2,500 Ways to Survive

**Meshel Laurie** (0:00)
The following podcast contains accounts of child sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
This is Australian True Crime with Meshel Laurie. In 2019, Dr. Jeni Haynes gave evidence in court against her father, who was charged with various sex crimes committed against Jeni throughout her childhood. In the history-making trial, Dr. Jeni was the first person in the world allowed to present evidence on the stand from several of her personalities. Dr. Jeni lives with a condition known as Dissociative Identity Disorder or Multiple Personality Disorder. She has over 2,000 personalities, whom she refers to as alters. She's the subject of a new documentary streaming on SBS called We Are Jeni, and she joins us to talk about life as she lives it today. This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation.
When you popped up on the screen, who's waiting to come into the call, it was Symphony. Yeah.

**Dr Jeni Haynes** (1:10)
She's the one that created all of us. It's us honoring the little girl that made everybody else.

**Meshel Laurie** (1:18)
The documentary is so beautiful, isn't it? And the way they've animated your alters, how did that feel to see that?

**Dr Jeni Haynes** (1:26)
Oh, that was wonderful because in our very first discussions, I said, no, we are not using child actors to represent my alters. We are not representing the abuse in any visual way.
No. So, that was sort of my non-negotiable. I wanted no further person traumatized by my dad. So, we went for animation, and then I got to tell them what everybody looks like. And that was fabulous.

**Meshel Laurie** (2:06)
Yeah. When you're doing an interview, and again, you did a lot of interviews in the documentary, for the documentary, and now you're doing them about it, who's job is it, who's best to do interviews?

**Dr Jeni Haynes** (2:18)
Well, that's the thing. For the lived experience of having DID, my experience is we have a doorway, and whoever is sitting in the doorway is in the body, okay? Nice and simple. What we do is we come into an interview having created the entity currently known as Jeni, that's me.
I have all the skills that I need for doing an interview, right? So the technical side of it, the making sure we look good, that side of stuff, that's my job. But when you ask a question, everybody else is literally clustered around behind me, and as soon as you ask a question that belongs to somebody else, they'll just pop in and answer it and then retreat. So you might see a difference or you might not. It's not like we've got one person that does interviews. We could do that.
Mr. Flamboyant keeps putting his hands up. I'll do the interviews. I'm good with this shit. Yeah, no problems. I just go, no, no. Because having one consistent Jeni answer questions in every interview, cheats people who have DID or MPD, who are desperate to see somebody be real and not do the masking. When I talk to you and a different person comes out, I'm actually validating everybody else that has DID, who's sitting there going, yeah, but it's all got to be hidden. No, it doesn't have to be hidden. Not anymore. You can be real. You can actually be whoever you need to be, and you don't have to hide anymore because we got justice. And MPD, DID is a topic of conversation for, in essence, the first time since the 70s.

**Meshel Laurie** (4:13)
Yeah.
And your doctor, Dr. George Blair-West, he says, you know, for so long, DID has been portrayed as the craziest of the crazy. But you're talking about representing in a way that says, I'm living a life here. And the thing about you is, what a life. Your academic career is outstanding, apart from anything else.

**Dr Jeni Haynes** (4:38)
Thank you. But it's so true. People have always seen NPD. Now, I will say, I prefer the term multiple personality disorder. It fits for my experience. So you'll get from the NPD slash DID, dissociative identity disorder is the more common modern term for it. But it doesn't quite sit well for me. So for those people listening that have DID, I invalidate it is NPD, DID. I'm just using the term I feel more comfortable with. So now we've got that out of the way. When you look at the diagnosis of NPD, NPD is considered a mental illness.
We are dysfunctional apparently. We are having hallucinations and delusions. We're paranoid allegedly, but we're not. We are small children surviving the worst the world has to offer in the only way we can. I mean, most of the trauma that results in NPD or DID, occurs when we are pre-verbal.