{"id":833106,"date":"2026-05-30T20:54:16","date_gmt":"2026-05-30T20:54:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/833106\/"},"modified":"2026-05-30T20:54:16","modified_gmt":"2026-05-30T20:54:16","slug":"what-its-really-like-to-live-with-multiple-personality-disorder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/833106\/","title":{"rendered":"What it&#8217;s really like to live with multiple personality disorder"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Cameron West, who lives with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), revealed childhood sexual abuse by his grandmother.<\/li>\n<li>Rikki, West\u2019s wife, helped manage his breakdown and supported their family through his 24 alters.<\/li>\n<li>West\u2019s 1999 book, \u201cFirst Person Plural,\u201d a bestseller, is reissued with a new epilogue.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Cameron West\u2019s eyes go somewhere else for a moment.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>He\u2019s sitting beside his wife of 45 years, Rikki, in the middle of a conversation about a morning more than 30 years ago. She opened a closet door in their young son\u2019s bedroom and found her husband crouched on the floor with a sketchpad and a red marker.<\/p>\n<p>He wasn\u2019t entirely Cameron West at that moment. He was Davy, a sweet, sad 4-year-old drawing pictures of what had been done to him as a child. The images were crude and explicit and terrible. West had no idea who Davy was, yet, or what the drawings meant.<\/p>\n<p>Cameron West has lived with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), previously called multiple personality disorder, for decades. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy mind was protecting me, from things I would not have been able to psychologically survive as a child,\u201d  West told The Post in an exclusive interview. \u201cIt turned out to involve my grandmother sexually abusing me.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>Little Davy was the first of West\u2019s 24 alter personalities to emerge. He documented his experiences with his alters \u2014 the clinical term for each of the separate personalities <a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2014\/10\/17\/gigis-son-had-developed-multiple-personalities-shrink\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">living inside a person<\/a> with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), <a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2023\/09\/04\/woman-with-dissociative-identity-disorder-93-personalities-finds-love\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">previously called multiple personality disorder<\/a> \u2014 with the 1999 book \u201cFirst Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A New York Times bestseller and one of the first first-person chronicles of DID, it\u00a0sold over 1 million copies, earned West an \u201cOprah\u201d show appearance and was optioned for a Disney\/Robin Williams movie that was never made. <\/p>\n<p>Now, the memoir has been reissued with a new epilogue bringing the story of West, now a grandfather in his 70s, and his family up to date. <\/p>\n<p>Rikki, who has a degree in psychology and had spent a decade working with traumatized children when her husband\u2019s alters emerged, wasn\u2019t wasn\u2019t totally unprepared for everything that followed. She understood enough to know that vitamins wouldn\u2019t fix it.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>What she couldn\u2019t have anticipated was the scale of what was coming, or how completely their family of three would have to reorganize itself around it.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe had to manage Cam\u2019s breakdown, essentially,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was a long process of him coming apart and then coming back together. But we also had to manage how we presented things to our son, and how we maintained an equilibrium in the family for him.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>West\u2019s wife, Rikki, and son had to navigate his mental breakdown. <\/p>\n<p>West, who ran a promotional products company with his brother, stopped working entirely after the diagnosis. Rikki stepped in to help manage his business, then later took a job as an administrative assistant at a large Oakland company to support the family while West pursued his doctoral degree in psychology. The household ran on her steadiness.<\/p>\n<p>West had 24 alter personalities to contend with. Among them were Switch, an 8-year-old who carried enormous rage and had harmed West\u2019s body many times; Bart, a wisecracking 28-year-old whose job was to keep things from going completely dark, and Per, an ageless spiritual presence the book describes as the father figure to everyone in the system.<\/p>\n<p>There was no\u00a0predictable schedule for who might surface when.<\/p>\n<p>Their son, Kai, then just 5 years old, learned to recognize when his father had gone somewhere else and how to call him back.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe made the decision early on that he was going to present as Dad to our son. Some multiples let their young alters play with their children,\u201d Rikki said. \u201cWe weren\u2019t going to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cMy mind was protecting me, from things I would not have been able to psychologically survive as a child.<\/p>\n<p>Cameron West<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Central to how the family managed was a concept West\u2019s therapists helped him develop called co-consciousness, an internal awareness that allowed him to observe his alters when they were out rather than simply losing time entirely. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cHe can see what they\u2019re doing,\u201d Rikki explained. \u201cThey\u2019re aware of him. They have an inner communication.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In 2001, the Wests went to Los Angeles to see a neurologist who recorded West\u2019s brain wave patterns in real time as his alters switched. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cEach of your alters have different brainwave patterns from you and from each other,\u201d West recalled the doctors telling him. \u201cAnd child alters have the brainwave patterns of children that an adult no longer has.\u201d When switching occurred between alters, the EEG looked like a seizure. Each personality produced a distinct and measurable signature.<\/p>\n<p>Twenty-five years on, most of West\u2019s alters have quieted or integrated,\u00a0the result of years of intensive therapy, including inpatient treatment at a Dallas trauma center, and the slow internal work of building communication within the system.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>West\u2019s bestselling book, \u201cFirst Person Plural,\u201d has been republished for its anniversary. <\/p>\n<p>A few alters \u2014 Wyatt, Clay and Roger \u2014 still reside in corners of West\u2019s mind, but the full chorus of 24 has largely melded back into his core self.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHis psyche is stable,\u201d Rikki said said. \u201cIt took many years.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The alters arose in the wake of a near fatal candidiasis fungal infection and four failed sinus surgeries that left his immune system ravaged. West deals now with autoimmune conditions he attributes to years of physiological stress.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Living on the California coast and being near the ocean and its soothing sounds help keep him calm. <\/p>\n<p>He and Rikki are still giddy about each other. Mid conversation, he turns to her with genuine bewilderment and asks, \u201cHow come you stuck with me?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>She doesn\u2019t hesitate. \u201cI love you. I\u2019ve loved him then, I love him still.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cameron West, who lives with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), revealed childhood sexual abuse by his grandmother. Rikki, West\u2019s&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":833107,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[36],"tags":[1022,210,517,4166,32681,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-833106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-books","tag-health","tag-mental-health","tag-mental-illness","tag-postscript","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116665520379389872","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=833106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833106\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/833107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=833106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=833106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=833106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}