AnnaLynne McCord has recently revealed that she has dissociative identity disorder (DID).
Earlier this week, the 33-year-old actress told celebrity doctor, Dr. Daniel Amen, that she has DID. During the conversation, she said she is “absolutely uninterested in shame” while breaking the stigma surrounding mental health, according to PEOPLE.
McCord said, “There is nothing about my journey that I invite shame into anymore. And that’s how we get to the point where we can articulate the nature of these pervasive traumas and stuff, as horrible as they are.”
On Friday, the 90210 alum spoke to Good Morning America (GMA) and further shared her experiences, admitting that she “wanted to die for so much of my life.”
“I didn’t want to be here,” she continued. “Now I wake up every day and say, ‘Thank you, I’m alive again!’”
McCord also spoke about the issue with DID’s previous terminology, called multiple personality disorder.
She said, “It is not that. You don’t have multiple personalities; you have fragments of yourself. There’s AnnaLynne, who you’re talking to right now, right? Then there’s this part of me that this trauma happened to that’s still— if you can imagine it as trapped in Pandora’s box. And I just opened Pandora’s box.”
The Excision star has previously spoken about sexual abuse victim as a teenager and the trauma it caused.
In 2019, she told PEOPLE, “A year ago, I was in treatment for PTSD and memories of child sexual abuse came back for years all the way until I was 11 years.”
In her recent interview with GMA, McCord said that portraying a sexual assault survivor on 90210 brought up her real-life traumas, affecting her mentally and emotionally,” according to PEOPLE.
“These moments were coming to light through my work,” she said. “I didn’t understand anything about the mind or the brain at the time, I just was trying to my job and I couldn’t. It was very scary.”
Explained why she went on to seek help, McCord said, “The brain doesn’t care about quality of life, it just cares about going on to continue living. I want my quality of life to get better and that’s why I stepped into this healing process. I want to thrive.”
DID is a severe form of dissociation, a mental process that produces a lack of connection in a person’s thoughts, memories, feelings, actions, or sense of identity, according to WebMD. It is thought to stem from a combination of factors that may include trauma experienced by the person with the disorder. This complex psychological condition is likely to be caused by many factors, including severe trauma during early childhood, especially extreme, repetitive physical or emotional abuse, per WebMD.
