Multiple Personality/ Dissociative Disorder

I didn't watch the show, so this is no comment on whether what she remembered was real or not.

As far as abuse goes, sadly, people are capable of horrific things. However, it isn't a stretch to assume that the more outlandish abuse claims are the more likely they are to be untrue, especially when the person has tendencikes which could be described as fantasist.

Satanic Ritual Abuse is another fascinating but largely dismissed pseudomalady.

Thanks for you reply, Martin. Were the nightmares your ex-wife experienced and the gradual recollection triggered by anything that you know of?

Andy, what can you tell me about Satanic Ritual Abuse that won't scare me too much?

The more people heard about it, the more recovered memories came up... and many gullible children were coerced into providing details about things that never happened.

In the end, it's been entirely disproven, but alot of people's lives were ruined in the process, and alot of pop psychologist made a fortune with the scaremongering.

The most most famous case was the McMillan preschool case in California.

SRA in a nutshell. My connection is that certain social "popular" illnesses seem to have a lifespan, a certain ecological niche where they thrive for awhile and then fade away. The fugue condition (ambulatory automatism) was a popular mental illness in France in the 1890's, almost forgotten today... and now we have newer popular illnesses (chronic fatigue for instance) that thrive in today's culture.

It doesn't mean they're not "real", but seem to have a time and place when the conditions are right. Satanic abuse hyseria did not take off in Tunis, for instance, but became huge in protestant America.

I don't know anything about any of these cases, I'm frantically googling.

I'm not saying Chronic Fatigue is without merit, but I'll be very suprised if people are still suffering from it in 75 years.

Once people are introduced to a form these socially acceptable mental illnesses, they're more likely to be stricken with them.

Mental disorders are VERY culturally specific (anorexia is a north american/western european disease. in, i think, malaysia it is there is a mental disorder where young men attack people with axes). This is not to say that they aren't "real" but that the way behavior is interpreted (and mental disorders are always interpreted indirectly) is relative.

x-post

Chronic Fatigue, because it's in currently in the mass media, is a new disorder that seems to fill a need right now. The sufferers are only occasionally debilitated, but most just undergo a lowered quality of life. Therefore, for some people (and I'm not saying everybody), having a neatly packaged diagnosis that fits in with their lives, is talked about in the media, etc, is easier that something hardcore and scary. Chances are they met a chronic fatigue sufferer before they came down with it, so therefore it is more 'socially acceptable' because it's diagnosed more often.

There's been some therapists who've kind of "led" their patients into "remembering" completely fabricated abuse - but of course there is also quite a lot of genuine abuse too.

Interestingly, a study was done of adults who were injured as children, with hospital records available, and many of them don't remember their documented mishaps.

I have met people who claim to have multiple personalities - I'm not about to tell them their experience isn't valid, but privately I'm a bit skeptical.

Remember that schizophrenia is a totally different illness from multiple personality disorder - I don't think anyone doubts that schizophrenia is a real disorder; I was in a psychiatric hospital with many schizophrenics and it's a real and recognisable disorder.

"Rather than being a bona-fide disease, so-called schizophrenia is a nonspecific category which includes almost everything a human being can do, think, or feel that is greatly disliked by other people or by the so-called schizophrenics themselves.  There are few so-called mental illnesses that have not at one time or another been called schizophrenia...."

x-post again

Yeah, there is a problem in that it is so ill-understood, and it's probably the case that there are a handful of different forms of schizophrenia all being treated with the same anti-psychotics. Nevertheless, it is clear that something is wrong with schizophrenics, and with treatment they can lead a normal life. Nothing beyond that really matters. (as it is, of course, many schizophrenics spend their lives institutionalised, either in hospitals or prison, or on the streets).

x-post. Well, that is really mind-body problems, or the problem of other-minds, and I don't think those questions are going to be solved any time soon. Schizophrenics brain chemistry is notably different from that of non-sufferers, and it doesn't seem unwise to assume that disordered and uncontrolled behaviour is linked to a mental illness, especially when the experience of the patient is so different to that of non-sufferers.

Also: Now that several celebrities (Mike Wallace, for instance) have been forthcoming about their battles with depression, people are finding strength to do battle with this very real and debilitating illness.

(The harder part is that many minority communities do not deal well with mental illness at all, and it often goes undiagnosed and untreated because of the shame connected with it.)

Has anyone noticed that bi-polar seems to get thrown around ALOT these days? If someone's mother is alternately cranky and pleasant, her daughters tell everyone she's bipolar.

Oh, and I'm not saying that no one is crazy either, I'm just saying that more of it may be behavioural than would be popular to say nowadays.

Well, if you believe that changed in the brain can cause behavioural differences, which if you've been drunk wouldn't be illogical, and you believe in the scientific method, I think accepting that the changes that exist in the brains of schizophrenics represent a real illness isn't crazy. After all, it's not as if these changes are small, or random. I also think there have been studies into the brains if undiagnosed schizophrenics, but seeing as how I csn't figure out for the life of me how that would be achieved I will have to put that down to false memory syndrome until I find a copy of the paper.

