Switching Time

In 1989, a woman walked into Dr. Richard Baer’s office asking for help with memory loss. Thus begins the first and only complete account of Dissociative Identity Disorder treatment told from inside the consulting room.

“An absorbing journey through a psychiatrist’s dauntingly challenging first case—from the beginning of therapy to stable integration and recovery. Vivid, loaded with fascinating details. A richly rewarding read.”—Colin Ross, author of Multiple Personality Order

Karen Overhill didn’t know why she kept losing parts of her day. She didn’t know why she found herself in places she didn’t remember going. She didnt know why people described conversations she had no memory of having.

Then Dr. Baer received a letter. It was addressed in Karen’s handwriting. The sender was a seven-year-old girl who said she lived inside Karen.

She was one of seventeen.

What followed was fourteen years of the most challenging and most documented case of DID in clinical literature.

A young boy filled with frightening aggression. An adult male who considered himself Karen’s protector. A sassy flirt who sought dominance over the others. Seventeen distinct personalities, each holding a fragment of a childhood of unimaginable abuse. Each one a survival mechanism. Each one, in time, a person Dr. Baer came to know.

In Switching Time, you will find:
• The complete first-person physician account of a DID case from first session to full integration, never before told from the treating doctor’s perspective
• Seventeen personalities rendered in full: their letters, their artwork, their fears, and their remarkable will to survive
• The therapeutic relationship in its rawest form: the trust, the limits, and the cost of caring across more than a decade
• A story readers have compared to Sybil and The Three Faces of Eve, with the distinction that this one is complete, from a single doctor’s unbroken perspective

If you have ever wondered what it actually takes in real time, over real years, to help a human being survive what Karen survived, Switching Time is the account that answers that question. There is no other book like this one.

“Baer guided Karen to a place where she could risk knowing the horrors lurking in her elaborate inner world. One marvels at this caring therapist and his immense honesty, courage, and commitment.”—Dena Rosenbloom, Ph.D., co-author of Life After Trauma