Tina has a split personality — and says: “I am healthy.”

Tina plans her daily routine meticulously. She tells of a day when her plan was like this: 11:30 cooking, 12:00 eating, later jogging. She cleared all the ingredients, prepared the pot and pan, lit the gas flames on the stove. Tina cut onions, switched to autopilot in her head.

Four hours later she stood in the living room and painted her wall with colorful ornaments. She put the paint aside and remembered that sports were on the schedule today. As she tied on her running shoes, she suddenly remembered that she had never eaten and ran into the kitchen: burning flames on the stove, half an onion on the chopping board, uncut.

Tina often experiences moments like this. “I always thought I was just extremely flipped,” she says. Today she knows that this forgetfulness has its causes.

Tina suffers from a dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder. According to the so-called trauma model, currently the leading scientific explanatory model for a DIS, it develops as a trauma sequelae disorder in childhood due to severe physical and psychological abuse, often in the context of organized and ritualized violence. To make the extreme suffering bearable, the brain of an affected child splits off parts of its still incomplete personality. The phenomenon is a survival mechanism: the parts “carry” the traumatic experiences in the subconscious and thus protect the child from cruel memories.

Thus, a person with DIS does not learn to “grow together” into a single identity after a split. Often, several dozen shares with their ego-consciousness, which has a name, age, gender, preferences, and skills, slumber in the affected person.

Anyone who has seen Mr. Robot or Fight Club will think that such a disorder leads to problems in everyday life. But the reality is more harmless in many “systems”, as the affected people call themselves. Tina doesn’t notice her condition for years. The system always made sure that she could cope with her life. She graduated from university and had friends with whom she celebrated at parties or went on excursions.

According to a study conducted in 2006, 0.5 percent of the German population suffers from dissociative identity disorder, while more recent estimates put the figure at between two and four percent of the total population. Those affected often slip from one misdiagnosis to the next.

For a long time, Tina had no idea of her condition, but also swept many conspicuous features under the table. When she was a student and still drinking alcohol, she could not remember the entire weekend, although she had not overdone drinking at all. Sometimes she met people on the street who greeted her warmly and was confused: she was sure she had never seen these people before in her life.

She often and abruptly changed places of residence, professions, and circles of friends. In the meantime, she knows that her personalities had different world views and friends. The system always caused abrupt changes in her life. Tina’s fickleness made her relationships more difficult, but apart from a few comments such as “You are somehow very different today”, her environment never noticed that there was something wrong with Tina. Her friends merely nicknamed her “The Wicked”.

Tina always found a satisfactory explanation for the amnesia that DIS causes through dissociation or a change of personality. The fact that she can barely remember her life before the age of eleven, she attributed to pure forgetfulness. Even as a teenager she often talked to herself in English and thought she was watching many American series. Today she knows that English is the preferred language of her system.

When the trained art therapist starts working as a teacher in a private school, what Tina calls today her “everyday team” in the system slowly breaks down. It becomes an extreme burden for her to stand in front of a school class every morning. Her inner life begins to rebel, personalities take over the body uncontrollably. “I stood in front of the children and listened to myself talking,” she says.

Through the changes, Tina’s consciousness constantly drifts away, she dissociates and loses herself in daydreams. In the classroom, this leads more and more often to curious situations: “A girl came up to me at the desk and wanted to show me a picture. The next moment I can remember, I am standing in a completely different place in the room and the girl looks at me in front with questioning eyes. I just ran away from the desk without realizing it.”

Eventually, Tina will miss the whole mornings. The amnesia makes her feel like she’s losing her mind. During the breaks she hides in the material room, she avoids the teachers’ room. At home, she lies motionless on the sofa for hours with construction site headphones on her ears. “I lost more and more interest in the outside world. It was incredibly exhausting not to drift off into daydreams all the time.

A psychiatrist first diagnoses ADHD and prescribes Ritalin. She scratches her face in front of the mirror until the wounds fester. She no longer dares to be alone at home, she thinks she is unpredictable. When she finally tells her then family doctor that she wrote a funeral eulogy without her knowledge and collected money for her funeral, she finally gets a place in a psychiatric institution around Christmas time 2018.

When Tina is diagnosed with “Dissociative Identity Disorder”, her entire view of herself and the world changes. She realizes for the first time how often she used to be controlled by different parts of her personality. She digs out old photos in which she does not recognize herself. “I also know now why I feel like I’m in my early 20s and not my late 30s: I’ve so often just not been in my body.”

