Written by the CCP on 5/14/2025
Most people on Neocities have a website manifesto, which we think is a neat idea, and we might eventually write one for our site specifically. But we also wanted to write something of a DID manifesto in order to express our views about DID, plurality in general and other such topics.
This manifesto is separated into three categories: DID in Specific, Plurality in General, and Questions You May Have. It is subject to editing at any point in time.
Case in point. It’s also in the goddamn DSM-5, which has its own problems, but the fact that it’s in there points to the conclusion that it was enough of a problem in psychiatric settings that people had to make up an entire name for it. Also, any schmuck halfway decent with finding credible scientific research can find a whole host of literature on the subject. If you don’t think DID is real after a 30 minute Google search deep-dive, then I can’t help you.
BTW, people who have DID who are functional and intelligent enough to use the internet in a way that doesn’t reveal all of their life’s agonies are real, too. We’re not poor hapless victims stuck in the same body as evil serial killers. We don’t want to be treated as either pitiful psychiatric ward patient in misery all of the time, OR as untrustworthy and unstable psychopaths who are all out to get everyone else. We’re everyday people, just like you, who have to go to the grocery store and clean our kittys’ litterboxes and do our laundry and all that normal daily bullshit.
Between 0.1% and 2% of the world population has DID. The DSM-5 estimates this prevalence at 1.5% (Source). That's almost 3.2 million Americans, 0.65 million citizens of the United Kingdom, or 71 million people worldwide. That’s also about as many redheads there are in the world, too. And you can be DAMN sure that a whole bunch of us are on the internet (DID people, not redheads. Everyone knows redheads don’t use the internet).
There has been a ton of research done on DID that scientifically and medically proves its existence and status as a disorder related to trauma, over and over again. Note that I am not talking about plurality in general, but DID specifically. The development and presentation of DID has everything to do with trauma and the effects of trauma, including symptoms of but not limited to: PTSD, CPTSD, and (usually) BPD. Naturally, this means that I’m going to be touching upon the subject of trauma in my writings.
They’re diagnostic labels in the DSM-5 created by psychiatric professionals to differentiate between different symptoms and presentations that people may have, but substantively the treatment/therapy is the same, because most of the symptoms hugely overlap anyway (it’s trauma all the way down, bay beeee). Basically, DID = Amnesia + Alters as included symptoms, OSDD-1a = Amnesia but no Alters, and OSDD-1b = Alters but no Amnesia. This is an oversimplification of the subject, but if you never plan to think about DID/OSDD beyond what you see on the internet, that’s all you have to know.
I don’t care if you think someone sounds crazy when they say they’re a fictional character that has memories of an entirely different life lived before this one. You’re going to respect what they say about themselves, because they know more about their life than you do, and it is more likely than not that they are also way more informed than you about the history and prevalence of the phenomenon that they’re describing.
Don’t assume that you know more than someone about something you don’t actually understand. Note that if you’ve done a bunch of research and do in fact understand the intricacies of phenomena such as dissociative disorders and plurality and alterhumanity - great! I’m glad you took the time and labor to learn about topics you previously didn’t know about. I’ll still kick your ass if you’re mean to people about it.
I don’t know what else I want to say here, honestly, other than please don’t conflate DID with plurality in general. Obviously there are going to be experiences that overlap between disordered and non-disordered plurality (namely, the plural part), but there are quite a lot of differences, too.
If you ask me if I think non-disordered plurality is real/exists/deserves to be taken seriously, I’m going to shrug on the first, shrug on the second, and look at you with very stern and tired eyes on the third. Because we don’t know the answer to the first two, but we definitely know that when someone is talking about their own experiences that obviously matter to them, we shut up and listen.
Seriously, we don’t. That doesn’t mean we’re going to immediately disbelieve you when you use a particular label or ignore that label in our head because it’s irrelevant; we’re still going to keep your label in mind so we can inform ourselves about how to interact on your terms. What we mean is that we don’t hold any judgements, moral or otherwise, about other people who experience any form of plurality/multiplicity.
This is a catch-all category for any burning questions people might have about our manifesto or anything about DID or plurality. If you have a question that you’d like to be answered, feel free to send a message in our Guestbook.