Cecil – You ended the article on DID (previously MPD) with “If DID is as rare as all that, what’s the big deal?” One big deal is that if it the syndrome exists at all, the possibility contains profound information about how the brain works. A big deal for me personally is that my de facto spouse for ten years was such a flaming example of MPD that my psyche still hurts from colliding with the shifts that she would pull. We’re still great friends, but in the end even my love of science fiction couldn’t keep me there.
Yes, the great fraud was a great fraud, but the few actual cases of DID, including my friend, were that way long before anyone told them they were. Those whom the quacks persuaded have a gullibility streak that should be considered an ailment in its own right. They live on, now seeking things like crystals, homeopathy, acupuncture, and quantum astrology. Minerals, diseases, pain, and planets nonetheless exist, no matter how many fools have gained or lost money selling or obsessing about them. – Ornithikos
And there were people who were considered perfect examples of demonic possession, animal magnetism and other similar conditions in the past, but that doesn’t mean those were real psychological disorders either. People who think they have DID or act in a way that causes others to believe they have DID generally just have bad cases of fantasy-prone thinking and the inability or unwillingness to behave responsibly. For those who are truly mentally ill instead of just overly dramatic, there are more than enough more reasonable diagnoses that can adequately explain what’s going on.
One can read about it in the study by Thigpen and Cleckley for a peer reviewed case study of the matter. It’s worth pointing out that DID almost never concurrent with schizophrenia, but could be a result of the manipulative side of a psychopath. It’d take some effort to confabulate differences in memory and brain activity. It would be a bit rash to suggest that people diagnosed with DID are engaging in an “unwillingness to behave responsibly”, as though they should snap out of it. It’s true DID as a diagnosis may go the way of hysteria, but other conditions where the physiological causes are not fully understood can be researched empirically without denigrating the sufferers. It’s possible to cure religious delusions by squirting ice cold water in the left ear, but the mechanism behind this isn’t understood. Strangely, it may be the one medical use for homeopathic medicine other than dehydration.
Which is why I said “inability or unwillingness” and not just unwillingness.
But, yeah, many of the patients – and, more importantly, their psychiatrists – are only drama queens who should, in fact, just snap out of it and face reality. Others are basically running scams to provide excuses for bad behavior. And some others are mentally ill but misdiagnosed. I’m not in a position to give percentages for each group.
Do you have any empirical evidence to back up your claims?
I watched a documentary with Ramachandran where he discussed it’s use in treating anosognosia relating to phantom limb syndrome and commented that it was also effective for treating religious delusions in manic depressives. I think only the former case is mentioned in “Phantoms in the brain”, but I’ll have to check for the documentary.
I have heard Ramachandran lecture about using cold water in the ear with anosagnosics, and have also read about its use in people suffering from hemispatial neglect. I never came across anything suggesting it had an effect or religious (or other) delusions (except inasmuch as anosagnosia involves a, rather specific, type of delusion). Anyway, it is more of a diagnostic technique than a cure. It acts very temporarily, and only seems to be effective in neurological conditions that affect perception of just one side of the body (or of the space around it). I doubt that it has any relevance whatever to DID/multiple personality disorder, which (if real) is usually understod as a psychological rather than neurological condition.o
Sorry, I never meant to posit the conditions as equivalent. I was just trying to establish the fact that psychological conditions have a neurological (physiological) basis, even if the minutia of the cause has not been discovered. Well, unless one is a dualist. Perhaps a better analogy would be with Asperger’s Syndrome? Last I read, the precise cause of Asperger’s Syndrome hasn’t been discovered, but there are symptoms in common with essentially every patient that can be used to diagnose the condition. Yet few claim hysterical fraudulent psychiatrists as the reason why some people cannot empathise.
Not that it isn’t worthwhile to be sceptical (I think Feynman called psychiatrists witch doctors in a lecture), just that guarded suspicion is more useful in the light of evidence than outright denial. Even if the behaviour is fraudulent and designed to manipulate the diagnostician (such as Münchhausen syndrome), the basis for the behaviour occurs with the personality, which is a function of a widely accepted and investigated physical phenomenon (as hard as I’ve been trying to convince everyone that said phenomenon happens to be absent in my case).
There’s no empirical evidence that shows any scientific reality to multiple personalities, so your question is backwards. Might as well ask me if there’s any empirical evidence to show that people who think they are possessed by demons are only being misled by ignorant religious leaders.
Googling, I think this is the study being referred to:
Thigpen, C.H. & Cleckley, H. (1954) A case of multiple personality. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 49, 135-51
Here’s a more recent literature survey on the topic:
Dissociative Disorders by John F. Kihlstrom : An edited version of this article was published in the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, Vol. 1(2005).
