A lot of people have ‘on-air personalities’ that they claim are vastly different from their real life personalities.
This doesn’t seem to make sense to me. Can anyone specifically and clearly show the difference between the two and how they can easily be differentiated?
I don’t think Stephen Colbert has a personality disorder, but he managed an on-air personality much different than his reality personality for many years. I guess another name for it is “acting.”
People behave differently in different social and public contexts; they do this consciously at first, then out of habit.
Dissociative Identity Disorder (a controversial phenomenon anyway, but assuming it exists), is not voluntary.
This is the same thing as an actor’s movie/TV persona acting quite differently than the actor does in real life. The on-air personality is how that person acts in his on-air role.
First off, the very existence of dissociative personality disorder (which is what you mean by “multiple personality disorder”) is a bit controversial, so it might not even exist at all. Forgetting that for a sec, though, the difference in a oversimplified nutshell is that it is a dissociative disorder and therefore is all about memory. Reality Stephen Colbert has the same memories as on-air Stephen. If he had dissociative personality disorder, those memories would either not exist, or they would exist in a form where he believes they happened to somebody else. It almost always involves a traumatic event that someone wants to disassociate themselves from.
On Air Stephen: Last night, we had Justin Bieber on the program.
Reality Stephen: That was a train wreck. I need to fire my fucking producer.
Dissociative Stephen: I have no idea what either of you are talking about, but I’m just glad it wasn’t me hosting that show that didn’t happen.
Q2: is “acting” to some people, and on some level, Multiple Personality Disorder (or another mental illness to be named later)?
No, because acting is a thing that exists.
No, it is not.
DID, yes assuming it exists, is associated with severe mental/physical/sexual trauma. You will likely never meet anyone who has it, ever. There have only been a handful of people with this, and it is not in any way related to schizophrenia.
Colbert et al. are acting and can decide how they want to come across. DID people theoretically can’t control when this happens nor the form of the delusion. When Colbert goes home he is still Colbert and not Colbért. He is also a very functional human being whereas DID people have disordered personal lives.
Apples and oranges.
Nitpick: by DSM-IV, DID is not a personality disorder, although it is similar in that both types are very, very resistant to change. I know DSM-V changed personality disorders drastically, but I believe this still holds true.
I did meet someone who met the description (undiagnosed, therefore not in the statistics). She had a concept of how she had to be, and any behavior or feeling which did not fit that ideal was attributed to another persona. Including having a carnivorous breakfast, chatting up her female crushes (internet and rl - the rl ones didn’t know about the whole personality-constructs thing), going back to bed, getting back up and having a birkenstocks breakfast: the teenaged boy was the only carnivorous persona and also the one who got crushes on females, but the body still ate twice. Another persona got angry, another one go jealous, and the main persona was always picking up the messes being left by the others. All of them except the angry one were defenseless and puppy-eyed, thus attracting a husband in search of a maid in distress (hon, you got half a dozen for the price of one) who eventually left her for a younger maid in distress (at which point she got so clingy that she managed to drive everybody away).
I’m reasonably sure that if Stephen Colbert has a full breakfast on-air, he won’t go back into bed, get back up and have some wholegrain cereals and a pear. And if he finds himself thinking “gee, what a nice fellow” about some guy in a chat, he probably doesn’t approach said fellow introducing himself as Stephanie.
Dr. Marvin Monroe says Harry Shearer and hid coworkers are really sick.
There were times in the service as an NCO I had to be a prick in order to do my job. I was nothing like that when I was off duty. I don’t think I had MPD.
Well, Lionel Hutz will produce Dr. Nick as a witness in the slander suit.
Clowns are interesting. They really are 2 separate people and will talk about the other in the 3rd person when in or out of makeup.
Yes, but that’s just a character that happens to be somewhat permanent; other artists with stage names do the same, but if the “stage persona” talks about the “regular person” it’s usually in the context of saying “well, it’s Mz Starz who makes the money but Laura Jones who pays the bills and raises my children” - they’re not claiming Mz Starz had no part in the making of those children.
Haven’t some actors said they got so into a role they found themselves unable to fully discard the character after filming and it was almost disturbing? Like they lost themselves in it a little too much and took on aspects of the mask.
Not DID but interesting.
Ventriloquists can also get a little creepy about their dummies.