Response to NYT article “What It’s Like to Live With One of Psychiatry’s Most Misunderstood Diagnoses”
I read the New York Times Magazine piece (listed at the end of this) on Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and felt that familiar, hot, nauseous mix of recognition and rage. Not because it denies DID. Not because it’s cartoonishly stigmatizing like Sybil or Split.
Precisely because it does the sympathetic, “nuanced,” trauma-flavored thing… and still lands on the same old story…
…A child survives unspeakable things by becoming many.
…She grows up, becomes a psychiatrist, goes to therapy, integrates, and is “fully recovered.”
…Now, as a respected doctor at McLean Hospital, she is allowed to speak for the rest of us.
It’s not just a profile of Milissa Kaufman. It’s a redemption arc for psychiatry itself, told through the safest possible narrator…
The former patient who made it all the way into the club.
And that’s exactly why it’s so dangerous.
The Story They Tell… From “Gang of Kids” to Respectable Expert
The article opens with a vivid inner world… a curious girl, a calm “nice lady,” an angry boy, and a tiny screaming girl locked in a box at the back of Kaufman’s mind. As a kid, they feel like friends. As she grows, they start arguing, judging, and raging. She realizes other kids don’t have people in their heads. She tries to make them go away by 14, then 15, then 16.
She hates mirrors. She feels unsafe in a female body. A thick fog descends in dressing rooms… the boy surfaces with disgust. She has flashbacks, amnesia, and fleeing dates without understanding why. Somewhere in the background… abuse and neglect she can’t fully name.
Decades later, we’re told… she learns this is DID… a “psychological defense mechanism” tied to repeated childhood abuse. She becomes a Psychiatrist, earns an M.D. and Ph.D., trains at prestigious institutions, and eventually helps run dissociation research and trauma programs at McLean.
And then comes the big reveal…
…She once had DID.
…She “fully recovered from it after years of treatment.”
…She couldn’t say “I have DID” until the end of therapy.
…She carried layers of shame and fear about disclosure, about funding, about being accused of overdiagnosing.
This is the blueprint of respectability…
…Survive horror.
…Become highly educated, highly credentialed.
…Work inside the very system that pathologized you.
…Integrate.
…Speak publicly as an ex-patient turned expert, now safely on the psychiatrist side of the power line.
The article names her fear around stigma and job security, which is real. What it doesn’t name is how relentlessly it mines her current psychiatric privilege to legitimize DID… and to frame singular integration as the gold standard of “full recovery.”
“Ingenious Survival Tool”… That Becomes a Developmental Failure
The piece repeatedly calls DID an “ingenious survival tool born in childhood.” It walks through how young kids, especially before six, can’t yet form a unified self. They have imaginary friends… They project feelings onto stuffed animals… They dream of being princesses or superheroes. Over time, “most children develop a unified self.”
Then it draws the line…
…In a “small subset” of abused kids who can dissociate, that unified self “becomes disrupted.”
…Their mind makes it feel like the abuse is happening to “someone else inside them.”
…For them, “developing a unified self” is interrupted.
…A leading expert is quoted saying their mind is like “a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces have never fully been put together.”
There it is.
On page one we were told DID is ingenious. By the middle, it’s quietly reframed as a developmental error… the natural process “most” children go through, except these kids whose puzzle didn’t complete itself.
That’s not neutral. That is a very specific value judgment…
…Singular, coherent self = correct, completed development.
…Ongoing multiplicity = disruption, fragmentation, failure to finish.
Plurality is allowed to exist only as a temporary emergency structure the child is meant to grow out of. If parts stay, the person is now a jigsaw that never became a picture.
The article never asks whether the picture itself… this ideal of the stable, unified, autonomous individual… is culturally and politically loaded. It just assumes it’s the natural endpoint of health.
That assumption is doing so much quiet violence in the background.
Integration as Redemption, Not One Option Among Many
Let’s talk about how the article narrates Kaufman’s therapy.
She…
…starts therapy in college but can’t talk about abuse
…insists she doesn’t feel anger
…slowly starts mentioning voices and amnesia
…learns these voices are emotions that were “too scary” to process as a child
…realizes the angry boy is her own rage, protecting her by blocking access to other self-states
…gradually acknowledges her trauma, dissociates less, and understands she’s no longer at risk
And then…
…she notices the “nice lady” disappears
…the angry boy “loses steam”
…parts “have nothing to do anymore”
…she misses some of them sometimes… especially the ones better at public speaking and anger… but they’re gone
This, the article tells us, is “what’s known as integration.” And it explicitly labels her as someone who had DID “in the past” and has “fully recovered from it.”
That phrase matters… fully recovered.
Later in the piece, it does acknowledge that…
…many people with DID will never integrate in this way
…integration is “often not a goal” for them or their therapists
…other treatment outcomes matter, like stabilization, less self-harm, more self-compassion, improved relationships
It even quotes one system saying that “being totally integrated sounds super lonely” and that their goal is not integration but better internal self-regulation.
And yet the only people framed as truly past DID… the ones described as no longer having “distinct self-states”… are the integrated ones. Kaufman. The lawyer Jennifer. The late Robert Oxnam, whose memoir was a lifeline to Kaufman and who is presented as another high-functioning role model.
