Walking up the back stairs of the nursing home, I heard someone yelling and cursing loudly. I pressed the red button releasing the door lock and came onto the third-floor unit. The fire of her fury had burnt out rapidly, and a 32-year-old young woman—I’ll call her Gwen—now sat hunched and sobbing in the nook at the end of the hallway. I thought if I spoke or approached too closely she would dismiss me, so I sat quietly 10 feet away on the broad windowsill. Her breathing slowe

Sakura was born in 1931, in the Japanese city of Nagasaki, a major port city and centre for ship building. She enjoyed a pleasant childhood with many friends and family. The early years of her adolescence were overshadowed, though, by the increasingly grim circumstances of her country being at war. On August 9, 1945, the day seemed ordinary for the 14-year-old Sakura, until in a flash, nothing ordinary remained, after an atomic bomb was dropped on her city by the U.S., and 60

“I call them the persons of my mind, my pers,” Robin said, in reference to the split personalities she experiences due to trauma. “I talk out loud to them and I find it therapeutic, but I try to be careful because I know it can bother my roommate, and other people,” she said. Robin suffered severe and serial traumas, and was diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder, and associated psychotic symptoms (voice-hearing and delusions). She currently resides in a nursing home,