I'm really playing devil's advocate, but I do believe that social,behavioural and upbringing are HUGE components in mental illness.

I managed to get myself diagnosed this year with Mixed Connective Tissue Disorder, a very vague chronic illness which I'm told has something to do with the immune system. How this came about was that I had a blood test which apparently showed that I was showing similar signs to other people who have been diagnosed with auto-immune diseases like lupus etc. (I have no medical knowledge and don't really understand what this means). After that, I had a couple of consultations with doctors who asked me questions like "Do you get joint pains?", "Do you often feel fatigued?" and "Do you ever get rashes?". I answered Yes to a lot of these questions, probably because I am quite suggestible and also most of the symptoms they suggested to me didn't seem particularly uncommon in mild forms. The more I think about it, the more I think this disease may not really exist at all. There are statistics saying millions of people have it, but if those people were mostly diagnosed in the same vague, lazy way that I was, it is no surprise there are so many.

So this makes me wonder how many other conditions and illnesses could be being diagnosed in the same way.

Oh my goodness, this is completely unrelated but I was still feeling a little bit scared from the Satanic cult stuff and then someone sent me this:
http://www.princeton.edu/~ccaro/mist_or_ghost.html

Yes, so do I - in fact that's another point that there's very little doubt about; there are huge differences in the rate of schizophrenia, depression etc. in urban compared to rural areas, for example. But there's also lots of evidence to show that mental illness is largely genetic. It seems that causes are not going to be simple to undestand.

I wa getting quite defensive there, for no real reason. My apologies.

Right now there's a whole lot of marketing of anxiety drugs... it's kind of a chicken & egg thing I guess.

Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder). From my own limited experiences as a psychologist, I do believe that there are true cases of this (people react to trauma in very different ways), and it's good to keep an open mind. I also retain what I hope is a healthy skeptism as a default when people claim they have it, as I also believe there are probably way more false positives than true positives (due to the often dramatic nature associated with the disorder).

I once did a paper on SRA for a graduate class on repressed memories. In it I took the position that SRA is basically a mix of urban legend with people's susceptibility to suggestion (kind of like that story you get every Halloween in college campuses about a psycho who will show up and kill everyone at a specific building). As someone mentioned, the 'Satanic abuse' or 'Satanic conspiracy' theme has considerable former precedent within our culture: consider horror films like Rosemary's Baby, Race with the Devil, Brotherhood of Satan, etc. Yet it is simply not plausible that this alleged activity (ritual murders, etc.) would be able to occur on such a level that the FBI would not be able to find one piece of evidence on it, etc. I think in my research on the phenomenon, it was also suggested that SRA claims tend to occur during times of economic depression and in rural areas that are more remote and less under the scrutiny of a larger body of people (i.e., you won't see any claims of SRA in NYC during times of economic boom).

For repressed memories/implantation during psychotherapy, while it is obviously a complex issue and every therapist is different, I have to say I am a firm believer in the power of suggestion, and that some people are particularly suggestible to suggestion. Put this together with a therapist's ability to suggest certain messages (the most infamous example I can think of being the book The Courage to Heal: "If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were." --I think they've wisely edited that sentence out in later editions) and you can have the potential for great harm.

Also, the girl who said she saw her father kill a playmate in 1969, I can't remember all the details - but there was never a missing girl or anything, it appears to be all false memory.

I think this is a good description (again, I'm not an expert on Dissociative Disorders). Many psychiatric disorders are thought of as extremes or exaggerations of normal emotions or coping styles (how extreme, of course, is the question). It is normal human experience to get down, to get irritated at others or experience anxiety, to wash our hands when they get dirty or to check the stove if we think it's been left on, to unwind at the casino (or the bar, or the gym)...it's in the extremes of these feelings or behaviors that pathology enters the picture.

What I like about this description is (at least for me), it removes the drama associated with 'dissociation' as this big, mysterious, fantastic thing and in its intuitive appeal as an extreme of a normal human behavior (escape from an event too stressful or overloading), presents it more as something understandable, plausible, and approachable for study.

most DID sufferers do report hearing voices, but DID is not a psychotic disorder as there are no hallucinations or delusions.

The way this can begin to be assessed is that auditory hallucinations are defined as having an 'external percept'. That is, for a true auditory hallucination, the person should be hearing a voice (whisper, other sound, etc.) reasonably in the same way that they are hearing you speaking to them.

Whereas for the people with dissociative disorders I've spoken to (again, not even a handful), the descriptions are more paradoxical (something along the lines of 'a voice that is me, but not me')--and there is more of an internal quality to it rather than the external percept quality (i.e., the 'voice' is experienced as a part of themselves or 'inside' themselves, rather than like hearing a voice or noise as if it came from the outside).

I'm bipolar and lived through nearly two years of utter hell in California when going to a county mental health clinic. Every time I visited, I saw a different psychiatrist, and every psychiatrist changed my meds to something "newer and better." As a result, I was changing meds every month to six weeks for more than a year, and by the end I was far, far worse off than I was at the beginning. It wasn't until I could get with a psych who took me off all that crap and started over with basics that I could begin to find some kind of equilibrium.

