Differences Between Men and Women With Multiple Personality Disorder

Estimates of the ratio of female to male patients with multiple per-sonality disorder have varied be-tween 4 to 1 and 9 to 1 (1). Putnam and associates (2) reported on a group of 100 patients, of whom only eight were men. Greaves (3) summarized the ap-proximately 200 cases of multiple personality disorder reported in the world literature up until 1980. He did not report a sex ratio; however, he and earlier reviewers have noted 19th-century reports of men who had the symptoms of multiple personality disorder (4). The literature includes descnip-tions of patients with multiple per-sonality disorder who were seen by individual investigators on small groups ofinvestigatons (5). To date no one other than Putnam has reported on a sample of patients in which there were enough men to allow statistical comparisons of the characteristics of men and women with multiple personality disorder. This paper presents an analysis of the differences between 28 male patients and 207 female patients with multiple personality disorder. Dr. Ross is associate professor of psychiatry at the University