Movies - TV
Tom Holland’s The Crowded Room Is Based On A Terrifying True Story
By VALERIE ETTENHOFER
Spoiler Warning!
This story contains spoilers for
“The Crowded Room.”
Content Warning
This story contains mentions of sexual assault and domestic abuse.
The TV series “The Crowded Room” follows Danny Sullivan (Tom Holland), a man who is arrested and subjected to rigorous psychological evaluation after engaging in a public shooting.
The Apple TV+ show tells a story that's stranger than fiction, but it's actually part of a story captured in the 1981 book “The Minds of Billy Milligan” by Daniel Keyes.
The book shares the story of Billy Milligan, the first person in America acquitted of a major crime due to a diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD).
Milligan was born in 1955 and, according to Esquire, first made headlines in the late '70s after being arrested for a string of rapes on the Ohio State University campus.
After his arrest, he displayed signs of MPD, now called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), which fractures a psyche into separate, distinct personalities in response
to trauma.
Milligan worked with doctors while imprisoned and first showed ten personalities, including an escape artist, a lonely lesbian woman, a British intellectual, and a scared child.
While aspects of Milligan's story were inconsistent and some doubted his diagnosis, his family members confirmed he had suffered relentless abuse from his stepdad at a young age.
This kind of abuse is an ongoing traumatic event that some experts in DID say can cause a person to extremely compartmentalize, creating new personalities to cope with the trauma.
Mental health professionals claimed it was Milligan's other “alters” who committed the crimes he was accused of, and Milligan was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Allegedly, an alter called “The Teacher” who had a more holistic view of Milligan’s subconscious was eventually able to “fuse” Milligan's personalities together.