May is Mental Health Awareness month, so we’ll be spending time exploring various aspects of mental health related to horror fiction. Today, we’re going to focus on the very common use of dissociative identity disorder within horror.
It feels like the idea of an unrealizable narrator often leads to this specific mental illness being written into the protagonist’s character arc. Split (2016), Identity (2003), Secret Window (2004) all lean on this mental illness to tell their stories. Whether they do a good job or not is a bit debatable.
As someone with mental illnesses, I’m always on the lookout for proper representation in fiction. Is the condition being exploited? Does the character present their condition in a realistic fashion? Does the creator of the fiction rest too hard on the mental illness, as if they couldn’t think of another way to create an unreliable narrator so they were like, “I know. I’ll make them bipolar or have dissociative identity disorder?”
It can be hard to find fiction that feels authentic, and really, a book may work for one person and not for another. With that said, I’ve gathered a few books specifically dealing with dissociate identity disorder, and I’ll let you check them out and be the judge. Also, if you know of any that you love, please feel free to recommend them!