DID What's so bad about did??

[Punky143]

Because having my friends(parts) was no big deal until- the formal dx. And the only one who knows is my T and we're still struggling with that. Maybe its people like us who are the norm and society has it all wrong? The world is messed up

 

[FireSign8]

Yeah. The world has a lot of learning ahead of it. I don't expect it to catch up anytime soon. I think they enjoy being stuck on stupid! I am reminded of the phrase from a book "I'm OK, You're OK" & "I'm OK, You're A Mess", from a bumper sticker! Humor helps me deal with "us" & I laugh at the things I hear myself saying when I'm having conversations aloud with my many unseen "guests"! I once assigned them letters & colors. It cut out having to remember so many names. Now I just relax & don't bother with the introductions or facial recognitions when I have dreams/visions in the night. I now have a better understanding of the term "I see dead people"! NO...they see me first & try to get my attention! Try explain that to a shrink. NOT HAPPENING!:poop::banghead::woot:

 

[anthony]

What's so bad about DID? It's not bad, just controversial, and is abused heavily by people and therapists. It is not healthy to be breaking a person down into inner people, which some therapists love to do, then tell the person once they've done that, they now have DID. The person then believes they have all these inner personalities and separate themselves into these identities they never had until created, either by themselves to explain how they feel, or by therapists to help a person explain how they feel.

Very few DID cases are real, because statistically DID is extremely rare. Hence... DID is controversial.

 

[zaniara]

It is not healthy to be breaking a person down into inner people, which some therapists love to do, then tell the person once they've done that, they now have DID. The person then believes they have all these inner personalities and separate themselves into these identities they never had until created, either by themselves to explain how they feel, or by therapists to help a person explain how they feel.

I wonder how do they do that? And how you know when someone has "real DID"? Only curious. :shy: Also, do you think they do that to people who are diagnosed with severe dissociation problems, aka structural dissociation(you know with one ANP but "emotional parts" as well)?

Neither my therapist nor my psychiatrist diagnosed me with that from start(not DID, but that 'structural dissociation'), but after some severe chaos exploding in everyone's face after digging into(with EMDR) the so complex and severe traumas they figured it out. Needless to say I wasn't cooperative in the beginning dealing with it. (I always believed people lied when they said I did or said stuff I didn't remember doing - I thought they were trying to make me crazy.. :D) - but I'm actually not suffering from it anymore. Only it's still difficult to handle some of the consequences.. (wrote a thread about it)

As for the threadstart.. Well, I'm not thinking DID is "so bad", like in some moral judgment or anything, like a broken bone is a broken bone, cancer is cancer. Different stuff, different treatment, some stuff more deadly than others, and all that. But otherwise, bad how? It's pretty messy and takes a lot to eventually be healed from. And it seems to be the consequences of needing that defense. And not healing from it seems to me as continuing living with a defense making life not lived with full presence. (which seems sad) Also it seems hard for the people living with someone with DID, even though there might be some unexpected perks to it too.. :rolleyes: But does not most people with DID have pretty much chaos tagging along with it? And suffering? Not like that much fun really. But they say it's a very creative brains way of dealing with pretty severe stuff. But I'm thinking a healed DID = the creativeness could be used in more life-improving ways, with less chaos tagging along with it...

 

[anthony]

I always believed people lied when they said I did or said stuff I didn't remember doing - I thought they were trying to make me crazy..

And this is the problem, thus controversy for DID. Use your worded example: dissociation of this kind happens to everyone. You drive your car the same route every day, you actually get from A to B with no memory of the drive, because you know the drive so well, you move into a dissociative state where you focus on other things, nothing at all, so forth.

Can't remember the drive -- can't remember what you just said when you exploded due to traumatic outburst.

Why is there now a new identity involved?

Answer: usually because a therapist is involved and they start trying to label frequent outbursts as an identity, which you then label as such, for ease. Either way, a DID diagnosis was just created for you.

