Most of us know Tila Tequila as a Playboy model or the girlfriend of a football player. Or maybe we know her from her most recent, infamous engagement to Casey Johnson, the heiress to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, who died in early 2010. Tila's not just a multi-layered character, she's actually not alone in that famous body! Tila Tequila suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder - or Multiple Personality Disorder as it was once known - a mental illness in which a sufferer has at least two distinct identities. Experts attest that most patients have about 13 to 15 personalities, although there have been cases of people with up to 100 "alter-egos." About a year ago, Tila announced her condition on her MySpace page, and some of her erratic behavior since seems in line with her confession that she suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder. For Tila Tequila, one of those other identities is "Jane," an outspoken woman who recently hijacked Tila's Twitter account. "I told you once and I'm not gonna tell you again, Tila is not here! this is Jane!" Jane tweeted. Aside from alter egos like these, people with Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID, experience severe memory loss, or memory fluctuations. Other symptoms of the disorder can include: sleep disorders, alcohol or drug abuse, compulsions and rituals, and depression, and in more severe cases, suicidal tendencies. Because Dissociative Identity Disorder is so eccentric, it attracts a lot of media attention. For example, Steven Spielberg's latest brainchild, The United States of Tara, is a television show about a wife and mother boasting four personalities and counting. The show resulted in Showtime Networks' highest ratings in five years, and was almost instantly picked up for another season. Despite all this buzz, it is generally believed that less than one-percent of the United States population suffers from DID. Why these few people develop the disorder is not fully understood, but...experts do know that up to 99-percent of Dissociative Identity patients report severe physical and/or sexual abuse in young childhood. It is for this reason that DID sufferers often have traumatic flashbacks characteristic of another mental condition called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. There is no definitive test that can diagnose DID, so psychiatrists must conduct detailed mental health interviews to look for it.The process is tricky though, and it is estimated that individuals with DID may spend up to seven years in therapy before they are properly diagnosed. The primary treatment for Dissociative Identity Disorder is ongoing psychotherapy, with a goal of combining all the personalities into one. This is what famous athlete, Herschel Walker, talks about in his recent book Breaking Free. A silent sufferer of Dissociative Identity Disorder, Walker channeled his identities into various sports.Walker was so successful at this that he was both a recipient of college football's Heisman trophy and a participant in the 1992 United States Olympian bobsled division. Walker also out-sprinted other Olympian runners, studied taekwondo, and schooled in ballet: "... a lot of people who have been under trauma go into an altered personality to cope with different things in their lives," Walker explained. Still, some individuals with DID are not content to rely on talk therapy. Hypnosis and electroconvulsive therapy are both alternative methods of attempting to control multiple identities. When DID is not treated - or when it's treated poorly - the results can be severe. Such was the case with Rebecca Arwen Long, a devout knitter, keeper of to-do lists, and loving wife. But it wasn't that side of Long that was on trial in a Seattle courtroom last November. Instead, it was a side that starved her stepdaughter to the point where the 14-year-old weighed just 47 pounds at the time of her rescue. Although Long's lawyers cited poorly controlled Dissociative Identity Disorder as the culprit, Long - and her alter-ego - were sentenced to three and a half years. Clearly, we have a long way to go before we fully understand DID and the conditions that surround it. But there are treatments that can help! So if you believe that you, or someone you love is suffering from the disorder, please seek immediate medical attention.