Are multiple personalities always a disorder?

That is the new and very interesting piece by Tori Telfer, here is one bit:

The multiplicity community insists on being seen as healthy—even normal. This is our reality, they argue. Why are you imposing your reality onto us? Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)—and its controversial precursor, Multiple Personality Disorder—are terms roundly rejected by the community, and most of them don’t feel that they belong in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) at all. It’s not that they don’t believe people can suffer from DID (or, more broadly, Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified [DDNOS]). They just don’t accept that they suffer from it. To them, all those with DID/DDNOS are multiple, but not all multiples are DID/DDNOS. Contrary to what a DID/DDNOS diagnosis implies, multiples want everyone in their system to be seen as people. Not fragments, alters, or personalities, but distinct individuals who happen to be inhabiting the same physical body.

About a year ago, Falah and Lark were joined by Steven and Rain; a few months later, Marcus, Santria, and Alyenor came along. “We are not openly multiple,” she says. “All of us disguise our behavior under one mask, one public persona, in essence appearing non-multiple to the outside eye and to most people we interact with. We’re able to share memories and communicate among ourselves internally, so it’s easy for us. We wear the mask well and look like your standard non-multiple STEM student, but it can be tiring to wear the mask.”

The piece is interesting throughout.  “Hey, Buddy — are you trying to nudge all of us?”