Dissociative Identity Disorder, Jim Morrison

As many as 75,000 Americans could die because of drug or alcohol misuse and suicide as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, according to an analysis conducted by the national public health group Well Being Trust. The group is sounding the alarm that the growing unemployment crisis, economic downturns and stress caused by isolation and lack of a definitive end date for the pandemic could significantly increase so-called "deaths of despair" unless local, state and federal authorities take action. "Unless we get comprehensive federal, state, and local resources behind improving access to high quality mental health treatments and community supports, I worry we're likely to see things get far worse when it comes to substance misuse and suicide," Well Being Trust's chief strategy officer Dr. Benjamin F. Miller told CNN. Miller emphasized the data is just a projection, and that actions taken could change the number of deaths. "We can change the numbers -- the deaths have not happened yet. However, it is on us to take action now," Miller says. "Unemployment during the Great Recession was associated with an increase in suicide deaths and drug overdose deaths," according to the Well Being Trust. For instance, deaths from both suicide and drug overdoses rose along with unemployment during the 2008 recession. Unemployment went from 4.6% in 2007 to a peak of 10% in October 2009 and declined steadily reaching 3.5% in early 2010, according to the group. Changes also must be made to medical and mental health care to ensure that those who need care can get it, the group says. That includes relaxing some privacy standards surrounding technology to improvise care options. "This screams for an opportunity to examine what wasn't working about mental health delivery prior to COVID and examine new strategies to create a new and more integrated approach to mental health post-COVID," Miller says. Earlier this week Vermont, which has been plagued by overdoses, reported that opioid deaths decreased for the first time since 2014. "The state saw a 58% decline in deaths attributed to opioid misuse between 2018 and 2019," Vermont Health Commissioner Mark Levine said. There were also fewer deaths involving fentanyl, but the percentage of opioid-related fatalities involving cocaine continues to increase, Levine said. "We've responded to the opioid crisis in this country as if it was only about opioids when, in reality, it's driven by deeper issues associated with mental health, addiction, pain and suffering," Miller says. "Virtual community may not be enough to hold off the impact of isolation and loneliness. And finally, uncertainty. The stress of uncertainty has a serious impact on the emergence and worsening of mental illness," the group said. Source: edition.cnn.com

Patricia Butler: At some point Patricia Kennealy wrote a serie of exaggerations about Pam Courson and her heroin addiction, citing Alain Ronay as her source. I called Alain and asked him if he had actually told her these things and he started crying and denying his allegations. Ronay also said that the article that was published in Paris-Match magazine was very inaccurate and that everything he'd said had been skewed. In the interviews Agnes Varda and Alain Ronay gave to Paris-Match magazine in 1991, both say that when they arrived, they went up to the second floor apartment where Jim and Pam lived. There is a contradiction in the Ronay and Varda stories at this point. Varda remembers clearly that when they arrived, Jim was still in the tub, surrounded by members of the fire brigade. On the other hand, Ronay says that Jim was already on the bed and that he never saw the body. Varda's accurate description of the death scene in the bathroom gives credence to her story over Ronay's. When Albert Goldman started his first draft, he simply wrote down the same old clichés about Morrison. 

The Doors Companion (1997) by John Rocco, included Albert Goldman's article "The End" which launched the most sleazy speculations about Jim Morrison's last hours in Paris. Albert Goldman, who appointed himself as my mentor, was not exactly known for his accuracy in reporting. In fact, the reason some people wouldn't talk to him (including Alain Ronay) about Morrison was because he had such an incredible reputation for yellow journalism. Goldman made no bones about the fact that he wasn't interested in what was true, just what seemed most provocative. Actually, I thanked Albert Goldman on my book credits along with my other sources, but not on a professional basis. My exact words were, "'To Uncle Albert Goldman, who told me I was too stupid to live to be 30." Albert Goldman was a dear man to me personally, but professionally he was a shark.

I thought Goldman was a nice guy to me personally, but I didn't trust him professionally and wouldn't want to collaborate with him. It would be good for people to consider the possible agenda of an author. My book is told almost entirely through the words of the people who were actually there, and all sides I knew are presented. Since I wasn't there and I don't have a personal stake in the story, I had no reason to lie or mislead the reader. If you interview enough people you start to get a sense of when people are being straight with you and when they are lying. It's not that difficult to tell when folks have their own agenda to pursue (i.e., those who have nothing to gain from lying are more believable than those who do). Also, unless all these people know each other and get together to coordinate their stories, pretty soon you can see if one or two stories seem oddly out of line with the rest and that's a red flag. Babe Hill did initially get angry with me when I told him I'd be writing about Jim's child abuse allegations but he later apologized for his reaction and encouraged me to write honestly about what I'd found in the manuscript of Max Fink, and just be sure I presented all sides and opinions (including the Morrisons), which I feel I did. Also I discovered Danny Sugerman was never romantically or sexually involved with Pamela. The problem with Sugerman wasn't in the details, but rather with the fact that entire passages were made up out of whole cloth. Many insiders had quite a lot to gain from lying ($$$), and Sugerman most of all. It is, after all, the nonsense that Danny added to NOHGOA that made it a bestseller. Jerry Hopkins tried for years to sell his book. Then he teamed up with Danny, who did a lot of editing on it, adding a lot of very dramatic and also very false information, and it's then when the book got sold. 