The narrative hierarchy is clear…
…Integrated, no longer meeting criteria means… “fully recovered,” safe spokesperson
Still plural, wanting to keep parts, focused on stabilization means… understandable, but implicitly less healed.
Integration isn’t presented as one possible arc. It’s presented as the finish line. Everyone else is on the course, doing their best.
The piece never offers a frame where…
Healing = safer, more consensual, more resourced multiplicity
Rather than…
Healing = becoming as close to singular as possible.
Good Systems, Bad Systems… Who Gets to Be Legitimate
The article loves a contrast.
On one side, we have…
…E., hospitalized over two dozen times, struggling with anorexia, OCD, suicidality.
…S., a faculty member whose self-states interfere with grading and meetings.
…People misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar, borderline for years.
…Survivors who can’t access adequately trained therapists or shelters of safety.
On the other side, we have…
…Kaufman, with her M.D., Ph.D., and directorships.
…Oxnam, the respected China scholar and former president of the Asia Society.
…Jennifer, the lawyer at a major international bank.
The subtext is unmistakable…
DID can happen to anyone… even smart, successful professionals.
That’s supposed to be destigmatizing, but it reinforces a classed and credentialed hierarchy of whose suffering shocks us enough to care.
There’s a second good/bad split too…
Good DID patients, in this article…
…feel ashamed of their diagnosis
…keep their parts quiet or private
…desperately want to “get better” in ways psychiatry approves of
…understand DID as a disorder, not as a possible identity
Questionable DID cases…
…teens on TikTok, switching on camera, changing outfits and voices
…young people who latched onto DID through online communities and later realized they have other diagnoses
…people seen as “fantasy-prone,” conflating imagination and reality
Experts worry about “social contagion,” especially in adolescent girls. TikTok DID is described as sometimes “florid,” dramatized, unlike clinicians’ experiences. A teen who disavows his DID self-dx is used as proof that kids can absorb a narrative and later “grow out of it” once a professional re-sorts them into autism, bipolar, psychosis.
Social contagion exists. Misdiagnosis exists. People do mirror symptoms they’ve seen online… especially in a world where pain is ignored until it speaks a language people recognize.
But the way the article handles this says more about psychiatry’s fear of embarrassment than about survivors’ needs.
The anxiety is not…
“What do these teens need that they are not getting?”
The anxiety is…
“If too many people claim this diagnosis, our field will look foolish again.”
Legitimacy is being guarded at the border. And once again, the guards are psychiatrists, not plurals.
Evidence, Biomarkers, and the Politics of Being “Real”
The middle of the article turns into a science tour…
…Ruth Lanius’s work on a dissociative subtype of PTSD… heart rate dropping in the scanner, emotional numbing instead of classic re-experiencing.
…Simone Reinders’s imaging studies where actors can’t match the neural signatures of people with DID.
…Newer work by Kaufman and Lauren Lebois showing patterns of brain network communication shifting with dissociation severity.
Kaufman is quoted saying there is no single biomarker for DID… just as there isn’t for schizophrenia… but that “important patterns” are emerging.
None of that science is inherently bad. Understanding how dissociation shows up in the brain can illuminate real patterns and help people feel less “crazy.”
The problem is how it functions in this article…
…as proof that DID is “real” enough to withstand skeptics
…as a way to distinguish “real DID” from actors and fakers
…as a validation tool patients dream of using to “prove” their diagnosis to insurers
There’s a haunting scene at the Healing Together conference where a woman begs Kaufman to put her in an fMRI machine to prove to her insurance that she has DID. Kaufman has to tell her no, because no scan can do that.
The article doesn’t pause long enough on what that plea reveals…
…People are so used to being doubted that a picture of their brain feels more trustworthy than their own words.
…Insurance companies and systems routinely require humiliating “proof” that someone is broken enough to deserve care.
…Psychiatry’s hunger for biomarkers has trained everyone to believe that unless your pain glows in a machine, it might be imaginary.
The science section should have been a moment to ask…
Who benefits from turning our inner lives into data?
Who gets left out when “realness” is measured in pixels and p-values?
Instead, it serves mainly to reassure the reader that they can believe people like Kaufman and not feel naïve.
Psychiatric Privilege and Who Gets to Tell the Story
It’s not incidental that the central survivor in this piece is a psychiatrist.
The article itself underlines some of the reasons…
…She worried disclosure would affect lab funding.
…She feared colleagues would accuse her of overdiagnosing.
…She had the option, for years, not to tell even the people closest to her.
…She could hide behind the “title of researcher” while sitting in rooms full of people with DID who didn’t know she was one of them.
That is power. Fraught power, scary power, but still power.
When she finally tells the journalist she used to have DID, it’s by their third conversation. There’s an entire architecture in place to contain the risk… tenure-track roles, institutional prestige, a research program, and a carefully managed public persona.
Contrast that with…
…E., whose diagnosis emerged through years of hospitalization and crisis, whose life is shredded by anorexia, OCD, and suicidality.
