People with dissociative identity disorder have started presenting their selves on YouTube to rapturous fans. Lfeidel reports
Wyn, at home earlier this month. Photo: Maegan Gindi for New York Magazine 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 would forget having met people she knew. Other times, she found herself suddenly acting outgoing or flirtatious for reasons she couldn’t explain.
By this point, Wyn had started to admit to herself that she’d long had “thoughts and emotions” that felt like they were coming from someone else. As a child, her panic attacks had sometimes felt to her like “bumps” of feeling from another person’s mind. In her late teens, she sometimes dressed as a man and introduced herself at drag shows as Daniel. But as Daniel, Wyn didn’t feel more like the person she was meant to be. Wyn felt like Daniel “was someone else entirely.
Wyn found more DID channels. Many vloggers proudly referred to themselves as “systems” of personalities and to their birth name as that of the system “host,” deemphasizing the notion that any of their identities was more real than any other. Jess had four alters, all male, named Jake, Jamie, Ed, and Ollie. Together they managed which of them “fronted” at any given time, sharing airtime on her channel and answering their own Q&As.
DID is not a debunked condition, nor is it widely contested by the medical Establishment the way chronic Lyme disease is. Some studies suggest that between .01 and one percent of the population may have some form of DID; of those, only a fraction have a dramatic presentation of their systems. The disorder is thought to form in childhood as a response to repeated trauma, commonly sexual abuse but also war, medical procedures, and natural disaster.
The period following Wyn’s diagnosis was rocky. Although her husband was supportive, Wyn said, the situation was sobering for them both. She continued attending weekly therapy, feeling that she and her therapist now “had a direction.” “I was like, All right, what’s up? We’re going to fuse everybody!” she recalled. Her therapist cautioned that this would likely take a while. In the meantime, Wyn decided she would start her own video channel.
One of her professors had recently defined entropy in class as “something that randomizes and separates.” Wyn decided to call her channel the Entropy System. I found it impossible to watch those videos,” said Loewenstein, who founded the Trauma Disorders Program at Sheppard Pratt psychiatric hospital in Baltimore, of DID YouTube. He has a strident, almost gruff way of talking about DID, as though years of public misperception have worn him down. He has treated people with DID for 40 years.
I started talking to Wyn over Zoom around Thanksgiving 2020. If another alter was out at the start of our call, they would introduce themselves in the way someone else might share a fairly inconsequential but ever-so-slightly embarrassing piece of contextual information — almost how one friend might warn another that they’d had a few drinks before getting on the phone. “Oh and, uh, by the way, this is Kim Kim,” Kim Kim might say, head tilted, a few seconds in.
For his footage, Daniel usually donned a flannel; Kit wore dark eyeliner. These were visible differences that some psychiatrists might regard as playing-up symptoms. Wyn told me she felt the separateness she portrayed was primarily for viewer clarity — a helpful visualization, not an exaggeration — mirroring what she already felt inside but would usually choose to conceal.
Wyn had started working at the game store in 2018, after she graduated from college. Twice, fans recognized her at work and asked for pictures. Online, Wyn often fielded questions from viewers on how to start their own DID channels. She started her own Patreon and set up a post-office box that overflowed with gifts of pillows, stickers, candy, and letters. Most were from people who said they had DID, too. One postcard read, “I have started to feel hopeful again for the first time in a long time.
On her channel, Wyn encouraged other people with DID not to be nervous about the prospect of fusing their dissociative parts. In one video, she likened “final fusion” to blending different shades of paint into a beautiful new color. Loewenstein echoed this metaphor. “It’s not that everybody is gone,” he said of self-states beginning to cohere. “It’s that everybody is more here than ever.”
Instead of fusion, some people in the DID community, even those who said they were in treatment, said they preferred a term like healthy multiplicity or functional multiplicity to describe their treatment goals. The language expressed a desire to remain in a divided, dissociated state without any of the internal conflict that dissociation implies.
Soon after, Wyn was working at the game store and texting with her DID-vlogger friends when she suddenly started feeling like “a confused blob.” “We started being like, Wow, I don’t know who is fronting right now,” she said. Everything got blurry. “Then, all of a sudden, we felt energetic and personable.” A new, fully formed alter had emerged as part of her consciousness. “He was like, ‘I don’t want to talk to customers.
Even after the messages subsided, Wyn started having panic attacks when she sat down to record a new video. Lockdown was in full swing, and she had nowhere else to direct her thoughts. She said she would “just sit at home and cry and be afraid.”
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