Introducing We Are Jeni
Content warning: this review references childhood sexual abuse.
Multiple personality disorder – now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) – has been a controversial diagnosis for decades. Hollywood has leaned on it for numerous thrillers, not all of them first-rate; the high-profile dramedy The United States of Tara had a mixed effect on community perceptions. Thankfully, Mariel Thomas and Akhim Dev’s documentary We Are Jeni avoids sensationalising its story; the facts alone are a lot to take in.
Meet the Alters
‘I never really knew that how my brain functioned was different from normality,’ says Dr Jeni Haynes as the documentary begins. ‘I didn’t know I was supposed to have one personality.’ As she walks through the sunny perfection of Queensland’s Deception Bay, then sits down to play Monopoly (the dinosaur version), we’re being shown a happy ending that she had to fight years to achieve.
Jeni has 2682 people inside her mind. DID is a survival tactic; when a child is under constant and unrelenting pressure, sometimes their personality fragments. When one personality can no longer handle what they’re dealing with, they step back and another one – known as an ‘alter’ – steps forward.
Jeni’s childhood was an onslaught of abuse, assault and rape at the hands of her father. Her first alter, Symphony created all the others. Forever four years old, she appears in two versions here. One is when she takes charge of Jeni, her mannerisms and tone now that of the child inside. The other is through the use of animation to present a version of her (based on what Jeni looked like at four) as she tells her story.
There’s also Erik, an adult man who helps give structure to their lives, and Muscles, a no-nonsense teenager who has a protective role. And many more; she describes a moment where medication wiped her masking away as being surrounded by conversations between children and adults, men and women, and she wasn’t part of any of them.
A Lifelong Battle to Be Believed
Much of the early stages of this fascinating documentary are focused on explaining just who Jeni is. She talks about how she’s battled her entire life to be believed (her preferred pronouns are we/us), and how she has a ‘persona’ that the alters largely operate behind so she remains consistent.
Well, to some extent: she explains that, as a child, the way she held a pen would be different depending on which alter was currently in her body. Week one of gymnastics, she could do backflips and the splits effortlessly; week two she was too terrified to go near the equipment. ‘We are never one person functioning in the world at any one time,’ she says. ‘There are always a cavalcade of stars’.
As her psychiatrist for over 20 years, Dr George Blair-West has had to overcome a fair amount of resistance from his fellows in accepting her condition. He says himself he probably would have dismissed it as a condition before meeting her. Now he sees it as evidence of the power of the human mind to rise above abuse of the worst kind.
One of the important things we learn about Jeni’s alters is, they’re basically frozen in time. Inside her mind, they don’t age. Which means that their memories don’t fade. So when her father was finally put on trial for his abuses, the prosecution had a unique form of evidence – if they could get the court to accept it.
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Despite the textbook definition of DID being that it’s the result of abuse, decades of movies and pop culture depicting those with it as ‘the craziest of the crazy’ (the doco uses clips from the James McAvoy thriller Split to underline this), left the prosecution more than a little concerned that Jeni wouldn’t be taken seriously, or that she’d be painted as someone making up stories.
A Moving Documentary
One of the things that makes this documentary so moving is the support from the people around Jeni. Blair-West is unfaltering in backing in her throughout, while NSW detective Paul Stamoulis listened to her story, believed what she was saying, and then went out and built a case; at one stage she calls him ‘God on legs’.
Her story is often gruelling and grim, one that deserves the warning given up front. But it’s also a triumphant one. Getting the court to believe her and accept the evidence of her alters is presented as a victory in itself (it doesn’t hurt that her father was found guilty and sentenced to 45 years in jail).
We Are Jeni is fascinating on multiple levels. Beyond Jeni’s alters and how they operate, it’s a gripping courtroom drama and a powerful story of survival. What shines through overall is her bravery; she survived a years-long nightmare that literally tore her apart, and then went back through her past to see justice done. It’s compelling viewing.
We Are Jeni premieres Sunday 7 June at 7:30pm on SBS and SBS On Demand. Discover more screen, games & arts news and reviews on and ArtsHub. Sign up for our free ArtsHub and newsletters.
