When a 16-year-old boy in Korea was admitted to a psychiatric facility, his medical chart showed a previous diagnosis of schizophrenia. He had auditory hallucinations and a history of attempting suicide. A new team of psychiatrists evaluated him and realized the young patient had been misdiagnosed.
They decided he had dissociative identity disorder (DID), not schizophrenia, according to a case study published earlier this year in the Journal of the Korean Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry. The instance is considered to be the first reported case of DID in an adolescent in Korea, among just four diagnosed cases in adults.
DID is a rare condition in which a person develops multiple identities in response to abuse or trauma. It is often misdiagnosed. An estimated 1.5 percent of the world population has been diagnosed with DID, and as many as 5 percent of people globally may have a form of a dissociative disorder (DD).