Even now, years later, I have to constantly question my meds doc every time she wants to change a medication. Almost every time, it's simply because the one she wants to change me to is "new and better." But I figure as long as the old ones are working, why change?

Damn drug companies. They push the providers, who push us, the consumers.

Oh... and as for dissociation... We all have dissociation to some degree. Some just have it to a higher degree, and with some people it get out of control and takes on a life of its own. But we all dissociate, regularly.

One thing I posted to another thread that bears repeating:

For the FDA to register an antidepressant, it requires only two successful trials showing that the drug performs superior to placebo.
The rub is that it can be two successful trials out of an unlimited (to my knowledge) number of total trials; that is, including numerous trials that fail to show any difference between the drug and placebo.

Hopefully, they are in the process of establishing more respectable guidelines for acceptance...

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/11/ma_565_01.html

There is a parallel between MPD and the less extreme dissociations that gurus, rock stars actors, and other famous people experience when trying to construct a public image. The public image may be inconsistent with, or at odds with, one's non-public persona.

Thus: Rod Stewart. I choose to champion the less obvious variations of this mental illness;it's difficult to find healthy artists. Bi- polar is better known as manic depression and as sad and sick as it may be, this particular disaese has been touted as a reason for artistic purpose. I am in no posisition to criticize art - but i can say that every record of our most respected artists talks about something that I would target as bi-polar and manic depression. Look around and listen - you might feel it too.

dude. Thus: Ziggy Stardust.

he lives of bipolar people tend to attract interest from everyone, as they're so full of drama and comedy.

Do you have a problem with drama and comedy? I quite like both.

And third:

we habitually ignore sane artists

BECAUSE WE CAN'T FUCKING FIND ANY GOOD ONES.

I do find it a little odd though.

I find good art a little odd. I want to keep it that way.

I'm listening to Burzum as I type this, hahaha.

Uh... no.

I do hope that a least a few people argue with you on this point.

If mental illness and creativity go together, as Kay Redfield Jamison and others claim...

Let's take it over here.

By 17th and 18th century standards, all us modern folks are already in a cold steel cage, naked, irredemably insane. Also, we are all more free than they could ever have conceived.

OMG we've questioned God! In light of that, who cares what we, today, define as "insane"?

Sanity is relative. Freedom is as well.

There are many "culture-bound syndromes", (which to a greater or lesser extent most of the posts here agree are "real") but anorexia nervosa isn't one of them. In Polynesia, for example, where skinniness isn't regarded as the height of beauty, there are comparable rates of eating disorders with N America and W Europe.

I don't really see the term "insane" as being of any use in any context, medical, social or otherwise.

I'm talking having a psychiatric illness to a clinically impairing degree, not just "oh they think waay differently = mentally unstable"

I've been looking at tumblrs by people who claim 'natural multiplicity' all day.

Some of them claim their alters (headmates) are fictional characters. Some of them claim they are vampires.

I quickly reached the point where I couldn't tell who was trolling.

http://x-trung.tumblr.com/post/27678139066/im-not-one-of-jenns-headmates-i-am-a-singlet-with

"Jenn. 22. Cisgendered female. Transabled. Pansexual. Member of a multiple system. Gainer. Vegan. Feminist. Fat activist. Transfat activist. Demiplatonic. Aromantic. Asensual. Trying to learn. Trying to accept. Faltering. Trying again.

"Justice. 23. Genderfluid FAAB. All pronouns acceptable. Racially mixed PoC. Pansexual but currently nonsexual. Trans* activist. Hardcore vegan activist. Animal rights. Organic Raw Vegan. Former O.S. Anti-racism. Feminist. Eating disordered and working to recover. BPD. OCD. Anxiety. I'm not one of Jenn's headmates. I am a singlet with my own body."

Here's an idea, J&J -- why not try to do something interesting? Perhaps you could help someone with some real problems (other than pathological narcissism, I mean).

And here's an idea: maybe you could stop reading people's tumblrs as if they were a freakshow for your amusement.

how did u know three word username was one of my alters

what does "FAAB" mean

never mind, ty google

http://www.banglads.com/sportswear-7/mens-skintight-38/ultra-skin-wrestling-singlet-white-9226-6918_medium.jpg

www.banglads.com

nope, not going there at work

Only one of me in here. Could not have possibly read this tumbler more than the 2 minutes I just did. (I read fast). Fuck privileged people who have active functioning support systems and make up disorders in order to feel special. Give this person $500 and a one-way bus ticket to a new city and see how long it takes to transition to a scared poor person.

Oh man. I just gis'd "singlet". Did NOT realize where I was getting it from!

http://www.thejcklatch.us/

How do you know, from reading person's Tumblr for 2 minutes, exactly what their situation is?

Seems to me like you're just ~looking for something to get offended about~ even reading the thing to start with.

Are you transannoying? 'cause you're starting to piss me off. (jokes)

Take two minutes and read and you find out what I found out. Can't help you if you're transilliterate.

http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic275304_md.jpg