Multiple Personality Disorder...is this a joke?

Back when I thought I was sane enough to go into the field of Psychology, I was always intrigued by the amount of mental disorders that are documented by the American Mental Health Association. Of course the more commonly known cases are Schizophrenia, Bipolar disorder and what have you. But I found Multiple Personality Disorder to be the most interesting because...well...the thought of one person having live-in visitors inhabiting their body, coming and going as they please is just highly entertaining. And scary, to say the least. Think about it, you have a friend name Candace who you love going out with and y'all are chillin one day at a restaurant and you go to talk to her and she looks at you as if you've lost your mind, sayin that she doesn't know you and demands you stop caliing her Candace because her name is Shawanda. What do you do? Play along? Get up quickly and walk away?

Well Showtime has braved the topic of Multiple Personality Disorder with a new series, United States of Tara. It's about a mother of two teenagers/wife of one husband (she's married to the man Carrie Bradshaw should have married, Aidan, from Sex and The City for those who had enough sense to follow that show) who is often taken over by her "alters". It works like this. Her given name is Tara and she has this family filled with your typical confusion, especially when u have a 16 year old drama-queen daughter and a 14 yr old know-it-all son. But things get even more complicated whenever Tara gets stressed out because she automatically retreats into herself, unleashing one of her 3 alter-egos, T (a 16 year old nympho who loves wearing jeans that show off her nasty looking thong), Buck (a trailer park trashy type man who loves flirting with trailer park trashy bar waitresses) and Alice (a June Cleaver/Mommy Dearest wannabe). When one of these alters take over, Tara is completely powerless and doesn't remember anything once she snaps back, leaving her vulnerable and capable of doing God knows what while she's under the alters control.

The show is funny as hell and I now have two whole reasons to watch Showtime. (The L Word is still number 1) But i'm still not sure if I buy into the whole multiple personality thing. I mean I know the brain is a very intricate feature and yes, if it's chemically imbalanced you can become wacked out beyond belief, but damn. I just don't know how I could handle being four people in one. I have a hard enough time dealing with myself! I can only imagine what my alters would be like. I know one of them would be a white girl named Becky. I know it. lol.