Trisha Paytas has always been a controversial figure on YouTube. The 31-year old has been in and out of the news for several years now, usually for controversial statements and opinions, such as her voicing her support for Donald Trump and Republicanism. She has also claimed to be transgender and that she identifies as a chicken nugget and has gotten married to a cardboard cut-out of Brad Pitt.
No matter what she does, Paytas is surrounded by drama and has had several feuds with her fellow YouTubers. Currently she has 4.89 million subscribers on YouTube.
The latest of her controversial moments was been when she uploaded a video titled “Meet my Alters’ in which she told viewers that she has self-diagnosed herself as having Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID).
According to Psychology Today, DID is a rare psychological condition in which ‘two or more distinct identities, or personality states, are present in—and alternately take control of—an individual.’
DID is caused by past traumatic experiences, in which the person copes by ‘dissociating’ themselves with that time by creating a fragment of consciousness that can develop into an entirely new ‘personality’ in order to deal with the trauma. In this process a person can have several ‘personalities’ or ‘alters’. Each of these alters are often different from each other and each cannot remember what has happened to them while another alter is in control.
Self-confessed internet troll Paytas received huge backlash from the DID community following the video which was posted in March. She said in her video “This sounds crazy, I sound like I’m losing my mind.”
Many of her viewers claimed in the comments and on Twitter that she was making false and sweeping statements regarding the condition. They accused her of spreading misinformation and “glamorising” what is a very debilitating condition to those how suffer with it daily.
This sparked yet another one of her YouTube feuds, this time with a channel called DissaociaDID, which is channel run by someone who has DID and has several alters.
DissaociaDID aims to educate people on the condition as well giving real information and help to people who are suffering with it. In her video, Paytas called the channel “crazy” which angered many people on social media.
In retaliation, DissociaDID made a detailed video reacting to Paytas’ video and debunked a lot of what she said. The alter who made the video, Nin, went through each of Paytas’ claims and said that Paytas is “obviously not very educated in the subject.”
She also said that DID is “not an easy disorder and there are people who cannot deal with it, you have to be aware that when you talk about things that are so stigmatized, that what you say when you have a huge reach will have a massive knock on impact.” Nin actually then turned off Paytas’ video after nine mins because it was ‘quite upsetting’. Nin’s video has now been watched by over two million times and received lots of positive feedback.
Paytas tweeted during the backlash “I did nothing but share my truth and now I’m being mocked because I’m known as the crazy mentally unstable troll of YouTube. Logic is to mock a mentally unstable person.” Her video now has 1.3 million views.