Phil Chamberlain

Ten minutes previously I had done the same thing but then Helen had been Adam, a chatty 10-year-old boy. Now she is Helen, a quietly spoken 35-year-old who suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder or multiple personality disorder.

Helen picks up the piping hot cup of coffee Adam ordered for her with slightly shaking hands and asks what had we just been talking about.

At the age of 21 Helen appeared, on the surface, to have a fulfilling life ahead of her. She had just gained a first in health and community studies, taken up a job in health promotion and was looking to do a Phd.

Then, as she says, over the next five years "things just fell apart".

"I got a first basically because I threw myself into work because I was alone and not very good at making friends.

"Then I found I was losing track of time. I was writing my dissertation and I would find I had written words and not remember doing so.

"I couldn’t finish my Phd because I had these voices in my head and I was diagnosed, wrongly, as schizophrenic. I was eventually diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder."

It was a bleak period of self-harm and depression, drug overdoses and intense therapy as Helen and her therapists tried to identify and resolve her problems.

Multiple personality disorder is very rare although this may be partly due to the fact that it is often misdiagnosed.

In Helen cases she has shared her life with a fluctuating number of other personalities that at most have numbered 20 but at the moment have coalesced in seven.

There is Adam, who greeted me with a cheery hello and told me excitedly about the pizza he had just enjoyed. There is also William, aged six, five-year-old Alex with his toy gun, the rarely seen youngsters Jamie and Elizabeth and teenagers Brenda and Karl.

These last two are more troubled and frequently responsible for Helen’s overdoses and self-harm. Her arms are a ladder of red and white scars.

"It has been virtual continual cutting of myself for the last ten years," says Helen. "When Brenda or Karl do it, it’s not to kill me, it is to block out the pain."

That long effort to block out the pain also means Helen is a recovering alcoholic but it does not stop her older personalities drinking on her behalf. She can literally be her own worst enemy.

Unsurprisingly Helen has not worked for 14 years. She lives in a council flat in the Midlands and survives on benefits. She is very isolated with only intermittent contact with her family whom she describes as "very dysfunctional".

"Socially I’m not particularly confident," she says. "I feel vulnerable when I am away from home knowing I could switch at any time."

Her switching means each has to leave notes about important things as there are periods of amnesia when Helen does not know what has happened.

"It is just like losing track of time and suddenly you get this sense of being catapulted and you do not know how you reached that point," she says.

The cause of Helen’s fractured personality appears to lie back in her childhood. She says that she was a victim of serious sexual abuse by more than one person. Her other personalities serve a dual function. They either give her a childhood she never had or, in the case of the male characters, they were created because she thought the abuse would not happen to them.

Medical opinion is still divided on the issue with some psychiatrists seeing multiple personalities as a threatre constructed in the therapy room between the therapist and the patient. Some charge therapists with planting false memories. The wilder accusations of systematic Satanic abuse have not resulted in any court cases.

For Helen, talking about being forced to eat her own aborted baby, the half-glimpsed horrors in her own mind are obviously real enough. As is her quiet bewilderment at psychiatrists who doubt her condition is real.

"I don’t see how I can be making it up," she says. "How can you consistently talk in a childlike fashion for years?"

There is no ‘cure’ for Helen’s condition, merely more therapy. She takes a cocktail of drugs to deal with the side effects. Her daily dose consists of Prozac, Diazapam, some anti-psychotic pills and sleeping tablets, washed down with Gavascon for the resultant heartburn.

"I’ve the constitution of the ox," she says ruefully.

But recently something from Helen’s childhood has returned and this has been a positive development for her.

Last year Helen was at Manchester train station buying a ticket when she heard someone call her name. It was an old school friend called Ruth who had known from the age of eight until she left school when, as happens, they lost touch.

It was the start of something new for Helen as Ruth has made a film about finding her friend and trying to understand what happened to the cheery girl she remembered.

"It was quite a daunting prospect," admits Helen. "But I thought it would be cathartic for me and it might help those people who have misdiagnosed and misunderstood."

Since making the film Helen has started voluntary work and developed a bit more confidence.

She can now envisage a future which might include taking up paid employment, meeting someone, settling down and having children. A scenario she admits sounds "complicated".

As for the other personalities, while some are likely to be integrated into Helen’s personality, some may never disappear – and after so long Helen isn’t willing to say goodbye.

"I would like to keep William, Alex and Adam. This is me and I accept me for who I am," she says.

NOTE: The Woman With Seven Personalities is due to be screened on Channel 5 on October 13.

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