Dissociative Personality Disorder

The many faces of a homegrown terrorist

The many faces of a homegrown terrorist
By Dinesh Sharma

While American media were apoplectic over "Weiner-Gate", a global terrorism trial came to an end in Chicago. Americans shocked by congressman Anthony Weiner's aberrant behavior, namely, the leakage of his private self represented as tweets in the public square, may not have fully paid attention to the mind of a terrorist.

There is a common element between the aberrant and the deranged - dissociation. In the age of Twitter, where no private transgression can remain hidden for very long, we can venture to make the linkage between the private and the public, the individual and the collective, and perhaps better understand the psychology of terrorism.

In the age of social media, privacy as we knew it is a thing of the


past; almost everything that we define as personal can now be accessed in the public domain.

In the past week, those concerned with homegrown terrorism were shocked to learn about the tightly compartmentalized - complex, multiple and divided - chambers inside the mind of a Pakistani-American terrorist, David Coleman Headley, who managed to penetrate and dupe intelligence authorities across many cultural and international borders.

Do You Suffer From Multiple Twitter Personality Disorder ...

), Each with its own pattern of perceiving and interacting with the social media environment.

In the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Twhealth Problems the name for this diagnosis is multiple twitter personality disorder. In both systems of terminology, the diagnosis requires that at least two personalities routinely take control of the individual’s behavior on twitter with an associated memory loss that goes beyond normal forgetfulness; in addition, symptoms cannot be the temporary effects of drug use or a general medical condition. DTID is less common than other dissociative disorders, occurring in approximately 1% of dissociative cases. and is often comorbid with other disorders, such as SEO obsessiveness

There is a great deal of controversy surrounding the topic of DTID. The validity of DTID as a medical diagnosis has been questioned, and some researchers have suggested that DTID may exist primarily as an iatrogenic adverse effect of therapy. DTID is diagnosed significantly more frequently in North America than in the rest of the world, in particular California.

Signs and symptoms

Individuals diagnosed with DTID demonstrate a variety of symptoms with wide fluctuations across time, although the existence of time is open to debate; functioning can vary from severe impairment in daily Facebook status update functioning to normal or high abilities, such as +1.