…S., whose parts derail her academic work, whose inner child shows up in a dean meeting, whose goal is not integration but less internal chaos.
…Asher of The A System, making videos on TikTok, getting regular hate messages and accusations of faking, and saying, “I’m not an educator; I’m just trying to explain my own experience.”
They don’t get a glossy profile in the Times. They appear to support the psychiatrist’s narrative and the field’s self-understanding.
Their stories are real, but structurally, they are supporting characters in psychiatry’s self-portrait. They are evidence, not authors.
Meanwhile, Kaufman is framed as the rare hybrid… she “knows what it’s like” and she sits on the diagnostic throne. That’s supposed to make her the perfect bridge.
What it actually does is reinforce a Core Truth of psychiatric culture…
The safest person to tell the story of your madness is the one who successfully crossed back into normal.
If you stay where you are… visibly multiple, resistant to being translated into a singular I… you don’t get to narrate. You get narrated.
Plural Pride, Caged Inside a Diagnosis
The section on the Healing Together conference is one of the most poignant parts of the article… and one of the most revealing.
We see…
…350 people with dissociative disorders gathered at a DoubleTree in Orlando.
…Book tables with titles like Dissociation Made Simple and bookmarks that say “Dissociation Is Not a Dirty Word.”
…Ribbons labeled “#plurals,” “Allow Me to Introduce Myselves,” “Hot Mess Express.”
…A woman who says she finally feels she belongs after years of hiding her diagnosis from everyone but her therapist and husband.
…Pollack in a bee costume talking about never finding “her people” until she created this conference, then playing the music video where the bee girl finally finds a whole field full of bees like her.
It’s tender. It’s real. The longing for community is palpable.
But even here, the article keeps everyone in the cage of pathology…
…Everyone present is described as having a “disorder.”
…Pride is always “in spite of” the diagnosis, never simply as plural identity.
…The idea that some people might be plural in ways that aren’t fully captured by a DSM label… or might want to claim plurality outside that frame… doesn’t appear.
And then there’s Kaufman, sitting in the audience as a clinician and researcher. People approach her for referrals, for help with insurance, for guidance. She goes every year with her research team.
When Pollack invites her “bees” to stand, Kaufman stays seated, crying, feeling ashamed for hiding. Years later, something shifts and she finally stands. Her body feels heavy. She wants to sit back down, but she remains on her feet as the song plays.
That moment could have been used to turn the critique back on the system…
…Why does a woman who has spent her entire professional life in this field still feel unsafe publicly aligning herself with other plurals?
…Why is her shame framed as personal, instead of as a byproduct of a culture that only respects her once she sheds the diagnosis?
Instead, it becomes the closing beat in her personal redemption journey…
the final step from closeted patient to brave, integrated ex-patient who can now safely represent DID to the world.
It’s moving. It’s also subtly disciplining…
“See? Even she eventually stood up. You can too, once you’ve recovered enough and earned enough safety.”
The structure never gets questioned. Only her courage does.
What This Piece Cannot Imagine
For all its length, this article has a very narrow imagination.
It cannot imagine that…
…plurality might be an orientation, not a detour from the “right” developmental road
…some systems might want safety, consent, and stability without trading in their multiplicity for a singular narrator
…healing might mean redistributing power and care among parts, rather than deflating them into silence
…there could be plural pride that is not “We are proud even though we have a disorder,” but simply “We are plural, and that’s a valid way of being human.”
It cannot imagine a world where…
…DID isn’t something you either “don’t really have” or “fully recover from,” but one of many labels people use to make sense of their internal landscape
…self-knowledge and community epistemology are taken as seriously as fMRI scans
…survivors are not expected to become psychiatrists, lawyers, or scholars in order to be believed
What it can imagine is…
…psychiatrists disagreeing in good faith about trauma vs suggestibility
…research gradually correcting the excesses of the Sybil era
…a small group of carefully vetted experts, including one “fully recovered” former patient, guiding the field toward a better standard of care
That’s not reform. That’s reputational rehab.
For Plural Systems Reading This
If you are multiple, if you live with DID or some other form of complex dissociation, you are not obligated to become anyone’s redemption arc.
You are not required to…
…turn your inner world into a jigsaw that finally forms one picture
…make your parts disappear to be considered “fully recovered”
…sit quietly in the back until you can stand up as a safely integrated, professionally successful ex-patient
…prove the “realness” of your mind with brain images or diagnostic tools
…distance yourself from other plurals who are messier, louder, more online, more obviously in pain
You are allowed to want…
…less time lost to amnesia
…fewer internal wars
…more consent around who fronts and when
…safer relationships inside and outside your system
…resources, housing, food, community, dignity
…while staying plural.
You are allowed to say…
“We are many, and that isn’t the problem. The problem is what was done to us, and the systems that keep insisting we must compress ourselves into one to be worthy of care.”
You do not have to become one to be whole.
You do not have to erase your people to be taken seriously.
And you absolutely don’t need a psychiatrist-approved New York Times profile to make your experience real.
Here’s the article my piece is referencing for those interested…
Jones, M. (2026, January 30). What it’s like to live with one of psychiatry’s most misunderstood diagnoses. The New York Times Magazine.