by John Zenoni
Fascinating story about multiple personality disorder in the Netflix show, ‘Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan.’ Is this a real mental health disorder? I remember the television show, ‘Sybil’, starring Sally Field, who played a young woman with 16 different personalities and was just brilliant in the role, that took over the nation at the time as no one had seen anything like it. It's around this same time that Billy Milligan was arrested and accused of multiple rapes on the Ohio State campus. During his incarceration and interviews, Milligan claimed to have been innocent by reason of insanity. Multiple psychologists, psychiatrists and other doctors, including the psychiatrist who worked with Sybil and wrote the book on her ‘famous’ client, began to talk to and ‘study’ Milligan, with him being diagnosed initially as having 10 distinct personalities, most likely the result of horrific childhood abuse by his stepfather. Later on, after going through the system for many years, it came out that there are actually 24 different personalities in Milligan.
The story goes into Milligan’s early years, his arrest, many years in jail, hospitals, and interviewing many people about him, some who believe he truly was a ‘multiple’, a term used to describe those diagnosed with multiple personalities, and others who questioned whether he was faking it or not. Very interesting show!
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