Diagnosing dissociative identity disorder has always been a challenge for mental health practitioners. Up till now no specific method or technique has been approved to diagnose multiple personality disorder. Various practitioners and psychologists use various techniques to prove the presence of split personalities in one person. Whatever diagnostic technique a psychiatrist has been applying the main strategy involves setting up answer question session to explore the truth hidden behind the disguise of split personalities.            

Applying Interviewing Techniques to Explore Inner Self

The main diagnostic tool to trace dissociative identity disorder is asking various questions about the past unusual tragic experiences and present life tensions. In such question answer sessions there are a lot of chances to that patient’s answer, response to certain question or overall body language will give a clue to facilitate further investigation to detect hidden identities present in one person. But psychiatrist have to be conscious during asking touchy question about any traumatic event happen to the patient diagnosing for having split personalities. It is possible that any specific question could cause to dominate hidden aggressive identity suddenly which could be dangerous to the life of patient and its practitioner as well. Therefore questions are asked with proper care to deal with any unexpected psychological condition of a patient suffering from dissociative identity disorder.             

Chances of Wrong Diagnosis

When diagnosing a multiple personality case, there is always present a chance of wrong diagnosis because the major symptoms of this disorder like memory lapses, depression and aggressive behavior are taken as normal depressive state of mind due to certain sad happening. In fact such sad events aggravate the severity of disorder and cause to appear them before other people. For example, if a person having split personalities has to face a tragic event like relation breakup or death of loved ones and such event acts as trigger to show its hidden abnormal mental state then in most of the cases it is taken a strong impact of that single event not as the discovery of a hidden identity. Such patients are treated on the basis of that specific event not as a patient of dissociative identity disorder. All such conditions could lead to wrong diagnosis of mental disorder.                   

Legal Interrogation and Dissociative Identity Disorder  

In some cases such patients have committed an illegal activity under the influence of hidden negative identity but interestingly they forgot everything completely. In such cases during legal interrogation it was discovered that the person was suffering from split personality disorder and whatever he did was just a response under the strong influence of another identity. So in some cases such legal processes also led to the discovery of dissociative identity disorder in some patients.