The woman who has 17 people living in her head

When Karen Overhill was asked to do a self-portrait her main problem was how to fit everyone in.

When Karen Overhill was asked to do a self-portrait her main problem was how to fit everyone in. For, as her incredible sketch revealed, it had to include her multiple personalities - all 17 of them.

Each of these personalities had its own voice, traits and mannerisms. They included two-year-old Karen Boo, Sandy, a depressed teenage binge-eater, and surrogate dad Holdon, 34.

And then there was Jensen, the 11-year-old black boy who drew the sketch which helped psychiatrists unravel the tangled strands of Karen's mind - and knit them back together again.

"It would come like a wave over me," says Karen, 46, who had no recollection of what happened when one of her other personalities had taken over.

"When I came back to myself I'd be exhausted. I never knew where I'd been or what I'd done, so I would have to look for clues, like a bag in the car or leftovers from a restaurant. It was amazing, but I accepted it."

Finally a series of terrifying episodes prompted the mum-of-two to seek help.

Karen walked into the Chicago offices of top psychiatrist Dr Richard Baer, 17 years ago. Suffering from depression and married to an abusive husband, she told him how she often simply lost time.

Once she woke to find a knife under her pillow but had no idea of how it got there. In a Las Vegas casino she started out with $25 and ended the night with $2,500 but had no knowledge of where the money came from. And after giving birth in hospital she didn't recognise her family at her bedside.

Over the following years, Dr Baer made the amazing discovery that Karen had Dissociative Identity Disorder (once called multiple personality disorder).

Routinely molested by her father, grandfather and others from an early age, Karen had developed a series of imaginary people, or "alters", to take over her life and shield her from the pain and, later, the terrible memories.

When something bad happened, she would disassociate from herself and create another personality to deal with the trauma.

Dr Baer only told Karen of his theory in November 1993, after receiving a letter with her return address on the envelope. Inside was a scrawled note in pencil that said: "My name is Claire. I am seven years old. I live inside Karen."

Using hypnosis, Dr Baer found that the personalities living inside Karen were both male and female, black and white, and ranged in age from two to 34.

All were very different - eight-year-old Miles was talkative and fidgety, while Katherine, 34, was a prim, mother figure. During these sessions, Karen's alters began to open up about the abuse she had suffered as a child.

As a baby, she was choked and thrown against a wall by her father, who then tied her mouth, arms and legs with tape. As a schoolgirl, her dad and grandfather would stick pins in her legs.

They subjected her to horrific rituals in which she'd be shut into a coffin or strapped to a table and sexually assaulted. At the age of 11, her body was sold to other men.

For most of her life, Karen's memories of the abuse were a blur.

"I had some awareness of it at the time," she says. "I'd see bruises and cuts. I had bits and pieces of memories, but you don't want to ask too many questions for fear of it leading to more abuse.

"Later, I asked questions of my mother and brothers in a round about way to try and confirm what had gone on. Sometimes I remembered horrible things, but I couldn't remember feeling pain - the alters had taken it away.

"Different alters would feel it. If I had a bad headache it would just go away without medication. But this caused problems, too, because pain is protective. Once I stayed at work till the end of the day when I needed an appendectomy.

"It wasn't like today, where you mention abuse and everyone comes running. In those days people beat their children. I went to a Catholic school. If the teachers saw welts, they thought it was discipline. And I thought I was bad and deserved punishment, so I didn't complain.

"My father and grandfather said that if I told anyone they'd kill me. So I put make-up over the wounds or wore long pants if I had bruises.

"And in high school they made me come home right away after school, so I wouldn't talk."

Claire, the first alter to write to Dr Baer, would emerge when Karen was ripped from her bed at night. When the torture began, Miles took over. For dealing with her father on a daily basis, Sidney came to the fore.

While the claims of abuse cannot be proved - Karen's father and grandad are now dead - in 1993 her dad was convicted of 19 counts of sexually abusing her niece.

Dr Baer decided the best way of helping Karen was to integrate her personalities. Under hypnosis, he told her to imagine herself in a safe house where the alters lived. Slowly, he introduced each one to Karen and they would talk and hug.

"Each integration was so exhausting," she says. "I was receiving all their memories. And there were physical issues, too. One alter would do things left-handed and the others right-handed. Lots of the alters had different walks.

"After integrating one of the child alters I didn't know how to drive. That wasn't a good day. I sideswiped a car coming out of the parking lot."

Today, Karen (not her real name) - who gave Dr Baer her blessing to write a book about her case - is free of alters, divorced from her husband and living in the American Mid-West. She is reconciled to her past but is uncertain about the future.

"When you're suicidal, as I was for so long, you don't make long-range plans. The most important thing for me is just knowing that I'm alive and can look forward to the future."

The case of Shirley Ardell Mason, who had 16 separate personalities, was the basis for the bestseller Sybil that became a TV mini-series starring Sally Field. Minnesota artist Mason, who died in 1998, said she was abused by her mother, although she is dismissed by some as a hysteric.

Pamela Edwards, 35, from St Helens, Merseyside, is one of the few people in Britain known to suffer from Dissociative Identity Disorder. A 2005 Channel 4 documentary showed how she lived with four personalities who, unusually, were aware of each other's existence and often interacted.

New Yorker Truddi Chase created 92 personalities in her mind to deal with the trauma of childhood abuse by her mother and stepfather. She recounted her story in the 1987 autobiography When Rabbit Howls.

Christine Costner-Sizemore, from South Carolina, was thought to have 20 different personalities. Her story was turned into the 1957 film, The Three Faces Of Eve.


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