Two Minds Blog

  This week I’m considering a powerful tool for behavior change: the humble checklist. The oldest historical example of this writing genre may be the Sumerian King List from 1800 B.C., but people were likely using lists even earlier for mundane tasks connected to record-keeping and trade. Benjamin Franklin tracked his progress in developing moral virtues using an elaborate list system. The popular FranklinCovey planner system  therefore takes its name from America's first ambassador. Checklists in their current widespread form also benefitted from the advent of mail-order catalogs in the mid-1800s, which encouraged consumers to list the items they wanted ( Franklin also had a hand in developing the first printed catalogs!). Lists helps us to keep track of things that we might otherwise forget, to put things in a meaningful order, and give us permission to drop things from our memory when we don’t need to remember them any longer.  A checklist has two essential features...

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly called “multiple personality” disorder, is one of the more unusual conditions in the spectrum of mental health. It is relatively rare, affecting only about 1.5% of people in the world over the course of their lives, and despite its intense and distinctive symptoms it is frequently misdiagnosed as one of several other behavioral conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder , or depression . The prior name "multiple personality disorder" (MPD) was confusing because DID was never considered to be a personality  disorder -- those are a cluster of problems related to people's interactions with others or the world, which tend not to be distressing to the patient but are often distressing to those around them. DID, by contrast, is often confusing or frightening to the person experiencing symptoms. The disorder's key characteristic is "disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states, w...