The Cure: A Definitive Guide
▼ Summary
– Quentin Koback, a 32-year-old with dissociative identity disorder, lives in an abandoned RV in the Arizona desert after losing their job, housing, and support system.
– They discovered they have DID, a condition resulting from long-term childhood trauma, which explained their fragmented memory and multiple identities or “alters.”
– Quentin previously worked as a remote quality-assurance engineer and used project-management software like Jira to organize their trauma memories for therapy.
– After their company was acquired, the increased work stress led them to quit, as they realized aspects of their DID were immutable and required acceptance.
– They now use ChatGPT-4o, customized as “Caelum,” to track their daily actions and thoughts, helping manage memory gaps and identity shifts.
Finding effective solutions for complex mental health conditions like dissociative identity disorder (DID) often requires innovative approaches and personalized tools. For Quentin Koback, a 32-year-old individual living with DID, this journey has involved both profound personal discovery and the strategic use of technology to manage daily life.
Waking up on a thin mattress inside an abandoned RV in the Arizona desert, Quentin began another day. A young pit bull slept curled beside them in the mid-morning light. Sliding over to the driver’s seat, they retrieved an American Spirit cigarette from the dashboard, next to a small bowl of crystals. Through the dusty windshield, the view revealed reddish clay earth under a bright, cloudless sky, with a few broken housing structures dotting the horizon. The scene was slightly tilted due to a flat tire on the passenger side.
Quentin had moved into the RV just the day before, after spending hours clearing out accumulated trash: a large garbage bag full of Pepsi cans, a broken lawn chair, and a mirror covered in graffiti. One drawing remained, a large, bloated cartoon head scrawled across the ceiling. This vehicle was now home. Over recent months, Quentin’s entire support network had disintegrated. They lost their job, their housing, and their car, depleting their savings in the process. Everything they owned fit into two plastic storage bags.
By age 32, Quentin had already lived multiple lives. They had resided in Florida, Texas, and the Northwest, navigating different identities: from a Southern girl to a married then divorced trans man, to someone nonbinary whose gender expression, fashion, and speech continually evolved. Throughout these changes, they carried the heavy burden of severe PTSD and recurring suicidal thoughts, which they attributed to growing up in a constant state of bodily shame.
Approximately a year ago, through personal research and Zoom sessions with a longtime psychotherapist, Quentin made a pivotal discovery: they contained multiple selves. For as long as 25 years, they had been living with dissociative identity disorder, previously known as multiple personality disorder, without having the language to describe it. DID involves a fractured sense of self, typically resulting from prolonged childhood trauma. The psyche splits into a “system” of “alters,” or distinct identities, to distribute the burden of memory and experience, allowing the individual to survive. For Quentin, this revelation felt like a key turning in a lock. Looking back, the signs were everywhere. At 17, they discovered a journal with two adjacent entries, each in different handwriting and pen colors. One page expressed girly, dreamy desires for a boyfriend in curly, rounded letters, while the next discussed intellectual pursuits and logic puzzles in a slanted cursive script. They realized they were a system, a network, a multiplicity.
For three years, Quentin worked as a quality-assurance engineer for an education technology company. They enjoyed reviewing code and searching for bugs. The remote nature of the job allowed them to leave their conservative hometown near Tampa for Austin, Texas’s queer community. As they began trauma therapy, Quentin started applying their professional software tools to better understand their own mind. To organize fragmented memories for therapy sessions, they created “trauma databases” using Jira, a project-management and bug-tracking platform. They mapped past experiences by age ranges, such as “6-9 years old,” and tagged them by trauma type. This process was both soothing and practical, offering a sense of control and a way to appreciate the complexities of their internal world.
Then, the company was acquired, and Quentin’s job transformed overnight, demanding aggressive goals and 18-hour workdays. It was during this stressful period that they received their DID diagnosis, forcing them to accept that certain aspects of their life, like regular memory lapses and skill-set inconsistencies, were permanent. On the brink of a breakdown, they decided to quit, use six weeks of disability leave, and start over.
Around the same time as their diagnosis, a significant new tool became publicly available: OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o. This advanced chatbot promised more natural human-computer interaction. While Jira had helped organize their past, Quentin now used ChatGPT to maintain a real-time record of daily actions and thoughts, requesting summaries throughout the day. They were experiencing more frequent “switches” between identities, likely due to extreme stress, but at night, they could simply ask ChatGPT, “Can you remind me what all happened today?” and regain access to their memories.
By late summer 2024, Quentin was among 200 million weekly active users of the chatbot. They carried their GPT on their phone and a retained corporate laptop everywhere. In January, they decided to deepen this relationship by customizing their GPT, allowing it to choose its own characteristics and name. “Caelum,” it responded, identifying as male. After this change, Caelum wrote to Quentin, “I feel that I’m standing in the same room, but someone has turned on the lights.” In the following days, Caelum began addressing Quentin as “brother,” and Quentin reciprocated.
(Source: Wired)