DID What's so bad about did??

[mylunareclipse]

I had never even heard of the word dissociation when few months into therapy when therapist looked at me and said I wasn't a burden and I could rely on her when my body memories started surfacing. I laid on the bathroom floor for days on end feeling everything happening to me all over again and sucking my thumb and crying later. Still I don't think I "switched" per day to a different personality. I was still me in the back, just unable to control myself. I didn't even think I was even dissociating even after all this because I remember things.

Anyhow, where am I going with this? I have read research, but then again don't forget that reading research involves a lot of confirmation bias. However, I think it's best for me to speak from my own experience.

I was 28 when my body memories surfaced md to this day I haven't accepted them or these memories. However, I cannot go around and say I made this up because I didn't choose to get my body locked like that.

You seem to say that diagnosing did is about drinking the cool aid. Let's see did stands for dissociative identity disorder. I.e. If you just read the words it means an person with dissociated identities which cause him or her distress. There is nothing there to suggest that the person doesn't remember switching etc. I think personally what the movement has been about as you say, is to recognize these people who go through life dealing with situations through dissociated identities, i.e. Not a fused identity and furthermore this causes them distress not going to work etc. I think recognizing this can help with trying to deal with the problem. For instance I always thought I was just depressed, but recognizing that I compartemantalize a lot can help me try with this problem as well.

Maybe the DID diagnosis was never meant to represent the weird representation in media etc. maybe that was the problem to begin with. Maybe this diagnosis was indeed hijacked by people who exaggerated it.

I am sure that some people might abuse the meaning and behavior of DID but that doesn't make it invalid. Like there's people that exaggerate other things and don't make them invalid. Or just because they occur to people who are sick doesn't make them invalid. I.e. The fact that some people on drugs see things when high doesn't make psychosis not valid.
From what I have read a least it seems that PTSD as well for instance was instead labeled as people that fought in wars being weak. This meant that once PTSD was recognized there was indeed a rise in people being diagnosed, not because it was a fake diagnosis but because a set of symptoms was being recognized as a set of distress symptoms that presented itself in a population that had undergone trauma.

In past all mental illnesses were perhaps classified as people being crazy. As we evolve, our understanding of our behavior, thought and emotional process evolves as well. Maybe with time we might come to realize that it is this compartementalization in a lot of people be in inner child or same parts of you etc that causes distress, so what's so wrong with labeling that and helping people deal with that if these symptoms are causing them distress?

Mind you I am not even saying I have DID in any shape or form, because hey I don't go around calling myself different names etc. yet perhaps it is this dissociation in different identities that causes me so much distress, yet I must deny it because the stigma says i am not "bad" enough, whatever that means.

Anthony, I know this is your site and I am just a young girl who has been in therapy for only two years and does not know much as much as you about mental illness. However, I find a bit worrying the rigidity with which you approach this subject. Somehow it seems to bother you so much that maybe people are exaggerating symptoms to just get a diagnosis. Why does this bother you so much? After all there is always people exaggerating and lying but this doesn't make things untrue.

Not sure if my post makes so much sense. All I am trying to say is let's keep an open mind, it has never hurt.

 

[zaniara]

, 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.

Oh, that would be manipulation btw!! Really horrible! Almost like implanting false memories. But my therapist did not do that. Am grateful for that!!

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,

Thank you for your patience. I'm trying to think this through. And am open to changing the way I think about it.

But if you in those dissociated states are a person very much unlike "you"? Like totally different..? I've seen one of the "parts" filmed, it was pretty difficult to comprehend that she was me and horrible to watch. But that "part", among others, came out and acted out in different ways with some people. I know it's some part of me(of course all me in one sense) who survived horrible abuse and torture and was trained by a psychopath and thus learned stuff "normal me" couldn't deal with back then. But I actually split of somehow, sort of got fragmented, during that and some other severe trauma. Dealing with it brought the "part" out big time, and stuff got really nasty. Talking to only "normal me" did not help nor work in therapy after triggering all that shit. As long as my therapist was working on that, treating me like "one whole person" it only deteriorated until I was close to undoing my self(or someone else). (I have the worst session on tape and the person in that room hardly look like me.) From the moment he started addressing and dealing with the fact that I was not one whole person only, things got a bit more manageable.

