Susan Fairfoot

Speaking With Strangers Susan Fairfoot

A young girl leaves home, straight from school to live in London where she has been booked into a secretarial college, very much against her will. As the first part of her life was lived in sheltered isolation she battles with a world of mystifying strangers who seem more aware of her past than she is. She lives in a separate world of reality with her music and is unable to recognise what is happening around her as she searches for identity and meaning in a world of secrecy and hidden trauma. She becomes involved with a family who are battling with a member of the family suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder, also known as Dissociative Personality Disorder. The circumstances of the girl's life and that of the family have been taken from two real life cases in which I have been involved, not directly but with connected family. All the "alter" characters are described as they actually happened. Names and places and time have been altered and I have contrived a fictitious story between the two. The idea of combining the stories is to compare how two cases of psychotic behaviour can have such diverse conclusions.