cover image The Stranger in the Mirror: The Hidden Epidemic

The Stranger in the Mirror: The Hidden Epidemic

Marlene Steinberg, Maxine Schnall. HarperCollins, $25 (336pp) ISBN 978-0-06-019564-9

What do the Columbine killings, ""getting lost in a good book"" and your midlife crisis have in common? According to psychiatrist Steinberg, they are all events that can be placed on a broad continuum of behaviors related to dissociative identity disorder, popularly known as multiple personality. Steinberg, whose research was supported with grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, argues with conviction that mild dissociative behavior--temporary episodes of disconnection or memory loss--can be a useful mechanism for coping with such mundane but stressful events as giving public presentations as well as major traumas like an operation or an assault. In more extreme forms, it is a debilitating disorder--similar, she argues, to attention deficit disorder--that is in need of psychiatric recognition and intervention. Arguing that DID often results from early childhood abuse, Steinberg passionately calls for removing the stigma from its related behaviors, noting that the popular conception of the disorder is gleaned from overblown films such as Sybil and The Three Faces of Eve. Readers can gauge their own dissociative tendencies with the book's abridged version of the Steinberg clinical interview for DSM-IV dissociative disorders. Readers interested in clinical depression and ADD will gravitate to this book, although Steinberg's throwaway comments that suggest that seeing ""alternative"" lifestyles depicted on TV can cause psychic confusion and that stepparents have a greater tendency to violate the incest prohibition may cost her some otherwise sympathetic readers. While DID doesn't have as much cultural currency as ADD, Steinberg's research has much to add to the contentious debates surrounding childhood trauma, diagnostic categories and the changing relationship between incurable disease and manageable disorder. Agent, Mary Tahan. (Oct.)