Living with a greatly misunderstood psychiatric disorder

February 1, 2026

It would take decades for Milissa Kaufmann to understand that the feeling of having multiple people inside herself and the amnesia she sometimes experienced were signs of an extreme type of dissociation known as dissociative identity disorder or D.I.D.

Public knowledge about the disorder tends to be informed by overdramatized portrayals in movies and on TikTok, making it one of the most controversial diagnoses in psychiatry. Concerned about stigma and her lab’s funding, for years Kaufmann herself feared disclosing her diagnosis despite leading several trauma programs at a hospital in Massachusetts.

For Maggie Jones’s feature about new scientific understanding of the condition, Kaufmann shares her story about D.I.D. and its connection to abuse and genetics.

A portrait of a woman with short silver hair, a black shirt and glasses. She looks directly back at the viewer.

Haruka Sakaguchi for The New York Times

What It’s Like to Live With One of Psychiatry’s Most Misunderstood Diagnoses

Spurred by her past struggles with dissociative identity disorder, she has devoted her professional life to studying it.

By Maggie Jones

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Photo illustration by Mike McQuade. Source photographs: Patrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images; Nathan Howard/Reuters; Shiiko Alexander/Alamy.

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