Amarin Reyny: DID, Disability and a Health Care Lifeline Under Threat

Amarin Reyny lives in a group home for disabled people in Maine where direct support professionals provide care 24/7 to help them with daily needs. They depend entirely on MaineCare, Maine’s Medicaid program, to cover nearly all their medical care and support services.

They cope with dissociative identity disorder, or DID, a condition caused by severe childhood abuse. “DID is basically when a child is abused to the point where their brain has to resort to some really unorthodox methods in order to try to cope with that abuse.” Formerly known as multiple personality disorder, the diagnosis was renamed in the mid-1990s after experts recognized it was not a personality disorder.

“I am literally made of trauma,” they said, adding, “the person I used to call mother, she was conservative and she acted within her right-wing values and it left me in this horrible condition where I am literally a mental construct, a sentient mental construct made of trauma and forced to live against my will in a body that’s neither my own nor functional.”

In addition to DID, Amarin lives with other trauma-related disorders including PTSD and ADD. They also suffer from chronic health issues that were either caused or worsened by abuse and neglect. One of the most serious is frequent vasospasms—episodes where blood flow to the brain is interrupted, leading to dangerous short- and long-term damage. “If I try to work through a vasospasm, I will collapse.”

Because of the physical and mental toll these conditions take, Amarin cannot work or even exercise. “I basically have to rely a lot on other people for the majority of my basic needs until I’m able to get rehabilitated, which will take years.”

They depend entirely on MaineCare for health care, medications and services provided through their group home. “All of that is paid for either by MaineCare itself or by Section 21, which I believe is part of MaineCare anyway, and the rest is paid for by my SSI check, which covers rent.” The rent is affordable because the group home rents units below market rate to make them accessible to people with disabilities.

Without all these services, Amarin fears they would not survive. “I’d be f***ed. I can barely even stand without risking a vasospasm. It’s a risk just to go to the bathroom.”

Asked what they would say to members of Congress pushing for Medicaid cuts, Amarin responds bluntly. “I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say what I would say to them. Let’s be honest, it would be filled with profanities.”

Aptly, Amarin ends with a clear, unfiltered message for Republican lawmakers dismantling the health care that keeps them alive: “Keep your effing hands off my effing Medicaid.”