Meet My Multiple MEs

Decades after Hollywood sensationalized the diagnosis, some people with dissociative identity disorder are presenting their selves on YouTube to rapturous fans.

-  Lizzie Feidelson

WYN FELT HER REALITY BEGIN TO SHIFT soon after she joined the Army in 2011 at the age of 20. While in basic training, she had bouts of amnesia, during which she forgot having met people she knew. Other times, she found herself suddenly acting outgoing or flirtatious for reasons she couldn’t explain. She had experienced trauma in her childhood—something she still prefers not to talk about— and struggled with symptoms of PTSD throughout her life, including depression and anxiety. But this felt different.

“I was falling apart,” she told me. Sometimes she felt “like someone else.” She would look in the mirror and feel “disconnected” from the face she saw there, she said. One day, a sergeant found Wyn sobbing in her car in a parking lot, preparing to attempt suicide.

After a short hospital stay, Wyn received a medical discharge and, determined to get better, moved back home to the midwestern state where she had grown up. She married a nurse named Andrew whom she had met in the Army. She went to therapy and tried medication and EMDR (a form of psychotherapy that aims to desensitize patients to traumatic memories), but her symptoms didn’t improve. Six years later, despite being on “ungodly amounts of Xanax,” Wyn said, she still woke up some mornings unable to speak or leave her bed.