Dissociative Identity Disorder in MILGRAM (Mikoto Kayano)

"MeMe" Album Cover

Mikoto Kayano is a 23 year-old male who has been imprisoned for murder. He also has Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). It's shown to the viewer that this other persona, John Doe, is the one who is responsible for the murder.

This will be less of an analysis on his songs; instead I want to focus on the information we've been given about him and his childhood to what I know about DID. There was a time where I researched DID heavily for my own enjoyment, and still retain quite a bit of that information. I do plan to expand on this more in an essay, in which I bring in reliable sources.

From what we know about Mikoto, we know he's close with his mother and sister, and only mentions that his mom and dad got divorced. We know he's a fashion student and that he is generally a nice guy who doesn't understand why he is imprisoned. We also know he experiences memory loss.

MILGRAM has these voice dramas; basically a video where the guard and prisoner talk before the trial. A previous prisoner has tried to attack the guard, but was unable to do so. His hand just stopped right before it made contact. However, when Mikoto had his voice drama, he suddenly grew very angry and was able to actually strike the guard, and beat them up pretty badly. When I first watched MILGRAM, I did not watch these voice dramas, however in Mikoto's first trial/music video, it was very easy to tell that he had two different personalities.

Something that I'm confused about, is just exactly how he developed DID. In his second voice drama, the other persona, John Doe speaks to the guard, and says that he manifested when Mikoto was extremely stressed out about school. This felt wrong to me because from what I know, DID forms in childhood. It stems from repeated childhood abuse that alters the brain chemistry of the child, resulting in fragmented personalities. When the child ages, those personalities solidify into alternate identities, or "alters" and can emerge in adulthood when the brain develops more. If John Doe claims to have formed from Mikoto's stress about school and that stress only, this is not a legit diagnosis of DID. The reason why the alters can be so different is because of the lack of solid personality that the child has when they are young.

John Doe is Mikoto's alter, most likely his primary protector. These usually are the personality that appear when the host feels threatened or scared, then they appear to protect the host from these things. If Mikoto experienced trauma when he was young, then this could make sense to me, but from what we have now, it does not. Maybe we'll learn more about his past when his final trial is released.

Something interesting that did happen was in his voice drama before his second trial, John Doe spoke to the guard, and said that if we voted Mikoto innocent on this trial, he would go away. He was then voted innocent. It's safe to say that John Doe is gone, the art for trial three has Mikoto looking very rough, his clothes are torn, and he looks vacant. Alters don't exactly disappear, they integrate into another personality, or into the host. From what we see about Mikoto, it just looks like he's gone. The way they are treating this disorder is very different than what I know about it. It's possible that the research has changed and I just haven't caught up.

The other issue I have with MILGRAM is how they depict John Doe. His way of letting Mikoto de-stress is to straight up murder people. We don't know how many people he's killed, but it seems like a lot. They really made this alter seem like a monster, which yes probably his considering he might be a mass murderer, but this kind of stigma is terrible for the DID community. They already get mass amount of disbelief, and other things like this happening. Split is one example of a bad representation because they have the person who suffers from DID as a crazy murderer guy (I've never seen it).

The only thing John Doe knows is violence. If people are uneducated on DID and the community of it, they can think that all people with DID have this kind of alter. It's bad publicity for the community.

Another fun question to think about is whether or not Mikoto is actually guilty or innocent. Technically Mikoto didn't commit these murders, sort of. John Doe is a fragmented personality that is part of Mikoto, so it's hard to choose whether or not he deserves to be guilty or innocent, which I think is the main point of this character and him having this mental illness.

This guy makes me think a lot. :)