This is no different than the person who dissociates their way to work on the same drive, every day. Why aren't they diagnosed with DID too? One, they don't see a therapist. Two, it isn't associated with trauma, so a therapist will dissuade away the notion because it isn't linked to trauma.

Same thing but?

It isn't that DID is not real. It's that DID is now handed out to anyone and everyone who dissociates as the first diagnosis. Dissociation is part and parcel of having PTSD. It will be worse for those with complex trauma, especially child trauma, as kids use fantasy and such processes to shift themselves away during events to help them cope. These behaviours are normal for kids, the situation is f*cked up though. Remove the f*cked up, some children will keep the behaviour as a protection mechanism as they then grow into adulthood, having a created alter ego or such they shift to. Now knowingly doing this is actually different than what DID is, yet today, everyone is lumped into the same barrel. Why? Because having a DID client is just so awesome for their career.

It is no secret that mental health diagnosis has just gone stupid. For a field that we know little about in reality, therapists and psychiatrists love to create boxes and put people in them. The psychology field has changed significantly over the past decade, where they are moving away from this boxed diagnosis model, because they accept it is just so broken for the client. Psychologists are trying to be part of the solutions -- psychiatrists just keep f*cking it all up. Psychiatrists create diagnoses, they keep making diagnostic texts thicker with more shit they create. They keep making new boxes, expanding boxes to fit more people in.

Psychiatry is a business, and there are still plenty of psychologists jumping on the abuse bandwagon for diagnoses.

When you look at symptoms from a network approach, suddenly diagnostic categories become totally broken, wrong, and useless.

 

[theshadowoftheliving]

I usually don't respond when things rub me the wrong way, but I can't seem to help myself here. I am trying to keep this as level as possible.

The idea that DID is rare is a myth. Statistically, it is not. Its "rareness" is about the same as bipolar disorder, which is not contested in the same way.

Also, I think it is difficult to speak for experiences other than our own, and acting as authorities on diagnosis that we don't have is difficult. I don't purport to know what it is like to have bipolar. I can read about it, but it just isn't the same as living that experience.

Likewise, to say that people diagnosed with DID are labeling parts falsely is assuming an understanding of someone else's lived experience. For me, I knew about these parts long before I started working with a therapist, so the idea that someone else made them up for me is impossible. Assuming and blanketing the DID community with the assumption that we are "faking it" is adding to a stigma that just shouldn't exist at all.

 

[anthony]

Assuming and blanketing the DID community with the assumption that we are "faking it" is adding to a stigma that just shouldn't exist at all.

Your interpretation of what I said, is inaccurate. I did not blanket, I stated nothing more than what you can find with your own fingers and Google about DID controversy. You are taking your personal situation, then applying it as though I have commented about you specifically. I did not do that.

There are a lot of people who fake PTSD too. DID is rare, factually, look it up.

Don't apply your personal situation to what I am saying about a general context -- they are not the same thing.

 

[Hope4Now]

With all due respect, Anthony, as the lead guy on this site, I believe you ought to read more deeply and thoroughly about dissociative disorders and DID before making statements such as those you made above. This is the second time in a month or so that you have posted opinions on the topic that do not reflect current research but harken back to the stereotypes about DID perpetuated in film and the popular media.

This is a site for PTSD, I get that. And DID is not PTSD. But to minimize its impact on sufferers lives, to accuse psychiatrists of fabrication for the sake of career advancement, and to minimize the profoundly disabling effects of severe dissociation by comparing it to spacing out while driving...just consider the impact your opinions have on your readers. It's up to each of us, obviously, to take or leave what's said, to engage or not. I suppose I'd just expected a bit of a higher bar here.

 

[anthony]

I'm not minimising anything. Dissociative disorders have a very valid place. Dissociative disorders are valid in many contexts. I am simply agreeing with the data out there on DID facts, not the politically correct DID movement that has occurred.

