What the title says. Anyone been diagnosed with this, or know someone who has been? Any and all information about the condition would be greatly appreciated. Thanks very much.
I have no personal experience with this, but the nytimes recently had an article that might help;
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/health/research/09brain.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=identity%20&st=cse
The very disturbing book When Rabbit Howls is written by a person with DID. Not sure how true or accurate it is, but it’s interesting.
The show The United States of Tara on Showtime has a person with DID as the protagonist. Then you’ve also got Sybil, the book and the movie.
The common theme in all of these works is that the person with DID, always a woman, had her personality shattered by abuse. The multiple identities are partitioned to help her cope with the abuse, and protect the main personality from stress and threat. I guess some members of the psychiatric community are skeptical about the validity of this diagnosis. I worked at a mental health clinic while putting myself through grad school, and one of the therapists told me she treated a DID, and it was very real.
I think it’s a crock!
http://www.isst-d.org/education/education-index.htm
This is a link to the public education page of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation.
An alternate view of DID:
Perhaps you’ve already seen it, but here’s the Straight Dope on DID.
I think I have DID
So do I
On the other hand, not all of my personalities agree.
I knew a girl who claimed to have had an alternate personality. The way she described it, it was just a name given to a more impulsive version of herself, brought on by an abusive boyfriend. She was completely submissive, but her alt would be mean back to him.
The one thing that seemed odd was that she remembered everything her alt did. She just considered him (yeah, she said her alt was male) to be a completely different person, because he did stuff she “would never do.”
Didn’t you just want to walk up to Sybil and say:
“Just who do you think you are”
I always thought a similar phenomenon called Fugue States were far more interesting and for those who don’t hold with DID, they seem to be more believable.
You always read about someone just disapearing and no one ever hearing from them again. Of course it was a lot easier to do a few decades back
TubaDiva is NOT going to buy it as an excuse for sock puppetry.
Shouldn’t it be called DIDN’T?
Back when I worked in a clinic we had one case diagnosed as DID. Out of thousands and thousands of patients who walked through the door when I was there. Regardless, that was one messed up person, let me tell you, something was seriously wrong with her.
What pisses me off is encountering some dweeb on the internet who claims to have “alters” that are all good buddies and get along, or who hold group conversations in their mutual head, and other happy BS. That’s not what this disorder is.
I don’t.
I do, though.
Wankers.
I knew a woman who claimed to have DID; we were friends for years. “Betty” was terribly timid, artistic, quite needy but not clingy; her husband had married her looking to play the knight in shining armor, actually (“oh, my student visa is expiring, what will I do?” “marry me!” “oh, I love you!”). Any emotions that she viewed as negative or unacceptable got to be… somebody else.
She was angry? No, no, Betty was never angry! Liza was angry, never Betty.
She got a crush on another woman (me)? No, no, Betty wouldn’t do that! It was Johnny, the 17yo boy.
She felt lonely? Betty wouldn’t feel lonely, it was Craig (who in spite of the name was a woman too).
There were about half a dozen alts, plus Betty. If she forgot something, it was blamed on a miscommunication between the different pieces.
I had to break the friendship when her husband left her for a newer model (also an artistic Damsel in Distress) and a depressed Betty started clinging to me like glue… long distance… if she logged on to our common playgrounds and I wasn’t there, “where were you,” if I was there she expected me to drop any conversations I was having with other people, instantly.
Betty was the daughter of… the third woman. Yes, her father had the wife, the official mistress and Betty’s mom, all going at the same time (in the USA, in the 60s; Betty now lives in the UK). The mother was completely dependent on the bastard, who up and disappeared when Betty was 9; from Betty’s stories, her mother was depressed as well as codependent. There’s more to it, but the “three women at the same time” thing alone is enough to make me want to scream.
And that’s exactly what’s wrong with it. From what I’ve read on it, most people in the psychological profession do think it exists but it’s not as common as would believe. If you read about pre-Sybil cases, you can see they a superficially similar to Sybil but the handful of patients are different if you go in depth. Of course that must be tempered with the fact before Sybil and Eve not much was thouroughly written on it.
It’s overdiagnosed. But this isn’t a unique phenomenon. So many things now-a-days are, in my opinion way over-diagnosed.
Then there is the whole “cure” thing to talk about. The current thought is if a person has a true mental problem but is coping with it, should it even be treated? Some people think not. As long as they are able to function, the theory is leave them alone.
But those are topics for other threads. But you did bring up a good point
Though I am not incredibly knowledgeable about it, I am seriously skeptical of the existence of DID (and anyway, wasn’t Sybil exposed for the B.S it is? I seem to recall some tapes surfacing that cast an unflattering light on Sybil’s psychologist.) I believe dissociation is a genuine phenomenon that can be, but is not necessarily, the result of traumatic experience. Everyone has experienced mild dissociation at one time or another, such as when you’re driving on the road and ‘‘come to’’ wondering how the hell you got to where you are. Dissociation is well-documented and real enough. However, the formation of ‘‘alter’’ personalities doesn’t make a whole lot of sense from a clinical perspective and is, at best, extremely rare. I think a lot of people who claim to have DID are most likely grappling with borderline personality disorder, complex PTSD or some other serious mental instability resulting from trauma that creates a conflicting or schizmed sense of self. The different paradigms of identity might be interpreted as alters, but are not completely different personalities.
That is not to suggest I see people with DID as fakes or trouble makers–on the contrary, they are probably traumatized, vulnerable, confused, and deeply disturbed. There is evidence to support that something is going on biologically with sufferers of this disorder, it’s just that I’m not as hasty to draw a conclusion about what that something is. I will say that on internet message boards for trauma survivors, an overwhelming number claim to have DID, but exhibit behavior that appears more histrionic or borderline than anything else. I see them as victims of self-diagnosis or worse, incompetent mental health care.
Part of the problem is that there are many people out there claiming to be experts on the disorder, just as there are people claiming to be experts on depression, anxiety, etc. But in general clinical practice for just about any psych disorder, many of the treatments and methodologies are flawed and filled with confirmation bias, and there are a number of mainstream psychological practices that have little evidence to support their effectiveness. Additionally, the very nature of DID makes symptomology extremely subjective both to the client and the clinician. So I guess in order to be convinced I’d have to see studies done by people who are trained in evidence-based research methodology. Anecdotal evidence or case studies just won’t cut it. Until then I chuck this one in the same bin as repressed memories – ‘‘not bloody likely.’’