Talk:Dissociative identity disorder/Archive 2

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Archive 2005

Detractors?

On the whole I like your edits, Bluejay. However, I'm not sure changing skeptics to detractors is such a great idea. Skeptics is a neutral word, detractors is negative. How about debunkers? That gives the same idea of attacking an idea, but has a more positive connotation. I'll make the change and we'll see how it looks. Zora 08:20, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I don't particularly like any of those words as they tend to be ambiguous and in the weasel word category. Words like advocates, proponents, exponents, supporters and opponents -- used in relation to the actual names of such people -- are much more neutral. I've found that you need to be very careful with the word "skeptic" in this context, as it can be manipulated. See the climate change and global warming pages for good examples of how the word "skeptic" is misattributed. --Viriditas | Talk 08:26, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Cleanup

Aloha, Zora. I added the cleanup header per Wikipedia:Cleanup resources. The article needs just about everything: copyediting, formatting, wikifying, POV checking, removal of weasel words etc. I'm hoping the header will bring others in to help. If you think another header would be more appropriate (attention?) then feel free to change it. As a very small example, the table of contents needs to be moved below a lead (which also needs to be tight) so that the casual reader will be able to glance at the definition at the top of the page without having to read through the TOC and ~four paragraphs just to find out what this article is all about. --Viriditas | Talk 09:58, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Healthy Multiplicity

We are a healthy multiple collective, and we would like to see more attention paid to the healthy Multiplicity section. We may even do it ourselves.

Um, right now the healthy multiplicity section is one of the longer ones, so making it even longer doesn't seem like a good idea to me. That unbalances the article and seems to slight the other viewpoints. But what about writing a separate article on Healthy multiplicity? Then we could link to that article from the DID page. Just be sure that it's a summary of current views, research, news, etc., and not original research. You can start the article just by clicking on the red link in the sentence above.

There may be some argument about whether or not that's the right name for the article, but articles can be moved to a new name, so just start and we can argue later <g>. Zora 15:37, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

Restructuring of article

I’d like to help in the cleanup of this article, but I think we need to restructure it in order to make it unbiased and useful to those who don’t know what DID is. Currently, the article seems particularly biased toward the opinion that if DID exists, it is a mental disorder that’s all in the mind. The current article does not list any of the purported symptoms of DID separately from the debate of the disorder’s existence.

In the overview, for example, we need to state what DID can be defined as before we start discussing the controversy of its existence. After the overview, the current article is split into categories that are, mostly, arbitrary classifications for groups of individuals who, to varying degrees, do or do not believe the that DID exists as it is most commonly defined. This is irrelevant to what DID actually is and such categories should be grouped under a sub-heading given a name such as “Controversy”. Also, these categories NEED to be renamed. The term “Debunker”, for example, is NOT neutral! We would do well to use the term “Criticism” in place of “Debunkers” – a debunker is someone who exposes falsehoods, it is therefore biased.

This is why I suggest we restructure this article before we attempt to clean it up and neutralize the language. However, we need to be in agreement about its structure. I suggest the following:

  1. Overview
  2. Diagnosis
  3. Controversy (in which DID is debated in neutral language)
  4. Treatment
  5. External links
  6. References

Obviously, this can be developed as time passes and new information is added. I’m confident that the current article will fit into these six categories. However, before I charge into the article like a raging bull, I want to confirm this with those who have been working hard to improve on this article for a long period of time.

Jdbartlett 04:37, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

Um, you're assuming that DID exists, that it is a disorder, and that it can be reliably diagnosed and treated. This POV is to start the article, and then everything else is to be lumped into controversy. I protest vigorously. So do a great many other people. You can't START by assuming a controversial POV.
But I appreciate it that you opened the matter on the talk page before wading into the article. Zora 04:56, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
No, I'm not assuming that DID exists, that it is a disorder, or that it can be reliably diagnosed and treated. However, I do believe we should start the article by stating that "DID is most commonly described as a rare mental disorder in which two or more distinct personality systems develop in the same individual. This definition, however, is the subject of much controversy (and here we would point to the controversy section)..."
As I stated, we can link to controversy within the overview but should not do so before we state what DID is most commonly described as. Doing so is NOT providing bias - imagine looking up 'God' in Wikipedia and first seeing the statmenet, 'There is a lot of debate as to whether or not God exists. People who believe he does/does not are...' As you will see from following the link to the 'God' article, it has been contributed to a great deal but follows no such pattern!
Whether or not DID exists, it IS diagnosed and it IS treated, just as whether or not God exists he IS praised and IS exalted. We should first provide the facts about why people reached the conclusion that DID exists before we provide the facts about why people reached the conclusion that it doesn't! Otherwise, we will provide no useful information at all to people who arrive at this article wondering what DID is!
I believe the best solution would be to make it clear in the outline (in which we will attempt to describe DID) what the context is, then to explain the definition unself-consciously. This is in line with Wikipedia's suggestions:Talk:Neutral_point_of_view#NPOV_regarding_unusual_claims
See also Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view#Making_necessary_assumptions, and Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view#Giving_.22equal_validity.22
I appreciate your quick response. I have another idea, which is to split the article into the definitions of MPD, DID and MPS and use the DID front page to link to each of these three articles and then state the controversy on the front page. Could this be a better solution? Jdbartlett 13:51, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