Take a look at mental health doctrine 10 years ago. Take a look at it now. WHO state that one in four will endure a mental health condition at some point during their lifetime. No worries with that. It takes seconds to research the issues and rise of mental diagnosis:

• Link Removed
  
• Why the Rise of Mental Illness? Pathologizing Normal, Adverse Drug Effects, and a Peculiar Rebellion - Mad In America
  
• How our society breeds anxiety, depression and dysfunction

Those took me a few seconds to find, a few minutes each to read.

Normal problems. Normal symptoms that we experience as adverse affects to certain things in life -- are pathologized more than they ever have. Mental health is now BIG business globally.

I'm not dismissing anything -- I'm simply not jumping on the gravy train though either about turning mental health into BIGGER business.

We see it here... my partner cheated and I was diagnosed with PTSD -- oh shit, dude, you must have suffered the same as those who are raped, tortured and abused in that cheating. Right?

Bullshit. People need to stop drinking the cool aid, as I believe its called in America.

DID has valid application. I've never denied that. It is factually rare though. We see concentrated bursts here, being a trauma community, thus it is a bit more acceptable and common to see it here. Whilst reading it here though, the sheer times I have read the exact nature of how DID should not be diagnosed, i.e. the therapist leads the person to describe themselves as having alternative personalities for behaviours, or lets create an "inner child" (just love that one) then after leading the person, slap them with a BIG business DID label.

I have talked with a few people here who I believe have multiple identities / alters. Then I have seen a whole lot of bullshit too. People in chat intentionally going in and out of alters, then claiming no memory, repeat and rinse, in cycles over x minutes. Total nonsense and not even how it works. Yet people suck through the straw on that cool aid nonetheless.

I am well versed on DID and dissociation, enough to know whats real about it, and when people are totally full of shit.

I'm not claiming that any member in this discussion is full of shit about DID... merely adding general discussion aspects within the discussion.

I own a mental health community and have built it to the largest in the world for its field. That didn't happen by drinking the cool aid and following along the politically correct movements that happen, which are total bullshit the majority of the time, with little to no substance for validity.

Gee, lets think about the politically correct vaccination movement that occurred over the past decade and a bit, based on evidence that has now been verified as fabricated. All those who drunk that cool aid, sucked the shit up, claiming that vaccinations gave their children autism and all sorts of garbage -- now we have epidemics globally of diseases that had otherwise been wiped out. We now have policies in Australia where children without vaccinations can no longer attend childcares and such, and conscientious objectors are now on their own -- they can keep drinking fake cool aid all they want.

Lets get closer to home -- depression. Depression has been claimed by pharmaceutical companies for decades as a lack of serotonin. So they created a pill to try and fix the issue. Low and behold, when it came down to it, there was ZERO evidence by pharmaceutical companies to substantiate any of their claims. Still, right now today, ZERO evidence. In fact, current actual research is discovering quite the opposite, thus hence why too many who take anti-depressants end up more depressed, because serotonin levels are already over-dosed, and the pills targeting the synapse are overloading the system, thus people get more depressed, not less. No evidence -- people following blindly drinking cool aid.

The evidence on DID has not changed. Show me where it has please. Show me the studied evidence -- not the politically correct movements comments on it. DID is over-diagnosed, misdiagnosed, and completely gone off the rails in the USA. I did a quick search to find that DID within the USA is the highest in the world per capita. WOW -- really? I thought. No -- not really. America has pathologized everything and anything into BIG business. BIG therapeutic business. I just looked through my science text, 11 pages on highly scientific, evidence based dissociation -- 2 sentences on DID and it was dropped. Why? Because the theoretical constructs of the type of dissociation has no valid evidence to date that supports it. There is science that theorises it is learnt behaviours for coping -- which is a forum of dissociation within itself -- because those labelled with DID are those who endured childhood abuse. Kids create fantasies to help them avoid the trauma (scientific). Even after the trauma has gone, the behaviours are learnt as coping mechanisms. Is it DID? Is it structural behavioural learning? The experts can't answer it outside, maybe both.

