An even greater injustice in all of this is that there are no programmes or commercials depicting multiples who are perfectly normal and don't behave like lunatics of one kind or another. Multiples are either invisible, or they are something to fear or ridicule. A fine cultural role model, that is. Anthony Temple, 2005

Multiplicity is a state of consciousness as natural as being a single personality. A multiple system or household is a group of many minds who live in one body. They may think and act very independently of one another, and have their own ways of experiencing the pleasures and frustrations of everyday life.

Some people find themselves in distress due to inadequate operating systems, or someone in the household being disruptive or destructive. In Western society, people with this kind of problem are told to go into therapy.

There, much of the time, they will run up against a prejudice so ingrained and so ancient that its adherents don't even know it's there; they're used to taking a singlet reality for granted. It is a prejudice which takes the form of a diagnosis. That diagnosis has been a death sentence for hundreds of multiple households with active careers, families and friends. It can give family courts a reason to take your children away from you, your boss an excuse to fire you, your friends to shun you like a leper.

"Multiple personality disorder" is the label used to describe the condition, not of being a multiple household in an upset situation or in need of improved communication, but rather of being multiple. "Dissociative identity disorder," the current label, describes the delusion that one has multiple personalities, for modern psychiatry has chosen once again to ignore reality.

Some therapists will still work with people in multiple systems, trying to accept the persons involved on their own terms, and not pushing inane, worthless pseudo- solutions like integration. Some households work out cooperative systems independently, and require little or no therapy. But we never hear about these. The only households in the books are the ones who came into therapy. The others stay in the closet for the most part -- and for damned good reasons.

Labeling multiplicity as a mental disorder caused by having sex with children was the worst mistake the APA could have made. It catered to tabloid fantasies and the worst excesses of the entertainment industry. It enabled the media to portray multiples as helpless victims, but also as murderous, vengeful killers. As insane. As out of control.

This seemingly harmless sensationalist ratings-booster has wrecked countless lives. For multiple households, the situation today is roughly equivalent of that of a gay or lesbian forty or fifty years ago. Those who are outed, or who simply find it difficult to hide the fact of their many selves, soon find their legal rights have all but vanished.

We can lose custody of our children if a family court judge learns that we are multiple. We can be fired if management finds out we are multiple. We are regarded as damaged goods, as untrustworthy, and as possible criminals. Inability to gain or hold employment encourages the popular view of multiple households as dysfunctional, mentally ill people.

Some systems believe that multiplicity is not a viable way of life, and that fusion should be the ultimate goal of healing. Others live very successfully in a cooperation of many selves and minds. Some don't wish to disclose for personal reasons, rather than fear of discrimination. But while discretion is always wise, we should not be afraid to disclose. Otherwise, multiplicity becomes a shameful secret, like the ones some of us had to keep as children.

Whether it's "Dissociative Identity" or "Multiple Personality", the APA still brands us with DISORDER, that is, chaos, lack of control. Since the mental health industry dictates legal standards of normality, all households are considered abnormal. This encourages the media to focus on lurid details. The public view of multiplicity is a stereotype derived from inaccurate, falsified media portrayals.

Multiplicity has been a subject for horror novels and films ever since Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In the 1950s, a spate of psychological dramas such as Three Faces of Eve and Lizzie portrayed multiples as depleted, neurotic losers who would periodically turn into fun-loving carousers. And, invariably, as women; that is, in female bodies. By the 1990s we were being treated with even less respect, as Raising Cain, Batman Forever and Mirage (as well as numerous television portrayals, particularly the despicable Melrose Place) firmly established multiplicity in the public mind as a disease spawned by child abuse, and its victims as helpless pawns of their own shattered brains, likely at any moment (particularly if in a male body) to turn savagely homicidal. No thanks.

I'd like to add in a word here to those who are preparing to write books or screenplays "about MPD/DID", or which feature "a character who happens to be multiple."

Writing a novel or a film which perpetuates stereotypes about multiple personality is like writing an old-time, cowboys-and-Indians western. Such entertainments seem relatively innocuous on the surface, but the way they portrayed Native Americans contributed -- and still contributes -- to the institutionalised racism that affects every Native American living today.

You're not talking about a harmless fantasy. You're not even talking about taking old mythological stories and dressing them up in new clothes, the way modern fantasy writers do like Charles DeLint.

You're talking about people who live and breathe and work and love in this real, present world. Who have dreams and aspirations and desires just as you do. The biggest mistake anyone, singlet or multiple, can ever make, is to think that the people in a multiple household are not real. As though, owing to the fact that there are several of us sharing a body, we are less worthy of equal dignity, equal respect, and equal rights. (And yes--the Milligan decision created case law precedent for persons in multiple households to have equal rights and responsibilities under the law.)