The diagnosis makes her daily life increasingly difficult. She can no longer work and must call in sick for months on end. The more contact she makes with their inner life during trauma therapy, the more questions she has. Her therapist helps her find the “we” in her mind: “She asked me the names of my inner persons. I thought the woman had a vivid imagination”, she says.

Tina still takes the question seriously. She sits down at her desk with a piece of paper and asks her inner world for names. “I felt completely silly,” she says. But suddenly the thoughts gush out of her. As if by remote control, she starts writing down details about personalities. “I did not hear any voices, as you might know from films. My inner life has simply taken over my thoughts,” says Tina.

The “inner persons” tell her details about their appearance. She takes numerous pictures of them, writes down everything that the thoughts and inner images tell her. “There were people who had a completely different sense of humor than I did, they knew things I had never heard. You cannot invent such things’, she says.

The personalities of the system, which is called Tina on the ID card, couldn’t be more different: She tells of Simon, a friendly and level-headed American, of the rebellious “emo-punk” Pauli, of the motherly Ursula or the spirited Samantha. Some personalities are soldiers, belong to a so-called “Tactical Squad”: They have always made sure that Tina doesn’t get into dangerous trigger situations.

What may seem to many like a collection of clichéd character traits is a reality for Tina and the system. But knowing about her new “roommates” often becomes a burden as well: She suddenly perceives personality changes, which means that her perception and reality can never again become the way her brain had faked it before the diagnosis.

This is because of the increasing ability to perceive her split state makes it more difficult for her to participate in everyday life. She avoids shopping and cycling. When she takes the tram, she sometimes has to get off early: she notices when she dissociates because chaos is looming in the system again. Inevitably, Tina has hardly any contact with the outside world and spends most of her time alone in her apartment. Only when she has no people around her, she can deal with her inner life in peace.

Despite the isolation, she looks for contact with others and for an occupation that gives her life a new direction again. She, therefore, creates a YouTube channel, which is supposed to focus entirely on the diagnosis. As a pedagogue, she uses her talent to explain facts simply. In several videos, Tina and the system, i.e. also other personalities, talk about the broad diagnostic spectrum of dissociative disorders. But she also always keeps the camera on it unfiltered when she is simply feeling bad.

But the channel is not only used for educational purposes: the camera becomes the medium for Tina’s inner world. In front of the lens, it allows controlled changes for the first time and lets the alter egos “come to the fore”. The videos show how different the characters are: When “Simon” takes over the channel, he has an English accent. Sometimes Tina’s neck hairs stand up while editing the videos: she often can’t remember what her inner characters told her in the recordings.

Among the subscribers, many other affected persons quickly mingle. They admire Tina and the system for their courage and exchange views with her in the comments. “I used to be told that I was worth nothing. It’s different today: all the encouragement on the channel gives us the feeling that we’re contributing something important to destigmatizing this disorder,” she says.

Nevertheless, the canal also holds dangers. For example, Tina and her followers have already been threatened by someone who posed as an exorcist and thought she was possessed. Other users accused her of acting. Even they often overcome self-doubt: “This is normal. You thought the whole time that you were leading a conventional life. You just don’t want to admit that all this is real.”

But her critics make her wonder, “Why would I want to expose myself on YouTube?” All her former colleagues and friends know about the diagnosis. “I can’t go back to my old life because of this. So what would I gain by pretending to be many people?”

At the time of writing, Tina still wants to take a break on the channel. “When I research topics like abuse or ritualized violence, I’m always triggering us myself. This hinders trauma therapy,” she says.

She will probably continue therapy for years to come. But the aim is not to find out all the causes of the traumas: “Some sleeping dogs shouldn’t be woken at all,” she says. Instead, Tina wants to learn how to lead a regular daily routine with her indoor flatshare so that she can go back to work or meet friends. Her therapist always speaks of an “inner democratization process”, which Tina has to go through with her alter egos.

Today the canal is the mouthpiece for Tina’s inner world and at the same time a window to the outside world. “I have noticed that we help people with our work,” she says proudly. “As an affected system, we want to make other people with DIS realize that they are valuable. They should know that they are not alone with all their confusion, self-doubt, and fear. DIS is not a disease in my eyes, but an alternative form of health. It is a miracle that our brain can do something like this to protect us. It’s a miracle that we survived.”