Maybe it was just a way of working with it, but it actually paid off. (As I said I don't have that problem anymore, I'm not able to dissociate anymore. So am only curious..)

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

Btw. Some of this is happening here in Sweden too, except you only get meds, very few get any therapy whatsoever. Paying for therapy is extremely expensive, which makes it a rich man's luxury. So PTSD(which research shows don't respond that well to meds) and some other diagnosis are pretty rare. But depression and bipolar is "trendy", since then medication is "necessary".. Sweden top BIG TIME the list of countries in Europe prescribing all time high the largest sum of antidepressants!! Like WAY more than any other country! Every forth or fifth Swede or something is on those meds..:eek:

But they're talking about starting to "prescribe" more electric shock-therapy too, even to depressed kids. Sigh..

= just to show that the business is not exactly the same everywhere.

 

[Hope4Now]

WHO state that one in four will endure a mental health condition at some point during their lifetime.

This doesn't surprise me, but it is not talking about severe dissociative disorders. The rise in mental illness in the US as well as in other parts of the world seems to be fairly well recognized. I think there are many speculations as to the causes. And it isn't limited just to the US. Check out the WHO statistics on suicide rates throughout the world.

It takes seconds to research the issues

Actually, these are magazine articles about mental illness in general. Not research. Research is more challenging and time-consuming to find, which is why most people rely on interpretations from the popular media to shape their beliefs. Sometimes those interpretations accurately reflect the research, often not.

Normal problems. Normal symptoms that we experience as adverse affects to certain things in life -- are pathologized more than they ever have.

Yes, this I agree with to some extent. Not altogether--I think there are a lot more people out there who avoid therapy and doctors as long as they can. I did--didn't go to a therapist until I was 49 when everything broke down because I kept convincing myself, "Oh, I can get through this...I have much to be grateful for...I have responsibilities...etc." I wish I hadn't believed all this because my health may not have crashed if I'd gotten the right kind of help earlier.

I agree there is definitely a time in life to give yourself or your loved one a boot in the backside and say, "suck it up and keep moving." But there are also a lot of times that this sends the suffering person over the edge. I lost 3 high school friends to suicide, 2 college friends (recently), and a half dozen of the students I've taught over the years. I often wonder if they had been treated with more gentleness and offered therapy and help, whether they'd still be here today. But despite all you're saying about the business of therapy and mental illness, in my experience most people still avoid it and often suffer greatly because they do. And most physicians, especially in the US, are so poorly trained to spot any red flag for mental illness, that many people suffer needlessly for years.

DID has valid application. I've never denied that.

I don't know what this means? "application"? Do you mean it is a valid diagnosis? I think it certainly is. The name of it has changed over the years, as have some of the criteria. The DSM-V doesn't include under dissociative disorders some of the things the ISSTD does. But generally there is pretty clear agreement about it. What's tricky is diagnosing it because usually there are quite a lot of comorbid disorders that need to be untangled first.

The Dissociative Experiences Scale (a self-test) and the much more comprehensive SCID-D (Structured Clinical Interview for Dissociative Disorders) can be helpful for therapists and clients to do some of this untangling (especially using the SCID). One of the reasons there may be an uptick in the diagnoses of dissociative disorders is that there are clearer diagnostic tools now available to treaters. Many people with dissociative disorders spend years in the mental health system with various incorrect diagnoses and, therefore, treatment that is not effective.

It is factually rare though.