Yes, your viewers or readers don't know any better. But does that make it right?

And the same to journalists, or what passes for journalists today, when you go to write up the script for a story about a person "with this rare, baffling disorder."

Multiplicity only makes it into the news when a member of a multiple household has committed a crime or has been a victim of crime. Multiplicity is being used as a legal defense, with a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, despite the fact that multiplicity is not insanity according to the mental health industry's own criteria. The media, unconcerned with trivialities such as facts, continue to connect multiplicity in the public mind with criminal or dysfunctional behavior.

Multiplicity as a subject for serious discussion has been relegated to tabloid talk shows. There has never been a serious media depiction, either in dramatization or the news, of a multiple household which is highly functional and successful in the real world. The Fox sitcom Herman's Head remains the only media depiction of a functional, gainfully-employed household.

In a personal email in January 1998, one of our website's visitors stated the following:

I think Hollywood people in denial of their own multiplicity are probably the single greatest reason for unsympathetic portrayals of dissociative people.

I have never seen such a cogent and powerful comment on the current state of affairs.

William Peter Blatty wrote brilliantly of demonic possession in The Exorcist. Readers of the book may remember the long intermediate section on the methods routinely used by priests to determine whether or not a person is -possessed- or -multiple-. This was probably the first popular-literature exposure to the concept of multiplicity many people had had since Three Faces of Eve. It also may have done a hell of a lot of unintentional damage. Though Blatty was exquisitely careful to delineate known facts about multiplicity, dissociative recall, hyperstimulated intellect, hyperawareness and ordinary telepathy, this section was dense and scholarly enough to have caused many readers to gloss over it, and the film did not contain any of this information. Imagine the impact on multiple households the world over, particularly on very young multiples whose upbringings might have contained stern religious elements. Demonic possession continued to be a popular theme in literature and film for decades afterwards.

A small, intensely mythic household with a powerfully compelling interior was checked into Chestnut Lodge, a private sanitorium just outside Frederick, Maryland, in the late 1940s. For three years its birth person fought a pitched battle with "reality" for the reality of her inner visions, assisted by Dr. Freida Fromm-Reichmann, who subsequently wrote up the case in a paper called "Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia". After an attempt at integration, the young woman elected simply to cease paying attention to the others. She embraced "reality", and twenty years later I Never Promised You A Rose Garden was a runaway bestseller. Very lovely. Especially for young multiples with strongly imaged interior landscapes, mythic elements and personal languages. Nice to know they're schizophrenic and created this inner world and all these people themselves, to make sense of an intolerable reality. And if they'll only admit they made the whole thing up themselves and share it with the rest of humanity through art, everything will be fine, fine, fine.

We have plenty of books on going crazy. We have none on plurality as a human state. We have no films showing multiples as healthy, functional human beings. There is no model for non-pathological plurality in Western culture.

It's clear that any persecuted group will have its agenda, and be resistent to the idea that there is any link between their condition (whatever it may be) and antisocial behavior. As a homosexual, I am well aware of the feelings behind such agendas. My colleague Ms. Nicholes, who is African-American, had this in mind when she wrote the following commentary:

"Advocacy groups have educated the public on a variety of minorities and conditions that were once considered unspeakably bizarre.

"African-Americans have the NAACP and Rainbow Coalition, AIDS has Act-Up: Jewish people have the Anti-Defamation League; the witches also have an ADL in addition to the WLPA and Witches' Voice; there are the Epilepsy Foundation, the Cerebral Palsy Foundation, and many others. Everything from retardation and learning disability to Tourette syndrome, cerebral palsy, AIDS, and epilepsy has been covered, not only in television news, but in dramatic series and even sitcoms.

"Not so when it comes to multiplicity. No advocacy group exists for multiples. No effort has ever been made to portray multiplicity as it really is. The general public is shown only one facet of an extremely complex lifepath. The shopworn myth of "multiple personality disorder" bears little nor no resemblence to the daily-life reality of multiplicity.

"So far as we know, Astraea's Household Page is the closest thing to an advocacy group for natural multiplicity that exists in the entire world. The ISSD exists to further the agenda of the mental health industry; Sidran is an information provider which consistently links multiplicity to the mental health industry and the abuse survivorship subculture. What we need is a proactive educational network dedicated to correcting misinformation, and disinformation, about multiplicity and plurality."

Originally, we included a list of possible actions that could be taken in order to help improve this situation. We should like now to ask the readers' opinions. What do you think should be done?

Other Essays by Anthony Temple