I talked to Mirandi Babitz quite a length about the rumors of Pamela working as a call girl on Melrose Avenue. When we traced her basis for saying such defamatory things, she realized that she never knew any of this firsthand, and she got it all from shady gossip from wannabes and rivals around the rock scene--the same gossip that had once painted Morrison turning tricks in Florida when the most probable situation was Morrison earning some extra dollars by dealing acid tabs to college students--. Ms. Babitz was repeating essentially third-hand speculation without basis in fact. My theory is Mirandi was jealous by proxy (her sister Eve Babitz had unrequited designs on Jim Morrison). Pamela actually called Eve Babitz "just a groupie" to her face and that apparently struck a nerve. Pamela was erratic, mentally unstable, flirtatious, but she was never a "semi-pro". That's patently nonsense since Morrison was very generous with Pam financially. By late 1970, Patricia Kennealy was stalking Jim Morrison; that's precisely how he saw it. Jim tried to pacify Kennealy to protect Pamela. Kennealy was maniacally jealous of Pamela and didn't understand her relationship with Jim. Her disturbing obsession with Pamela could even be confounded with lesbian attraction.

Jerry Hopkins: "Patricia Butler has worked six years on her book, and because she's turned up so much new material, my ego insists that the extra time she spent on research is why. I spent two years researching and writing No One Here Gets Out Alive; it was finding a publisher that took forever. Patricia, on the other hand, continued plugging away on this project nights and weekends. She slowly developed relationships on the phone and got her sources to tell stories they never told me, and then, adding insult to injury, uncovered some secrets Danny Sugerman and I never knew. Patricia Butler's exploration of Jim Morrison and Pam Courson's love story--and her surprising retelling of the Jim Morrison history-- should be the final word on the matter."

-Frank Lisciandro: Do you think Pamela was material-minded?

-Babe Hill: She wasn’t material-minded; that’s what Jim loved about her. She realized the beauty of his soul and what he was trying to do. She didn’t care about the material aspect of any of the stuff. That was her whole thing about being against the other Doors, and the office, and everything else. It didn’t have to do with that they weren’t making any money; it was just that they were wasting his creativity. I figure she had a very supportive influence on his poetry and never missed a chance to rag on him when he went off the track.

RiderontheStorm69: Severe depression was very obvious and it seems like it was something Jim Morrison struggled with his entire life. I think Jim Morrison might have suffered from DID. Thinking about it always makes me pause about  a few things that Jim wrote: "He felt he had to drink to silence the voices," the seeming separate identities presented in the Hitchhiker screenplay, and in the poem "The Changeling." On the flipside of that though, he could have been drinking as false courage because he was shy; His separate identities in the Hitchhiker screenplay perhaps could be archetypes, because archetypes interested him. I was just reading about DID and the article said that people who suffer from this disorder sometimes experience amnesia. And when a person suffers from the resultant amnesia, they usually try to make up a "story" for it afterwards. Jim's life can be seen as a flight from his past and from himself. The hitchhiker's journey being a metaphor for this. Sometimes, under great duress, people literally forget who they are and just start traveling. In psychiatric parlance this is called a fugue state. Morrison was definitely interested in forgetting; "Learn to forget", "Forget the world, forget the people", "Can we resolve the past?" His story is an internal drama. The family represents past memories Jim must destroy, or repress, at all costs. But as they are his past memories, the family, like the hitchhiker, is an aspect of Jim Morrison. So martydom or self destruction reappears. I tend to wonder if the film HWY was based on this premise, the two lead characters appearing two be adversaries, but actually representing aspects of one person, the life urge and the death urge.

I think the DSM IV has a category for those who consider that their changed consciousness and perception is the result of "shamanistic possession". It's called Dissociative Disorder. The difference between it and Dissociative Identity Disorder is that the person with DID experiences pronounced differences in memory, perception, consciousness, and what we call "personality" with each different part. There are typical "personalites" for DID--the angry protector, who remembers the abuse and acts out abuse on others; the child, who has less access to memories and skills; the member of the opposite gender; the older, wise counselor or nurturing figure; the provoker, or "clown." If Jim was dissociative, his memory of such an event would have been intermittent. If he had Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), he'd only remember it when he was in a particular mood. Specifically, an extremely angry mood. But the incident could still affect him on subconscious levels. Those who have DID tend to have survived abuse from a very early age. Just like in the song "Five to One" Jim alludes, "When the morning wakens/Then may I arise/Pure and fresh and sinless/" This leads me to an aside: The experience of having DID is a broken, shattered state of consciousness. The person experiences "coming to" or "waking up", or "coming up" abruptly, in unfamiliar surroundings, without context, sometimes without recognizing friends or even relatives. The person becomes very adept at covering up memory gaps by joking, making nonsense statements to throw the "strangers" off track, and outright bluffing--interpreted by others as lies--to fill in missing material. Source: groups.alt.music