Perhaps I misunderstand what you mean by "rare." I corrected this in another post you made. NAMI 12-month figures for PTSD 3.1%, Bipolar Disorder 2.6%, Major Depression 6.7%. The figures for DID vary (and do not include the other dissociative disorders (including conversion disorder which in the ISST recognizes as a dissociative disorder)--anyway figures vary from 1-2%. Much higher for hospitalized patients. So yeah, rare-ish. Certainly not wildly overdiagnosed. And if you look at the brief figures offered in the link below, you see some worldwide stats, not just US.

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 agree. This is totally irresponsible treatment which only does harm to the patient. HOWEVER, the notion of an "inner child" has been around for a very long time (I first heard of it 40 years ago) and is a valid construct/trope for helping hurting people tune into and heal the vulnerable and wounded parts of themselves. Only the most literal-minded of patients would believe they have an alter who is a child just because a therapist is telling them to nurture their inner child.

Many current therapies which might lead to your suspiciousness of therapists as well, have taken a stand on the old argument over theories of mind. Actually, I guess the arguments aren't so old--are still around--like worn out philosophical tennis balls. Anyway, one side says the human mind is singular and unitary and everything has to fit that. The other side says the human mind is naturally multiple and the goal is to get it working in harmony. Different types of therapy over the years have spilled out of these opposite views. Some of the most effective therapies happening today have developed out of an acknowledgement of the natural multiplicity of the mind. Often these therapies use the words "parts" or "aspects" with clients as they learn to get themselves working in internal and external harmony. The vast majority of these clients do not have DID or even a dissociative disorder. But I could see how someone reading or hearing about it might be confused into thinking they have DID. One of the better known kinds of therapies like this is called Internal Family Systems. I think it is mostly gaining traction in the US so far, but has good research going.

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

Wow you can do that without even seeing or talking to the person?! I'm only half-sarcastic here. If you can see it without ever meeting the person, then you're pretty talented.

lets think about the politically correct vaccination movement

:banghead:
Seriously? Are you seriously comparing this world health disaster with diagnoses of dissociative disorders?
The vaccine thing was and is insane. Yes, based on completely false news that played on people's terrors about the rapid rise of autism. I went through this with people. I had little children. I have friends whose kids developed late-onset autism. It was all a horrible mess and still is. And all about fake news and what people will believe out of fear.

But this thread is not about that. This thread is about dissociative disorders, especially dissociative identity disorder.

Lets get closer to home -- depression.

Yeah, the whole psychotropic medication thing is an exercise in trust--they don't actually know how most of them work...not just serotonin based ones. I haven't read what you have about serotonin, but there has to be something damned good about it for some people because I have watched them transform before my eyes and sustain that transformation. So I suspect the issue is more accurate diagnosis of the problem. And sadly we often have to try lots of stuff before we hit on a winner, or give up.
What's also true is SSRIs (and sometimes SNRIs) are often the first line treatment for many issues--BUT they are contra-indicated for many things and can therefore exacerbate symptoms. For instance, increases in serotonin can increase flashback activity. Happened to me (before I landed with people who actually know what they're doing). And most of these drugs do nothing for dissociative disorders at all. So yeah, they get you more depressed!

The evidence on DID has not changed. Show me where it has please.

With so many things including medicine, progress is dialectical (as in Hegel)...there is argument, counter-argument, and synthesis (one hopes, eventually). We have seen this many times in the past from the ancient practices of leeching, to the more recent craziness about ADHD in the 1980s and 90s. Everybody gets their knickers in a big twist and starts the academics' equivalent of shit-hurling trying to prove the others wrong. Eventually if all goes well, enough information comes out of the arguing that everybody learns something, and the people who suffer benefit from what the experts have learned.

The danger--and we all easily fall into it--is assuming that we know already what is right and true. So, I spent a lot of time poking around to see how your assertions about DID held up to my own understandings. And I learned some things. Which is nice. Because I am recovering from surgery and I am really, really bored.

