multiple personalities?
multiple personalities?
- Thread starterLeosha
- Start date
Me too please. Or just put it in here...
It's not called Multiple Personalities any longer. The new name is Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID).
One person who is DID told me recently that a book called "Getting Through The Day" is a good resource for people with DID. I seem to be giving people the impression that I'm DID. That's why I received the book recommendation. (This was not my therapist making the suggestion.)
I did take a Dissociative Experiences Scale test at therapy last week and started discussing it in today's session. My T asks about "losing track of time" (it happens a lot) and having people think they know me (it happens fairly often) or call me by another name (rare).
Without getting into a lot more personal details, that's about what I know at this point.
HTH,
Joe
One person who is DID told me recently that a book called "Getting Through The Day" is a good resource for people with DID. I seem to be giving people the impression that I'm DID. That's why I received the book recommendation. (This was not my therapist making the suggestion.)
I did take a Dissociative Experiences Scale test at therapy last week and started discussing it in today's session. My T asks about "losing track of time" (it happens a lot) and having people think they know me (it happens fairly often) or call me by another name (rare).
Without getting into a lot more personal details, that's about what I know at this point.
HTH,
Joe
I should caution anybody reading my last post that it's basically "hearsay." I don't have a diagnosis, but I have been doing some testing with my T. The person who recommended the book to me is not a therapist, just someone who thought they recognized some of their own symptoms in me. I have not seen the book yet, but I might look for it in the library.
There's more to dissociation than DID. From what I have read everyone dissociates sometimes, the classic example being "highway hypnosis" when the driver loses track of time, doesn't remember parts of the trip, etc. I have no understanding of the mechanisms behind that, or DID, or the theories that attempt to explain them. I have a bachelor's degree in Math and a houseful of books on "recovery from sexual abuse" and "adult children of alcoholics" (and dinosaurs
).
If you want to research on your own, fine. Be very careful about which online sources you trust, though. Ultimately this is exactly the kind of thing you should discuss with a professional. The problem with researching this kind of thing online for me has been that I lack the training to make good use of the best resources. I rely on my T to be the expert, and so far we've just started looking at dissociation in me.
Thanks,
Joe
There's more to dissociation than DID. From what I have read everyone dissociates sometimes, the classic example being "highway hypnosis" when the driver loses track of time, doesn't remember parts of the trip, etc. I have no understanding of the mechanisms behind that, or DID, or the theories that attempt to explain them. I have a bachelor's degree in Math and a houseful of books on "recovery from sexual abuse" and "adult children of alcoholics" (and dinosaurs
).If you want to research on your own, fine. Be very careful about which online sources you trust, though. Ultimately this is exactly the kind of thing you should discuss with a professional. The problem with researching this kind of thing online for me has been that I lack the training to make good use of the best resources. I rely on my T to be the expert, and so far we've just started looking at dissociation in me.
Thanks,
Joe
This is from a website called The Straight Dope, which tries to answer questions from persons with "the straight dope", or hopefully with as much knowledge and information as possible. For what it's worth on multiple personalities, DID, read on:
My wife and I are having a disagreement on whether multiple personality disorder is real or not. She works in a substance abuse clinic and says she sees people with this disorder quite often. I on the other hand feel that multiple personality disorder is a crock of dung. I have looked this up on the Internet, and views seem to be split fifty-fifty. What do you think--does this disorder exist? --Mark, via the Internet
Cecil replies:
Your columnist doubts it. Your columnist doubts everything. But in this case he's got a lot of company. Multiple personality disorder, now officially known as dissociative identity disorder (DID), remains the object of bitter controversy. One thing's clear, though--it's not nearly as common as people thought just a few years ago.
Possible cases of split personality have been reported in the medical literature since the early 19th century, and the condition was formally defined in the first years of the 20th. But until recently it was considered extremely rare--fewer than 200 cases were described before 1980. The diagnosis became much more common in the 80s for several reasons. One was the phenomenal popularity of Flora Schreiber's 1973 book Sybil, which told of a woman with 16 personalities. Stories of "multiples," fictionalized or otherwise, were nothing new--The Three Faces of Eve dates from 1954, "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" from way back in 1886--but Sybil made a crucial innovation, introducing the idea that multiple personalities stemmed from trauma during early childhood. Around the same time, child protection advocates and feminists began arguing that child abuse, especially sexual abuse, occurred far more often than previously supposed. And in the late 70s, in a phenomenon thought to be linked to the resurgence of Christian fundamentalism, reports of so-called satanic ritual abuse first captured the public's imagination.
