Teen with Dissociative Identity Disorder Starts Care2 Petition to “Split” Filmmakers

Amelia Joubert’s other identities include a four-year-old girl named Tina, who has a Southern accent, and an 18-year-old named Jax. She says she thought the personalities were ghosts until she was diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) when she was just 15.

Now 18, Joubert has started a Care2 petition asking the filmmakers of the upcoming M. Night Shyamalan horror movie Split, which centers around a character with the disorder, to issue a public service announcement about DID. Her petition has gathered over 6,000 signatures.

View and sign the petition here.

Joubert, who graduated from Fort Mill High School in South Carolina, told the Fort Mill Times the 12 distinct voices in her head include four-year-old Tina, who has a Southern accent and loves horses and kittens, and Snake, 5. There’s also 14-year-old Blossom, whose job is to care for the children, and Jax, 18, a protector.

“For the longest time, I had no idea what was going on with me,” she said. “I thought it was normal until I realized it wasn’t as I got older.”

Split, which comes to theaters January 20, 2017, stars James McAvoy as a man who experiences 23 personalities.

Joubert says therapy has helped her, but the worst thing about the disorder is the stigma surrounding it. She’s hoping her Care2 petition, if successful, will break some of that stigma.

“We’re continually put as the villains in movies,” she said. “That’s always hard. We want people to know that we aren’t scary.”

A separate Care2 petition has 15,000 signatures from people pledging to boycott the film due to its “backward representations of gender identity and mental illness.” Care2 petition author Sarah Rose, who is also Care2’s LGBTQ Issues Advocate, says the film plays into transphobia in an attempt to scare audiences, a trope that can be seen in other horror movie characters, like Norman Bates in Psycho and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.