Anyway, one of the things I learned is that the two "sides" of the DID controversy are called THE FANTASY MODEL (what you are proposing), and THE TRAUMA MODEL. I also had confirmed for me that the psychoneurobiological research into the etiology and presentation of DID are in their very early stages. So, we can all look forward to much more coming out soon. The lovely thing about brain science these days is that we have these machines that can "see" the brain work. And the people in the machines cannot control what the machine picks up. So you can be a traumatized fantasy-prone person but your brain will look different from a person with DID.

So, at the moment, THE TRAUMA MODEL is "winning." People who have DID have brains that function differently from people who do not.
--On PET scans, neurologists can compare the brains of people with and without DID and see marked differences. I cannot find online the piece about the work Onno Van der Hart, Steele, Boon. It is in their well done book (2006)called The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization (which describes primary, secondary, and tertiary dissociation--the last being DID). They also have a new book out (2016) called Treating Trauma-Related Dissociation. These are highly regarded and deeply experienced practitioners. These are not a pop-psychology books.
--Fact or Factitious? A Psychobiological Study of Authentic and Simulated Dissociative Identity States
Fact or Factitious? A Psychobiological Study of Authentic and Simulated Dissociative Identity States Conclusion: The findings are at odds with the idea that differences among different types of dissociative identity states in DID can be explained by high fantasy proneness, motivated role-enactment, and suggestion.
--The psychobiology of authentic and simulated dissociative personality states: The Full Monty Link Removed Conclusion: The results offer new information concerning the etiology of DID. This is important because empirical research into DID is still in an early phase. Results of the new post-hoc t-tests on the psychophysiological measures confirm the trauma model of DID. Results obtained from the brain data do not support the fantasy model of DID.
--A Review of Dissociative Identity Disorder Research: Response to Critics
A Review of Dissociative Identity Disorder Research: Respons... : The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
--Response to Dissociative Identity Disorder Letters From Martínez-Taboas et al. and Brand et al. Response to Dissociative Identity Disorder Letters From Mart... : The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

DID within the USA is the highest in the world per capita. WOW -- really?

It's not that much higher than some of the other stats unless you look at people in hospitals where there would obviously be a higher concentration. Not sure why? Knowledge? Often once we know what something is, once we understand it, we like to name it and treat it. Maybe that's big business, maybe it's pathologizing. But in my book, if there is something shitty happening in my body and somebody can tell me what it is and help me fix it so I can resume my life with some semblance of normalcy, I will grab on! On the other hand...not for everything. I broke my finger a couple of months ago when I fell. I didn't bother to go to the doctor because I knew what he'd do and how much it would cost. I am perfectly capable of splinting my finger and rehabilitating it so long as the bone isn't sticking out. But for a lot of people, dissociative disorders are like having the bone sticking out.

Because the theoretical constructs of the type of dissociation has no valid evidence to date that supports it.

Not true.

DID around the World. (interesting piece). DID Around the World
DID a Pathophysiological Phenomenon. Dissociative Identity Disorder: A Pathophysiological Phenomenon

ok. done. Maybe it will encourage you to think outside the box some more. I'm glad I spent the time reading all this because I learned. Maybe somebody here will be interested and/or benefit.

 

[anthony]

What you listed, is not evidence. Theoretical and philosophical hypothesis are the present day foundations to all mental health. The entire industry is presently scattering to the winds in search of ways to find scientific, biological methods, to distinguish mental health concerns. Imaging is the primary biological means we have to mapping similarities and then making theoretical hypothesis that if each person says x, and each brain scan shows y, then they must all belong to group z (diagnosis).

How many here have been diagnosed with their disorder labels based on brain scans?

If you can see it without ever meeting the person, then you're pretty talented.

No. Based on what a person tells when you start drilling down to the truth about how they began creating their alters and why. Search this site, you will read about people breaking up their personality into alters with their therapist, to help describe feelings based on time, trauma, so forth. When I read such things, it already screams tainted and full of shit. When people go in and out of pretend alters in live chat, minute to minute, claiming DID... hypochondriacs. DID doesn't work that way -- by hypochondriacs are hypochondriacs and they rarely admit to their lies. That is the illness.

