Word: milligan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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From the moment police charged Milligan with the rapes--which he did not recall, since he was dominated at the time of arrest by his central personality, Billy--a year-long struggle between prosecutors and psychiatrists ensued. No one suspected the extent of his mental disorder at first; as Keyes tells it, a chorus of citizens' groups and police, spurred on by sensationalist reporters, called for life imprisonment for Milligan, who appeared a stereotypical rapist: a lonely young man with family problems and a history of trouble with women...
...then new facts began to emerge. Two psychiatric experts picked up on Milligan's case and secured a series of interviews with the confused defendant; almost immediately, they realized Milligan's mental state was different, very different, from anything they had ever encountered. Depending on the setting he was in--and on other factors the doctors couldn't pin-point--Milligan would lapse into different personalities. While in his main phase--in which he referred to himself as "Billy"--Milligan could and often did allude to feelings of his other personalities (to whom he referred as a detached observer...
Aware that their discovery could help Milligan's upcoming case in court, the doctors publicized their contention that Milligan had multiple personalities. That tactic proved an error; newspapers and get-tough advocates immediately went berserk. Milligan, they said, was faking his disorder (though other psychiatrists had since confirmed it); the young man, they argued, was simply adept at putting on 24 different acts (though sophisticated tests actually proved him to have dramatically different IQs and values when dominated by different personalities). And, as Keyes laboriously shows, his personalities were diverse...
...Englishman (replete with accent): Allen, the con man; Danny, the frightened adolescent; Adalana, the introverted lesbian (three of his personalities were female); Philip, the thug; Kevin, the planner; Walter, the Australian big-game hunter; Lee, the comedian; Bobby, the daydreamer; and some 14 others. By securing the confidence of Milligan's main incarnation, Billy, the doctors elicited from the defendant information about each of his personalities...
...Milligan, it turned out, had been born with a throat disorder that almost killed him as a tot; from then on, his childhood went downhill. His troubled father committed suicide; his stepfather, a taskmaster, alternately beat him and raped him. Milligan could never relate to women and was often taunted by schoolmates; in a trance, he once revealed to the psychiatrists that he thought himself insane as a teenager. His abundance of negative experiences, the analysts found, gave birth to Milligan's two dozen incarnations. The problem was, no one else believed them, and there was no legal precent...