interesting also that autism and this range of multiple personality disorders have some common features and common postulated causes. But they are not very similar in some of their symptoms. For example, autistic people often have problems with vocabulary, this is not seen to be a problem for multiple personality types. Also there’s a difference in socialization skills. What is similar perhaps is a tendency to self-harm and withdrawal.