Every time I read these such stories, I know DID is being over-diagnosed and specific therapists want a DID case to talk with their peers about. One they helped create based on the feedback by the person on how it came to be. Anyone who says that alters existed prior to therapy, there the ones I believe are the real DID people.

Then we have misdiagnosis. OMFG -- how bad is that. But come on now, a self reporting scale / interpretation of, SCID-D, is mostly garbage and you have to recognise that.

Mental health is self report. A person can tell a therapist anything they want. A therapist can ask leading questions. Both are a recipe for mis-diagnosis. Lets be honest now.

There are always legitimate cases, but there are a whole lot of rubbish ones today. More than ever before.

Mental health diagnosis is a laughing stock. You must accept that fact.

 

[Hope4Now]

Anthony, I feel sad that you are so deeply cynical about the efforts of people who have dedicated their lives to healing those who have experienced trauma. It is not an exact science. It may be someday, but unlikely. Professionals who assess a person's challenges do exactly what you do--listen, engage, and hypothesize as to the core issues causing problems, then treat those. That's just how it works. I deeply wish there were some blood test that could identify for certain what mental illnesses cause the trouble, and point to a specific intervention.

But the closest we have to this currently is the theoretical frameworks proposed by wise and experienced people, and then tried with patients. Peter Levine is one example, and his work has saved many from their suffering. EMDR is another profoundly promising adjunct to trauma therapy. Fast and effective, but not for everyone.

I offered a lot of info to you as a sampling of what's out there. It is research. All research begins with a theoretical frame and question, and goes from there. You can't get away from theory. If you do, there's no research. That's why I talked about the whole dialectical thing.

I have no doubt there are false diagnoses of DID, just as there are of many medical and psychological problems for which there is no absolute test available that proves what ails the person. Until that happens, I stand with the people who are aiming to help sufferers heal. Fundamentally the diagnosis itself doesn't matter much (the DSM is rather a joke...in many professionals minds included, but it's what we've got for now). What is truly important is the therapeutic interventions that help people heal. And the therapeutic interventions for DID are the same as for other trauma related disorders--just a bit more complicated, intense, and longer term. And people do heal. Not all psych people are charlatans.

I have no patience for people who use their diagnosis or symptoms as an excuse for irresponsibility or to be hurtful or manipulative. I suppose there will always be people like that no matter what their diagnosis is or the motivations behind their behavior.

So, I will bow out of this rather interesting conversation, acknowledging that we have some areas of agreement, and others of argument.

As a ps I would just beg you to consider that when you write the way you do about people suffering, you may be aiming your frustration and anger at the psych field and at those people you believe to be hypochondriacs. But there are many more who DO have bona fide severe dissociative disorders that cripple their lives in many ways, and to have a lead person on a support site invalidate their experiences (whether intentionally or not), is not discouraging and disappointing.

As always, and in spite of this little argument, I appreciate this site. It kept me afloat the first year I was on it before I got some therapeutic traction. So kudos to you for keeping it running. It is one of the few ways people can connect peer to peer about what's going on with them.

 

[anthony]

Anthony, I feel sad that you are so deeply cynical about the efforts of people who have dedicated their lives to healing those who have experienced trauma.

Hope -- my cynicism is not at those who do good work, come up with good things, that "actually" help people who suffer. Never did I say that. These are your words and interpretation, not mine. Most of what you say, I concur or respect. There is a lot of shit in the world of psychology. My view has never changed, I read the experts and regurgitate their expertise into simpler form. So let me demonstrate cynicism based on the big wigs themselves, the past and current head of the NIMH. The largest funder of mental health research in the world. Do you want to dismiss the NIMH opinion?

