NEW DOCUMENTARY FOLLOWS SAN DIEGO THERAPIST, PATIENTS
‘Busy Inside’ to air Tuesday as part of social issues series
San Diego therapist Karen Marshall remembers the first time she realized there were other people living inside of her.
She was in her late 20s and on a camping trip with her former partner when she crawled into a sleeping bag one night and suddenly began speaking with another voice: “I split, and another part of me came out and she freaked and so did I.”
Marshall has dissociative identity disorder or DID, and her long journey toward healing, along with those of her patients, is the subject of “Busy Inside,” a documentary that will air at 8 p.m. Tuesday on the World Channel public television station. The 53-minute film is being presented as part of “America ReFramed,” a series that features
documentaries on social issues.
The footage in “Busy Inside” was shot from four to five years ago. The movie was released in late 2019 on the festival circuit but the pandemic forced the film into mothballs. So Marshall
said she’s a little nervous, and also excited, about “Busy Inside” finally reaching a wider audience this week.
“The people who participated in the film did so because they want to increase
awareness about mental health and DID, that it’s not the frightful thing that people see it as,” Marshall said. “I think if we can look at people being honest about mental health, we will have a much better world.”
Formerly known as multiple personality disorder, DID is a controversial subject. Although DID has been recognized in the industry textbook, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, many psychiatrists don’t believe it exists. Hollywood filmmakers have also sensationalized the disorder by making it the diagnosis for crazed serial killer characters. Marshall is well aware of the criticism, but she said she has treated up to 40 patients with DID in San Diego over the past 15 years.
“Why can’t some people accept it? Some people can’t imagine it,” said Marshall, who has been in private practice as a traumafocused therapist since 2000 and a licensed clinical social worker since 1991. “It’s OK if you don’t agree with it. I don’t know what to tell you. But what I do know is what I live with and what I’ve worked to heal.”
Marshall began visiting therapists in her early 20s, but she said none could help her explain why there were missing gaps of time in her days, why things moved mysteriously around her home and why she’d draw a blank during college exams on subjects she’d known hours before.
The answer, she found, was DID, an extremely rare disorder affecting as few as a fraction of 1 percent of the population. DID is usually the result of childhood trauma, such as sexual, physical or emotional abuse.
In her case, her late mother was her abuser. For “Marshay,” one of Marshall’s patients who is featured in the film, she was sexually abused by babysitters as a young girl. Because a child’s brain can’t process severe trauma, the experience sometimes gets locked away in the brain with a portion of their personality, Marshall said.
“DID is a coping strategy. It’s a way our brains manage things we can’t manage otherwise,” she said. “Our brain says ‘I can’t handle this’ so whatever the experience is, our brain takes it and compartmentalizes it. That personality has its own closet and it has things that it does.”
Marshall said she has about 17 personalities, known as “alters.” Many of her alter selves are children, including Rosalee, Big Eyes, One, Three and Screamers 1 and 2. Marshay, who is shy and lacks self-confidence, has several upbeat, outgoing alters, like Little One, Sassy and The One Who Dances. Marshall said many DID patients have an alter who is very angry or fearful, but the only person they try to hurt is themselves.
Marshall said alters can emerge at random, when they’re needed to complete a task or when they’re triggered by the recollection of a trauma or other memory. She said her alters don’t come out when she’s working or driving, but some move objects around the house that she can’t find later.
Back when Marshall was trying to figure things out about herself in the 1990s, the only books she could find about DID were clinical in nature. So in 1998, she coauthored with her wife, Tracy Alderman, the book “Amongst Ourselves,” a self-help guide to living with DID, which is still in print and sold on Amazon.
That book is how Marshall came to the attention of Olga Lvoff, a Russian filmmaker now based in New York. Before contacting Marshall, Lvoff and her co-producer, Victor Ilyukhin, had been unsuccessful finding anyone with DID willing to open up their lives on camera.
Marshall and three of her patients agreed to share their stories for “Busy Inside,” as long as Marshall had veto power over sensitive scenes and the patients’ last names weren’t revealed. Two of them, Sarah and Charlie, also wore wigs to conceal their identities. Some scenes take place during Marshall’s DID group therapy sessions, where Marshall said “there are four of us plus 50 or so other (alters) any given week, so you never know who will show up.”
The film made its world premiere in Moscow two years ago and played at movie theaters all over Russia. Interest in the subject there was so great that “Amongst Ourselves” is now being translated into Russian. Marshall said she hopes that Tuesday’s television broadcast will raise similar awareness about DID as well as empathy for the people who have it.
“I’m excited because of the filmmakers because I’m in awe of them. They did it out of their love for filmmaking and producing this story,” Marshall said. “But my whole purpose in getting involved is to say mental health is an issue, no matter what country you’re in.”
To learn more about “Busy Inside,” visit worldchannel.org/episode/america-reframed-busy-inside/.