Presented with, on one hand, allegations of an unrecognized epidemic of crimes against innocents and, on the other, a simple mechanism to explain why their troubled patients couldn't remember any abuse (i.e., the personality divides in order to shield itself from horrific memories), a small but devoted group of therapists began diagnosing multiple personality disorder with alarming frequency--more than 20,000 cases had been reported by 1990. Under the influence of hypnosis and other techniques, subjects reported dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of "alters" whose behavior, age, sex, language, and occasionally species differed from that of their everyday personas. Alters were coaxed into revealing bloodcurdling stories of abuse by family members, or of sacrificing their own babies to shadowy cults. One prominent multiple personality specialist claimed that the satanic network programmed alters into its victims, which it could then trigger to act in certain ways by sending them color-coded flowers.
By the early 1990s it began to dawn on rational folk just how preposterous the whole business was. Having investigated more than 12,000 accusations over four years, researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Illinois at Chicago determined that not a single case of satanic ritual abuse had been substantiated. A 1992 FBI study arrived at the same conclusion: overeager therapists had planted horror stories in the minds of their patients. In 1998 psychologist Robert Rieber made a convincing case, based on an analysis of audiotapes, that even the famous Sybil had confabulated her multiple personalities at the insistence of her therapist. The bubble burst, and diagnoses of multiple personalities subsided.
OK, so it was all a case of mass hysteria. The question remains: Are multiple personalities ever real? The debate still rages. Skeptics claim that alters are invariably induced by the therapist; the more respectable defenders of DID agree that many are, but not all. The controversy has been complicated by disagreement over the nature of personality. The common understanding of DID is that the alters are independent of one another and don't share memories and other cognitive processes, but demonstrating this has proven difficult. Speech and behavior are under conscious control, so changes can readily be faked. Even things like brain-wave patterns may vary not because of a genuine personality switch but because alleged alters cultivate different emotional states and different ways of acting out. In a recent study of several DID patients, successive alters were asked to memorize different sets of words. When alter B was asked whether she recognized a word memorized only by alter A, she often hesitated. That suggests a conscious process--I'm not supposed to know this--indicating the personalities aren't truly independent.
Research continues, but my feeling is this. Assuming that the diagnoses of the past 25 years were trumped-up and that the couple hundred cases reported between 1800 and 1979 represent the true incidence of the syndrome, we're talking about maybe one or two cases per year.
My wife and I are having a disagreement on whether multiple personality disorder is real or not. She works in a substance abuse clinic and says she sees people with this disorder quite often. I on the other hand feel that multiple personality disorder is a crock of dung. I have looked this up on the Internet, and views seem to be split fifty-fifty. What do you think--does this disorder exist? --Mark, via the Internet
Cecil replies:
Your columnist doubts it. Your columnist doubts everything. But in this case he's got a lot of company. Multiple personality disorder, now officially known as dissociative identity disorder (DID), remains the object of bitter controversy. One thing's clear, though--it's not nearly as common as people thought just a few years ago.
Possible cases of split personality have been reported in the medical literature since the early 19th century, and the condition was formally defined in the first years of the 20th. But until recently it was considered extremely rare--fewer than 200 cases were described before 1980. The diagnosis became much more common in the 80s for several reasons. One was the phenomenal popularity of Flora Schreiber's 1973 book Sybil, which told of a woman with 16 personalities. Stories of "multiples," fictionalized or otherwise, were nothing new--The Three Faces of Eve dates from 1954, "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" from way back in 1886--but Sybil made a crucial innovation, introducing the idea that multiple personalities stemmed from trauma during early childhood. Around the same time, child protection advocates and feminists began arguing that child abuse, especially sexual abuse, occurred far more often than previously supposed. And in the late 70s, in a phenomenon thought to be linked to the resurgence of Christian fundamentalism, reports of so-called satanic ritual abuse first captured the public's imagination.