Thomas Insel, the last director of the NIMH, in 2014 turned all future studies on their head creating RDOC, because he admitted they were nothing more than, well... little source of scientific data or proved causation effect:

Treatment development has stalled. The pharmaceutical industry pipeline for medications is depleted, after several decades of “me too” drugs. For anxiety, mood disorders, and psychosis, there are few viable new targets because of an inadequate understanding of the biology of the disorders. For autism, anorexia nervosa, post-traumatic stress disorder, and the cognitive deficits of schizophrenia, we lack effective medications. Psychosocial interventions have seen more innovation in the past decade with successful new treatments for anorexia nervosa and borderline personality disorder, as well as broader application of cognitive behavior therapy. But these treatments may not be disseminated or reimbursed in the new healthcare environment without evidence for the required dose and duration of treatment, necessary information for developing measures of fidelity to a validated treatment model. NIMH » A New Approach to Clinical Trials

Current director Joshua Gordon quotes a fellow neuroscientist from a 2015 consortium, bringing neuroscience, psychiatry and computational sciences together to try and start fixing this shit fight: “...diagnoses aren’t illnesses, they are observations, made by clinicians and probabilistically caused by the underlying illness. Bayes’ theorem* lets us work backward from the diagnosis to determine the probability that the patient has the illness, based on the clinician’s observation.” NIMH » Computational Neuroscience: Deciphering the Complex Brain

Every single mental health diagnosis is a "best guess" by the observer, in simple terms. Experts said it and agree with it.

I would just beg you to consider that when you write the way you do about people suffering, you may be aiming your frustration and anger at the psych field and at those people you believe to be hypochondriacs.

Hope, there is no frustration or anger directed at anyone suffering anything. You interpret and personalise my words that way. The mental health industry, according to leading experts within the very industry, is best guess, probable statistics from only published data. I remember a conversation with a psychology student some years ago... she said something along the lines that from her knowledge to date, for every study published, there are 4 that are not, because they failed to meet the objectives, primarily produce positive results. That figure is likely much higher, who knows... but that means the probabilistically data that all these assumptions are made on by the mental health industry, are wrong. Why? The obvious, of course. If you only produce positive data for statistical comparison, then you do not have the true statistical data for objective decisions. If there are more studies that have negative outcomes than positive, it means that even our therapy stats are very very skewed.

This is why I say above: showing me a study or two doesn't mean a thing. I'm a fan of meta-analysis myself, as they show a broad cross section. If one doesn't exist for an area, then it usually mean the area doesn't have enough data to warrant it. Most of the articles here are done via studies. They used to all have the citations. I eventually got rid of them, because at the end of the day, the studies mean diddly squat for validity. Their words were no different than me just writing it out. They're opinion, trying to be fact, but really just opinion. We don't know the full truth from unpublished data.

To date, we think TF-CBT, PE and EMDR sit around a 60% recovery for 12 sessions, 80% for maximum of one year. But for all the negative results we will never see, because why would the public want the truth according to the study leads, those figures are likely much much lower. The unknown lower figures, would likely explain the rise in mental health numbers due to awareness campaigns, but treatment is falling very very short.

The industry is broken. Always has been. That isn't cynicism, nor is it about the person suffering trauma, its just the truth of the matter. Even the experts agree that the industry is chaos, that they're fighting uphill battles for accurate treatment methods based on skewed data and limited or zero biological data for causation.

We the sufferer, are the ones who keep on suffering. I have full empathy for everyone who endures trauma and has to go within this nonsense system. This very broken system. We have pharmaceutical companies who drop development on drugs that work, because the market is minute. Then they charge a fortune for the ones they get a 40% plus success on. These companies are meant to be in the business of helping health services, not hindering it.

DID is controversial. The NIMH directors have admitted this, as having working groups and dissociative experts, as is PTSD, admitted that before too. They both make big claims and assumptions, with pretty much zero valid data to substantiate themselves. There is nothing wrong with being honest about the state of the issues. This is how we're going to change, and I'm glad the experts don't have their heads buried in the sand about the status quo. If they did... things are going to get worse, not better.

