Identity Research Paper Essay

Malcolm Rivers from the movie â€Å"Identity† has been diagnosed as a mentally ill patient with Dissociative Identity Disorder. This disorder is basically another name for a multiple personality disorder. The disorder is usually caused by severe trauma, emotional or physical, that causes people to create â€Å"multiple personalities† so that they can deal with certain situations. They usually have the inability to recall important information and have blackouts. Lastly, they have confusion of personal identity for an assumption of a new identity. The patient, Malcolm Rivers has committed several vicious murders and is waiting for execution. There is a journal that Rivers has explaining why he really committed the murders of all these people at a motel. His psychiatrist, Doctor Malick, tries to explain to the Judge who wants to have Rivers executed that he wasn’t responsible for the murders. The argument Dr. Malick made for it not being Malcolm Rivers fault is that it was one of his personalities because in his journal he has written down personal and private thoughts of several different people, which is a symptom of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Doctor Malick took Malcolm Rivers in front of the Judge and started questioning him to prove that he has multiple personalities. When he was questioning him though, he wasn’t Malcolm Rivers; he was â€Å"Ed†, the limo driver from the motel that everyone was getting murdered at. â€Å"Ed† keeps having these blackouts and this one blackout led him into the courtroom with Malick and the judge. â€Å"Ed† tells them what was happening at the motel and how it was bizarre that everyone was getting murdered and bodies were disappearing. In response to Malcolm Rivers or â€Å"Ed’s† story, Malick tells â€Å"Ed† about how he is really Malcolm Rivers. Rivers’ traumatic childhood has a strong effect on him, which made his personality fracture into different personalities. He remembers his mom as being â€Å"promiscuous† depending on whom she brought home he may also have been beaten as a child, and the disorder is caused by both mental and physical trauma. â€Å"Ed† found this really confusing, so Malick gave him a mirror that way he realized that he was just another personality. Malick also made another assumption that â€Å"Ed† and all the other people at the motel had the same birthdays. He told â€Å"Ed† that one of his fellow personalities is the one responsible for the murders, so once that personality dies, Malcolm Rivers won’t have to executed because he will be harmless. â€Å"Ed† thought that he finally identified the personality responsible for all of the murders. When he tried to kill it, both the personality and â€Å"Ed† die at the motel. Malick convinced the judge that the homicide identity is dead and Rivers should be harmless. Rivers was let off the execution and put into a mental asylum. Little did he know he actually killed the wrong personality, it was really Timmy, a little boy, the murdered everyone and set up their deaths. In Rivers’ head it showed Timmy was the one always watching the deaths of everyone, but he was so quiet no one suspected him. Timmy’s personality eventually dominated Rivers body and strangles Malick that crashes the truck going to the mental asylum. There are both positive and negative messages the movie gives the public about people with this disorder. One negative message it can give off is the impression that people with this disorder are dangerous murders, not all people with multiple personalities are dangerous or destructive. There are actually only a few cases that people with multiple personalities have criminal behavior. Another negative message is that it shows criminals can get away with a crime and be let off an execution if you have multiple personalities, a criminal does not get out of it that easily, they need to go through a long process of multiple professional physicians to prove they are criminally insane. Lastly, the personality ended up dominating Malcolm Rivers body in the end, so it can give off the idea to the public that this disorder can not be cured when it can. There are also positive messages that the movie gives off to the public that watches it. For one, it successfully shows the symptoms of a person with dissociative identity disorder. It can also give people a good idea that if they suspect someone they know has this disorder; you should get them to keep a diary to get down their personal thoughts so you can tell if they have it. Lastly, it shows that having a traumatic childhood can affect a person. That is a positive message because it can make people want to be better parents to their children after seeing what a bad childhood can do to someone. The journal article on dissociative identity disorder shows the four dominant approaches to understanding the disorder: childhood trauma and media influences. The posttraumatic model of dissociative identity disorder shows that the disorder is a defensive response that results naturally from continuous and tremendous childhood trauma, particularly from physical and sexual abuse. Children experiencing this trauma dissociate their distressing experiences and repress the memories of those experiences. This section of the article relates to the movie because his mom was â€Å"promiscuous†, so Malcolm most likely wanted to repress the memories from that time of his life. Another approach to understanding why people have this disorder would be media influences. There was an increased in the number of reported causes of dissociative identity disorder shown when the growth of popular books and movies about patients with multiple personalities. The movie itself did not have any media influences that made Malcolm Rivers have multiple personalities. However, the movie can give off a negative reaction to the public watching it because there might be more cases of dissociative identity disorder. In conclusion, Malcolm Rivers should be diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder from all the symptoms he has shown in the movie. The movie â€Å"Identity† is a great movie to watch, if someone wanted to learn more about the disorder or see an example of how a person diagnosed with dissociative identity acts. The journal article was also a good source because it backed-up one of the main causes of the disorder in the movie. Over all, the movie sends a good message to the public viewing it because the viewer can learn a lot about what causes the disorder, the symptoms of it, and they can be entertained at the same time. Traub, C. M. (2009). Defending a diagnostic pariah: validating the categorisation of Dissociative Identity Disorder. South African Journal of Psychology, 39(3), 347-356. Retrieved from EBSCOhost. Cusack, J. (Actor). (2003). Identity [Motion picture]. USA: Sony Pictures. Nevid, J. S., Rathus, S. A., & Greene, B. (2008). Abnormal Psychology in a Changing World (Seven ed., pp. 1-630). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Inc.