Quote:I didn't know that...or rather, I wasn't thinking about it when I formed my opinion of the story.
For those of you who don't know, I'm a psychology student. This... has very little to do with real psychology or psychiatry. Or real DID, for that matter.
It's certainly not my field. I'm currently an International Relations student, and my last job was in broadcast journalism.
The latter of which means I'm more interested in telling a good story, not getting the facts right.
(Yes, yes, that was a joke. But there's still some truth there.)
Now, I did find the hypnotism bit terribly contrived, and the explanatory psychobabble rather less than convincing.
The thing is, though... I didn't find it a stumbling block in my enjoyment of the story, once I accepted it as a plot device.
It's a suspension of disbelief thing, a vehicle for making the concept work. Maybe the writer could have researched real psychiatric disorders better. Maybe, I don't know. Perhaps the writer did do a lot of reading, but then went and intentionally discarded it for the sake of the tale they wanted to tell.
Ignorance or design? No idea. But the end result is a story I did enjoy.
Mind, now that you bring it up...I see how it could really piss off someone actually knowledgable about psychiatry. That's understandable.
But, well, I figure most fiction based heavily on some professional field of study...is gonna piss off people truly familiar with it. There's some authors who can do it well, of course. British crime novelist Ian Rankin is praised by the police for keeping his work close to reality, even though he's got no law enforcement experience himself.
That's hard to do, tho.
Myself? I got pretty ticked off a year ago, when someone in my roleplay community used Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in a story plot...and got it completely wrong. They assumed Yudhoyono was his surname - it isn't, Javanese don't have surnames. And nevermind the utter mess they made of describing Southeast Asian regional politics...
Point, see?
-- Acyl