We have a HUGE problem in society and media, splashing around DID and PTSD. We have greater than every diagnostic levels of these disorders, for what both are conceptual considered RARE in the scheme of mental health disorders. Media now purport "Ecstasy Treats PTSD" so we have PTSD sufferers blindly running to their local drug dealers getting hooked on a drug that doesn't treat PTSD at all. MDMA, the purest form and a pharmaceutical grade version, used in combination with therapy ONLY, is the truth. MAPS write the facts, people interpret and run off being stupid as shit with half arse information. Then we have people coming here perpetuating that they should visit their local street corner drug dealer and start taking Ecstasy to ease their symptoms, because they did and they're now a shining beacon of health (cough - :meh::rolleyes:). OMFG -- broken systems everywhere.

Added: the US marijuana movement is political correctness gone stupid. Marijuana does not help PTSD. It numbs a person and causes all the known health issues that marijuana does. Politicians are making decisions based on political correctness vs science. I care that trauma sufferers are being bamboozled with bullshit. Marijuana will kill them sooner than their natural lifespan if they continually use it.

Still not cynicism -- just the facts at hand.

 

[Friday]

I need a super like button.

 

[desiderata310]

Marijuana does not help PTSD. It numbs a person and causes all the known health issues that marijuana does. Politicians are making decisions based on political correctness vs science. I care that trauma sufferers are being bamboozled with bullshit. Marijuana will kill them sooner than their natural lifespan if they continually use it.

:O_o:

I've often wondered about this.
I use it SOMETIMES to sleep but I hate how it makes me feel; like I'm not in control so I've basically quit using it
Can you point me towards those studies? I want to read that information as well.

 

[lostforgottensoul]

I've often wondered about this.
I use it SOMETIMES to sleep but I hate how it makes me feel; like I'm not in control so I've basically quit using it

Its suposed to be CBD in it that helps I believe. THC has nothing to do with helping PTSD or anything else. CBD isn't supposed to make you high and you also are supposed to benefit by oil form, not smoking it. Which we all know smoke is horrid for you. I have researched it but not impressed enough to buy it.

 

[anthony]

Can you point me towards those studies?

Without having to go pull up years of prior reading, just read @joeylittle's article on the subject, which is quite balanced.

PTSD Treatment using Marijuana, aka. Weed, Cannabis

 

[Hope4Now]

Thanks for the link to that article. Interesting summation of the pros and cons. I'm interested to see if the study at Colorado ever got off the ground (I think it said they were hoping for 2015). I've been debating a trial of medical marijuana, but have put it off. It's been recommended to me because my major presenting symptom is pain from fibromyalgia. It's related to the trauma past, but the idea of actually being able to walk without as much pain is deeply appealing to me. Yet I am paranoid about getting dependent upon or addicted to drugs. So I have done nothing yet. I think the point comparing the use of marijuana to that of PRNs like ativan or klonopin is an important one. Where is the balance between managing symptoms so the therapeutic work can get done/move out of the stabilization stage and into the processing stage, vs. taking medicines purely for management and not doing the work. It's an interesting question for me.

 

[Deleted member 35429]

What's so bad about DID? It's not bad, just controversial, and is abused heavily by people and therapists....

Have you tried to understand why you care so much? Why does this get you upset?

I get really worked up sometimes about the liberal use of the word rape, and how getting fingered by a boyfriend that didn't ask first is now considered rape and young girls are crying on rape forums over getting betrayed like this. I get so crazy over how absurd this is and then I look around and realize no one else is upset with the wide spread use of a very strong term like rape so why am I? What is the threat to me?

Well I've finally figured my sh-t out and this thread isn't about me, so I'd like to ask you again, why does the liberal use of the DID diagnosis threaten you?