Journalists globally are writing about this problem. Drink the cool aid though if you want. I'm a big fan of opinion diversity and respect each. I simply ask people to go research study data. Read scientific texts on the facts -- what we know, what we don't, what we're unsure about, at this time. The data on DID is very very sketchy -- thus it is considered still today, as controversial.

Why would anyone want lies? The experts in PTSD, trauma and dissociation, agree that DID is controversial. What's so bad about that? They also agree that there are legitimate cases. They also agree that dissociation is very much part of trauma, as it is part of each person whether trauma is present or not. A few have even claimed dissociation is what forms PTSD. Get that into you. Sound strange? Van der Kolk is one of the experts pushing that belief -- PTSD is not build upon anxiety and depression, but apparently, according to him and a few others, dissociation -- all because it contains flashbacks and some dissociative symptoms.

Just like arseholes -- we all have opinions. DID is controversial -- theoretical -- lacks understanding -- over / misdiagnosed. There is nothing wrong with saying that. Its not a dirty secret. It is not dismissing anyone individually either.

 

[zaniara]

dissociation of this kind happens to everyone. You drive your car the same route every day, you actually get from A to B with no memory of the drive, because you know the drive so well, you move into a dissociative state where you focus on other things, nothing at all, so forth.

Can't remember the drive -- can't remember what you just said when you exploded due to traumatic outburst.

Why is there now a new identity involved?

I follow you. Thank you for clarification. :)Now I didn't have DID, so can't speak about that from personal experience. I was less totally fragmented. But I believe it is somewhat a scale, and I was obviously on the severe end of the scale of dissociation problems. But not as far as the end of that scale- being DID. Of course dissociation can be that, forgetting what you've done or said or been, for some triggered time. But most people don't have whole days or so gone, also not being very much like some totally different person either being unaware of the others. (Thus having whole relationships being formed out of one of those other "parts", not remembering them after you're out of it.) And noone was "looking for it" in me, but my therapist actually ignored some stuff out of unawareness until it made stuff so unmanageable that it was a very close call(me not making it). But either way I'm not fragmented anymore, and I can't have any opinions on rate of over-diagnosing in the system. Also diagnosis seem less important sometimes than just dealing with it, and acknowledging the traumas needing to be dealt with and letting go of the defenses that once saved your life.

 

[anthony]

But most people don't have whole days or so gone, also not being very much like some totally different person either being unaware of the others.

Not correct. Soldiers can be within dissociative states for days. You pin prick some people many times before they realise what you're doing, and even then, days later they remember nothing about it.

What you're describing, is exactly what the primary and most pervasive form of dissociation really resembles. Days of lost time with partial or no memories. You haven't gone into another identity, but your conscious brain goes into a protective place. You can go to work, do choirs, everything, and not remember anything. If you read the latest Handbook of PTSD, science and practice, the entire chapter of present scientific fact on dissociation related to trauma is exactly what you are describing. Days at a time dissociated. The science fits what you're saying, at present level theoretical fact.

 

[lostforgottensoul]

People need to stop drinking the cool aid, as I believe its called in America.

Koolaid. Its a brand name punch like drink for kids here. Jim Jones gave his followers poisioned punch (or what many call the poisioned Koolaid as most drinks like that are just named Koolaid) thus where the term came from.

What you're describing, is exactly what the primary and most pervasive form of dissociation really resembles. Days of lost time with partial or no memories. You haven't gone into another identity, but your conscious brain goes into a protective place.

I did in a super crowded Walmart around Christmas time. I remember being accidentlly sandwhiched between two people and then I "woke up" hudled in the bathroom saying "please don't hurt me" having zero memory of how I got there. It is a huge reason I need a service dog.

I have disocissated like that a few times. But I don't have DID.