At facebook I’ve 5 distinct personalities to deal with the many personalities there. 65% of FB’ers are housewives… I’m not a housewife, but have you ever tried to talk physic to a milk machine. Oops, was that my bad personality :smack:
Indeed, I’m mostly deaf. What people say to me is nonsense. I read lips and body language largely. I relate with people in any way I can, sometimes it means assuming a more or less distinct personality. I’m a performing artist, so the personality is also based on my ability to interact sonically. Some things are not easy to understand by people. Psychosis or mental illness can many times be explained as a person transition from one personality to another. Often a more desirable one, without the inclusion of our limited understanding.
Multiple personalities would be best left to medical science, as would most matters concerning brain activity. Psychology was sharp for finding it, but lack important tools.
Yes, that study presents the views of specific authors with specific opinions, but it does not give empirical evidence of multiple personalities. There are many, many journals out there giving contradictory opinions, and a single one you can cite while ignoring contrary views does not prove your case. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the proponents of multiple personalities are nowhere near that.
Well, all too often that does end up being the case, especially in psychology. And journal articles as a whole have poor histories when it comes to outside validation, replication and so forth - the very things needed to adequately test theories. What we end up with is various parties with views to advance and a lack of solid scientific methodology afterwards. The same way pro-paranormal researchers publish pro-paranormal studies, pro-dissociative psychologists publish pro-dissociative studies.
There are, of course, peer reviewed journals who publish articles stating that there is no scientific basis for multiple personalities. (As just two examples, there are “Dissociative identity disorder: Time to remove it from DSM-V?” Current Psychiatry and “The persistence of folly: critical examination of dissociative identity disorder.” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry.) So, since the journals disagree, how is one supposed to come to a conclusion?
At that point all you can really hope for is solid methodology replicated by multiple sources and then testing of alternative theories that could explain the same phenomena. Failing that – which we are desperately failing – we should apply Occam’s razor in the meantime. We don’t have any reason yet to jump to “some people have more than one separate persona in the same brain” as a reasonable conclusion for the kinds of situations we are talking about. It does, indeed, seem to be a case of “let’s make cool shit up” (or, more realistically “everyone knows this because that’s what we learned from older psychologists who made cool shit up, and I don’t want to be doing the boring fact-based shit you can actually prove, I only entered this field in the first place because of the awesome oddball stuff”).
On the basis of evidence. While Sagan may have often repeated the phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, I think the common conception is that “extraordinary claims require evidence”. For example, it is well documented that individuals can be born without the capacity to feel pain, despite the rarity of the condition. Should there be no current cases, evidence methodically gathered in the past would be sufficient to acknowledge its veracity.
That said, I’m glad you’ve provided some citations of your own rather than making assertions. Though I’m interested in what you think has better outside verification and replication than studies published in peer reviewed journals? I’d also challenge the assumption that those conducting research are peddling views and then fabricating results afterwards. A rigorous approach to an empirical question is to study the literature in the field, decide upon a method of experimentation, come up with a null hypothesis (the important part, a theory is only valid if it is disprovable), then conduct the experiment to find if the null hypothesis is satisfied within the parameters. In the study by Thigpen and Cleckley, the experimental evidence would be the changes in IQ results and memory in the individual, though I cede that these could be fabricated. One control factor that has been developed is giving an individual phrases to remember in one personality, then testing them in another personality. Hesitation or changes in physiological arousal (as measured by galvanic skin response) would indicate that the participant was lying about their lack of memory of the other personality. In this case, this would constitute the With forensic questions, all available evidence is gathered. Any methodological flaws would be discussed by the peers of the person publishing the article, as disproving a claim can carry as much prestige as providing evidence in support of it. Current Psychiatry isn’t in fact a peer reviewed journal (see here). The article in the Canadian Journal is a worthwhile literature review which may aid in detecting “roleplaY”, but they do not actually test their capacity to detect a fraud in a clinical setting.
Given your apparent distrust for psychology and the fact that every post of yours I’ve read on here is vituperative though, I am qualified to diagnose sociopathy over the internet.
So your argument for superior evidence is a study from 1954 while ignoring all the work since then disputing the concept (I picked two I happened to have easily available, there are plenty more where that came from)? If that’s your idea of solid support for a highly controversial theory, well, I’m sorry, but that’s pretty weak. That’s not how the scientific method is supposed to work, and it doesn’t win any arguments at the Dope.
And accusing people of sociopathy just because you disagree with them is pretty offensive, even if you tack a smiley face tag on it.