Presented with, on one hand, allegations of an unrecognized epidemic of crimes against innocents and, on the other, a simple mechanism to explain why their troubled patients couldn't remember any abuse (i.e., the personality divides in order to shield itself from horrific memories), a small but devoted group of therapists began diagnosing multiple personality disorder with alarming frequency--more than 20,000 cases had been reported by 1990. Under the influence of hypnosis and other techniques, subjects reported dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of "alters" whose behavior, age, sex, language, and occasionally species differed from that of their everyday personas. Alters were coaxed into revealing bloodcurdling stories of abuse by family members, or of sacrificing their own babies to shadowy cults. One prominent multiple personality specialist claimed that the satanic network programmed alters into its victims, which it could then trigger to act in certain ways by sending them color-coded flowers.
By the early 1990s it began to dawn on rational folk just how preposterous the whole business was. Having investigated more than 12,000 accusations over four years, researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Illinois at Chicago determined that not a single case of satanic ritual abuse had been substantiated. A 1992 FBI study arrived at the same conclusion: overeager therapists had planted horror stories in the minds of their patients. In 1998 psychologist Robert Rieber made a convincing case, based on an analysis of audiotapes, that even the famous Sybil had confabulated her multiple personalities at the insistence of her therapist. The bubble burst, and diagnoses of multiple personalities subsided.
OK, so it was all a case of mass hysteria. The question remains: Are multiple personalities ever real? The debate still rages. Skeptics claim that alters are invariably induced by the therapist; the more respectable defenders of DID agree that many are, but not all. The controversy has been complicated by disagreement over the nature of personality. The common understanding of DID is that the alters are independent of one another and don't share memories and other cognitive processes, but demonstrating this has proven difficult. Speech and behavior are under conscious control, so changes can readily be faked. Even things like brain-wave patterns may vary not because of a genuine personality switch but because alleged alters cultivate different emotional states and different ways of acting out. In a recent study of several DID patients, successive alters were asked to memorize different sets of words. When alter B was asked whether she recognized a word memorized only by alter A, she often hesitated. That suggests a conscious process--I'm not supposed to know this--indicating the personalities aren't truly independent.
Research continues, but my feeling is this. Assuming that the diagnoses of the past 25 years were trumped-up and that the couple hundred cases reported between 1800 and 1979 represent the true incidence of the syndrome, we're talking about maybe one or two cases per year.
Wifenneed,
This is why I suggest that people go to a professional. My take on the "straight dope" is that the columnist has no greater understanding or experience than I do. My training and education were mathematics; hers probably journalism or English.
Whether satanic abuse cases were substantiated or not has no bearing on the nature of dissociation. (Logic was required even for math majors.) Whether a single famous (or infamous) case of "multiple personalities" (Sybil) was called into question by a professional is not reliable evidence regarding the prevalance or veracity of dissociative disorders. (Lots of statistics classes were required for math majors, too.)
I'm sure that there are many respected professionals who disagree on this, but as I said, I don't have the background to follow along in their debate. I trust my T to be the expert, and I hope that others who feel troubled by this will recognize the bounds of their own expertise when seeking reliable helpful information.
Find an expert that you trust. Ask them your questions.
Just my opinion,
Joe
This is why I suggest that people go to a professional. My take on the "straight dope" is that the columnist has no greater understanding or experience than I do. My training and education were mathematics; hers probably journalism or English.
Whether satanic abuse cases were substantiated or not has no bearing on the nature of dissociation. (Logic was required even for math majors.) Whether a single famous (or infamous) case of "multiple personalities" (Sybil) was called into question by a professional is not reliable evidence regarding the prevalance or veracity of dissociative disorders. (Lots of statistics classes were required for math majors, too.)
I'm sure that there are many respected professionals who disagree on this, but as I said, I don't have the background to follow along in their debate. I trust my T to be the expert, and I hope that others who feel troubled by this will recognize the bounds of their own expertise when seeking reliable helpful information.
Find an expert that you trust. Ask them your questions.
Just my opinion,
Joe
Thank you to those who responded or otherwise contacted me of this. I am finding myself to be more then myself. It is been proven at me that I am more then myself, and it is both terrifying and freeing some. At least I understand some 'patches' that are lost of time and life, and know that they are not lost of me totally, but are still within me. So, part of discovering myself in all this, all the memories and feeling as sh*t on myself, part is discovering other parts of myself also.
leosha
leosha
Thank you for all who responded to this, I feel much better of the situation now. In actuality, I am realizing now that this is problem I have had long time, since child years, and to have definition of it, it explains things much. I understand those who are skeptic of it. I just can say that people other of me have seen the evidence of it in me, and looking back now, as I say, it makes much sense. I respect everyone's opinion though.
leosha
leosha