Dissociative Identity Disorder

Dissociative identity disorder is a mental health condition characterized by the presence of two or more distinct personality states, sometimes described as alters, along with recurrent gaps in memory for everyday events, personal information or traumatic events that are inconsistent with ordinary forgetting. It was previously known as multiple personality disorder before being renamed in the DSM-IV in 1994, and its cause is widely associated by clinicians with severe, repeated childhood trauma, though the diagnosis remains a subject of debate within psychiatry.