This is what it’s really like to live with multiple personality disorder — and 24 alter egos

• Cameron West, who lives with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), revealed childhood sexual abuse by his grandmother.
• Rikki, West’s wife, helped manage his breakdown and supported their family through his 24 alters.
• West’s 1999 book, “First Person Plural,” a bestseller, is reissued with a new epilogue.

Cameron West’s eyes go somewhere else for a moment. 

He’s sitting beside his wife of 45 years, Rikki, in the middle of a conversation about a morning more than 30 years ago. She opened a closet door in their young son’s bedroom and found her husband crouched on the floor with a sketchpad and a red marker.

He wasn’t entirely Cameron West at that moment. He was Davy, a sweet, sad 4-year-old drawing pictures of what had been done to him as a child. The images were crude and explicit and terrible. West had no idea who Davy was, yet, or what the drawings meant.

“My mind was protecting me, from things I would not have been able to psychologically survive as a child,” West told The Post in an exclusive interview. “It turned out to involve my grandmother sexually abusing me.”

Little Davy was the first of West’s 24 alter personalities to emerge. He documented his experiences with his alters — the clinical term for each of the separate personalities living inside a person with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), previously called multiple personality disorder — with the 1999 book “First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple.”

A New York Times bestseller and one of the first first-person chronicles of DID, it sold over 1 million copies, earned West an “Oprah” show appearance and was optioned for a Disney/Robin Williams movie that was never made.

Now, the memoir has been reissued with a new epilogue bringing the story of West, now a grandfather in his 70s, and his family up to date.

Rikki, who has a degree in psychology and had spent a decade working with traumatized children when her husband’s alters emerged, wasn’t wasn’t totally unprepared for everything that followed. She understood enough to know that vitamins wouldn’t fix it. 

What she couldn’t have anticipated was the scale of what was coming, or how completely their family of three would have to reorganize itself around it.

“We had to manage Cam’s breakdown, essentially,” she said. “It was a long process of him coming apart and then coming back together. But we also had to manage how we presented things to our son, and how we maintained an equilibrium in the family for him.”

West, who ran a promotional products company with his brother, stopped working entirely after the diagnosis. Rikki stepped in to help manage his business, then later took a job as an administrative assistant at a large Oakland company to support the family while West pursued his doctoral degree in psychology. The household ran on her steadiness.

West had 24 alter personalities to contend with. Among them were Switch, an 8-year-old who carried enormous rage and had harmed West’s body many times; Bart, a wisecracking 28-year-old whose job was to keep things from going completely dark, and Per, an ageless spiritual presence the book describes as the father figure to everyone in the system.

There was no predictable schedule for who might surface when.

Their son, Kai, then just 5 years old, learned to recognize when his father had gone somewhere else and how to call him back.

“We made the decision early on that he was going to present as Dad to our son. Some multiples let their young alters play with their children,” Rikki said. “We weren’t going to do that.”

“My mind was protecting me, from things I would not have been able to psychologically survive as a child.

Cameron West

Central to how the family managed was a concept West’s therapists helped him develop called co-consciousness, an internal awareness that allowed him to observe his alters when they were out rather than simply losing time entirely.

“He can see what they’re doing,” Rikki explained. “They’re aware of him. They have an inner communication.”

In 2001, the Wests went to Los Angeles to see a neurologist who recorded West’s brain wave patterns in real time as his alters switched.

“Each of your alters have different brainwave patterns from you and from each other,” West recalled the doctors telling him. “And child alters have the brainwave patterns of children that an adult no longer has.” When switching occurred between alters, the EEG looked like a seizure. Each personality produced a distinct and measurable signature.

Twenty-five years on, most of West’s alters have quieted or integrated, the result of years of intensive therapy, including inpatient treatment at a Dallas trauma center, and the slow internal work of building communication within the system. 

A few alters — Wyatt, Clay and Roger — still reside in corners of West’s mind, but the full chorus of 24 has largely melded back into his core self. 

“His psyche is stable,” Rikki said said. “It took many years.”

The alters arose in the wake of a near fatal candidiasis fungal infection and four failed sinus surgeries that left his immune system ravaged. West deals now with autoimmune conditions he attributes to years of physiological stress. 

Living on the California coast and being near the ocean and its soothing sounds help keep him calm.

He and Rikki are still giddy about each other. Mid conversation, he turns to her with genuine bewilderment and asks, “How come you stuck with me?”

She doesn’t hesitate. “I love you. I’ve loved him then, I love him still.”