MHA's Blog: Chiming In

For the first non-American Horror Story blog, I wanted to start right away with something great, something that helped redefine the way mental health is viewed in pop culture. Instead, I watched the first episode of Do No Harm. The show gave me a good gauge on where pop culture is in regards to Dissociative Identity Disorder, which you might know as Multiple Personality Disorder, and it’s not good.

Do No Harm is a new show on NBC (for now) about a doctor named Jason Cole. He’s a brilliant neuroscientist with an alter ego named Ian Price, who is a violent, decadent playboy. Ian only comes out between 8:25 p.m. and 8:25 a.m. At the beginning of the episode, Jason has controlled Ian for five years with an experimental drug that knocks him unconscious at night, but the drug has stopped working, leaving Jason to deal with Ian’s antics. The episode ends with Jason offering Ian a “truce” to leave each other alone, but vowing to destroy him privately.

The show is patterned off of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous gothic tale of horror, much more than any actual case of Dissociative Identity Disorder. In the novel, Jekyll’s experimental drug, and his subsequent addiction to it, cause his alter ego, Mr. Hyde, to appear. The two men have little interaction with each other until Jekyll tries to stop taking the drug and effectively kill Hyde, who then fights back. Jekyll’s original intent in creating the drug is to split the “evil half” of himself away from the “good half.” These two are the only two alter egos and are created in a specific situation, under the auspices of the drug. (The medical disorder did exist before the novel, despite the rumor that comes up from time to time; the first case was described in 1646.)

This drug induced personality split is quite far from what people with Dissociative Identity Disorder face. The generally accepted theory on the origin of the disorder is repeated abuse while the patient is a child. The child then creates a new personality to deal with that abuse, almost like copying a document over and over in a file. Each personality is created to deal with that new situation, whether it’s a good or bad situation. As a result, a person with the disorder may have up to 100 alters, with 4 or 5 being the most common amount. Some people are aware of the other personalities (they may even talk between them), and others are not aware. Some alters may know of some of the others; some may not know of any, even within the same person. I was under the assumption that all people with the disorder create the same type of alters, like the caring mother and the protector, but I was wrong in that assumption. The manifestation of the disorder is different, depending on the consumer and their experiences.  (To learn more about the disorder, the Wikipedia article is fairly accurate:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder). 

Do No Harm uses the language of Dissociative Identity Disorder, but incorrectly. At one point, Jason goes to his local church for a DID support group, where the Priest who runs the group tells him that he needs to accept his condition and use therapy and yoga to control it. Jason is quick to point out that he doesn’t need therapy (despite having an alter ego that routinely tries to destroy your life, seeing a therapist is still too taboo). The Priest even brings up integration (bringing all of the alter personalities together into one single personality), a common therapy for the disorder, but is ignored.

I know I should be angry about another misuse of Dissociative Identity Disorder to highlight the duality of man’s spirit instead of using it to address rampant childhood abuse, but I just can’t. This show is so awful on so many levels that it’s not worth getting angry over. The show has little grasp of physical medicine, let alone a complicated psychological disorder (Jason masks his condition by telling everyone his diabetes prevent him from working at night, and the staff of highly trained doctors just go with it, for one example). The show is clearly putting medical babble on top of Jekyll and Hyde to make it more modern, with no other thought behind either concept.

Avoid Do No Harm at all costs (which should be fairly easy since its ratings were terrible). Shows like this, with little thought beyond the premise, are everywhere, and not worth anyone’s time. I wish it were a better representation of Dissociative Identity Disorder (or that one existed that I could point you to), but the closest I could get was a better modern take on Jekyll and Hyde. In 2006, Steven Moffat created a show called Jekyll that was a decent modern update on the classic novel. It’s worth a watch.

Did you watch Do No Harm? What did you think? Do you know any positive or accurate portrayals of DID in pop culture? Next week, I’ll take a look at Wristcutters: A Love Story, and the pervasive idea that suicide in teens is somehow romantic.