The reviews corner

🖋 • TITLE • "THE MINDS OF BILLY MILLIGAN"

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🔏 • AUTHOR • Danyel Keyes (1981)

📜 • LENGTH • 544 pages.

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💸 • COVER PRICE • € 19.00

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Won an Edgar Award nomination. A TRUE and shocking story that tells of the first case in the history of the United States to be found not guilty of serious crimes for reasons of insanity.

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📖 • SYNOPSIS •

I want to clarify that the review you are about to read does not contain any spoilers.  The novel begins on 22nd October 1977, with the search for a man responsible for kidnapping, theft and rape at the expense of two students and one nurse. The man they're looking for is called William Stanley Milligan, whom we will call Billy, the book's protagonist. During the capture, taken aback in his apartment, the man is literally frightened by the intervention of the agents and continues to say that he had done nothing. Beginning to apologize by saying that if he had hurt someone it was not his intention. Once arrested with overwhelming evidence and testimonies of assaulted women, his lawyers begin to sense strange attitudes in him, as if each time they are dealing with more people. Psychologists and psychiatrists are called to investigate the case and a shocking truth emerges, the man is affected by dissociative personality disorder, in which 24 PEOPLE live. I remarked "people" precisely because the personalities within it did not want them to be defined as such, but demanded that they be addressed as people.

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📝 • REVIEW •                

“Imagine that all of us, many people, many of whom you have never met... we find ourselves in a dark room. In the middle of that room, on the floor, there is a patch of light. Anyone who steps into the light comes out on the spot, and is out of the real world, has consciousness. This is the person that others - those outside - see and hear and to whom they react. Others can continue to do the usual things, study, sleep, talk or play. But whoever is outside, whoever he is, must be very careful not to reveal the existence of others."

As I said, we talk about them as REAL and OWN people, each of whom has their own physical characteristics, their own accent, their own interests and even a significant difference in IQ found between one and the other. The people in question are classified into three groups

The ten most famous people belong to:

- Billy, the protagonist

- Arthur, 22 years old from England, the most intelligent self-taught in many scientific studies. It is he who dictates the rules and chooses who can come out and who not, the same who has divided the personalities into these three groups.

- Ragen, 23 years old with a purely Yugoslav accent. It is the strongest takes control in dangerous situations. I experience in weapons and martial arts.

- Allen, 18, manipulator, the one who goes out most often to deal with "outsiders". He smokes, plays the drums and paints portraits.

- Tommy, 16, escape artist. He paints landscapes, plays the sax and is an expert in electronics.

- David, 8 years old, is called" guardian of pain ", takes the place in situations of malaise of all kinds, which may be physical or psychological.

- Danny, 14, is the scariest, he only paints still lifes.

- Christene, 3 years old, English and intelligent, suffers from dyslexia.

- Christopher, 13 years old, Christene's brother, plays the harmonica.

- Adalana, 19, lesbian. Solitary and introverted, she takes care of the home for everyone.

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The undesirable (thirteen) defined by Arthur because they are dangerous for them and for others as they perform illegal actions or acts that put Billy in uncomfortable situations. Among these we find:

- Philip, Kevin, Walter, April, Samuel, Mark, Steve, Lee, Jason, Robert, Shawn, Martin, Timothy.

The Master, 26, the sum of all twenty-three alter egos merged into one. "His appearance and collaboration made this book possible."

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There is a huge division of thought in the many characters of this story, in which we find those who believe and recognize Billy's disorder as a real psychiatric disease; those who face it as if they were not dealing with a psychosis case but a simple neurosis, including incompetent doctors; and who thinks that Billy lies to try to escape the sentence. The novel is divided into three books:

- First book: "The time of confusion" where the story begins with the capture of Billy Milligan and continues with the treatment related to the recognition of his disorder and the criminal trials for the crimes he committed.

- Second book: "The Master", the central part of the book in which the writer tells the life of Billy from his childhood, analyzing in detail the various "people" that reside in the protagonist's mind and how they have emerged over time, a for one, following various circumstances related to Billy's life.

- Third book: “Beyond madness”. Here the writer picks up where he left off in the first part of the book, continuing with the story of the trials and medical histories of the doctors from Billy's capture onwards. Inside there are also a preface and an afterword.

In the preface, the writer tells of his meeting with Billy, the first individual with multiple personality observed 24 hours a day and the only one whose multiplicity was witnessed under oath by four psychiatrists and a psychologist. He himself says “I was skeptical but interested. I realized that Billy in the second meeting was very different from the young man I met earlier. Then one day he went to meet a <<fusion>> revealing a new character (the master) we become aware and conscious of all personalities from the moment of creation. For the most part, those who knew Milligan, including the victims, ended up accepting his diagnosis. The doubts I showed during his tales gradually turned into conviction as my investigations proved their veracity."

In the afterword, the writer tells how each other has evolved after the publication of the book and the demonstrations of multiple personalities studied with neural monitoring techniques such as EEG, in which the traces of these patients showed marked differences both with respect to the central personality and between of them. The author's purpose in this novel is to invite you to deepen your studies on the mind, especially of patients suffering from this disorder, as it has something to offer all of us in terms of mind and body control. He himself tells us "I believe that in fact multiple personalities can be one of those experiments of nature from which we will learn a lot about ourselves."

👩🏻‍🏫 • PERSONALCONSIDERATION •   

So, I tell you that this book can be complex for various reasons:

-1 the length if you are used to reading little books, as it has 537 pages.

-2 Use very specific medical terminologies that not everyone knows.

-3 The characters are many and some of the same names, as the people inside it really existed.

-4 Some parts run off quickly while others may be a bit heavy, I myself admit that in some places I struggled to continue. A novel like this is very complicated to write especially for the chronological reconstruction of the events.

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✨ • ADVICE•

In any case, I would like to recommend it to EVERYONE, this novel deserves to be in the libraries of every reader who may be interested in psychology and not, in the same way that each of us deserves to read a similar tale of a TRUE story at least once. in life. A story that caused a scandal in America.