Child abuse

I did some work on biased wording in the article’s overview. I am not personally willing to reorganize any structure at this stage as we are not yet in agreement as to how this should be done.

In the rest of the article, there seems to be a lot of emphasis placed on controversies surrounding child abuse and recovered/repressed memories. Almost always, those claiming DID also claim to have suffered abuse as children, often from their parents, and DID is always linked to some form of PTSD. However, there are a few cases of individuals who claim to have DID but have linked it to some trauma other than child abuse. I think this is worth a mention in the article, and I think we should lever the stress of the article away from child abuse and rather address DID itself. This is in accordance with Wikipedia’s recommendations.

The problem is that DID in the US is almost always linked with child abuse. You can't really discuss one without mentioning the other. In my opinion, that's because the whole syndrome is communicated as a meme -- people learn about DID and child abuse at the same time, and present with the expected symptoms. That's why the cross-cultural evidence is so interesting, since it breaks up the meme. Also interesting is the case of Chris Sizemore, the original of "Eve", who published her side of the story in I'm Eve. A fascinating book. She didn't seem to have suffered any memorable childhood traumas -- she was just prone to dissociate, and extremely impressionable. She continued displaying alters for years after she was supposedly "cured", and says she finally got better when she went to a therapist who wasn't interested in her alters, just in helping her become functional. I wanted to put that book in the article, but it seemed to constitute original research. Zora 01:29, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
Although DID is almost always linked with child abuse, DID is not a symptom of child abuse. The two are different things. Currently, the article pays too much attention to how allegations of child abuse should be dealt with, a subject completely irrelevant to DID. Jdbartlett 03:52, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

Child abuse and repressed memory is an undeniably important factor in DID, but there are already articles about child abuse and repressed memory. As concerns the debate of how these factors should be addressed and what there merit is, links should be provided to those separate articles (and much of the information in this article will be valuable to those separate articles) but it is not proper to detail the debate of how claims of child abuse should be addressed in an article about DID, which is the result of believed child abuse and not necessarily a symptom of child abuse. Just as when someone jumps of a cliff they may not necessarily die, those who have suffered child abuse may not necessarily develop DID. Likewise, when someone dies, it may or may not be the result of having jumped from a cliff. Most claimed DID cases are the result of child abuse, excepting the few.

You seem to be coming from a POV that says that DID of course EXISTS. Having watching someone learn about DID and then do his best to display it (!!!), I have to differ. I don't think it's a bad idea that there's a "believer" of sorts here, since I was having a hard time doing justice to that POV. But I am going to fight tooth and nail against privileging that POV in any way.
Whatever our personal opinions are should be kept out of Wikipedia's article. No POV should be priveleged, only respected and presented in a neutral manner. Also, I’m fed up with all this garbage about so-called “believers”. I certainly don’t think that every person who claims someone abused them as a child should be given merit simply because the possibility is dangerous. I think it’s a very difficult topic and there are a lot of issues at stake. I do, however, believe that it is possible for the human mind to develop more than one personality system and that SHOULD be the issue BUT AT THE MOMENT, IT IS NOT! There is too much about child abuse in this article. Child abuse is not the issue, DID is the issue. Certainly, we should be discussing whether or not people support the DID diagnosis and their reasons for their position, but that is unrelated to the topic of child abuse. To write about child abuse, use the child abuse article, NOT the DID article. Is that clear? Jdbartlett 03:52, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
C'mon, you're losing your temper already. Why yell at me for being honest about my personal reasons for scepticism, and then pretend that YOU aren't emotional?
Why don't you write up an alternate version and instead of posting it on the page, put it up on your talk page, as I said, and then we can negotiate over some existing words. Zora 06:11, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
Yeah, I'm sorry for losing my temper, it's just all I see on this page is an oversimplification of a battle that's unrelated to DID itself. Let me put it this way, if someone absolutely believes in their mind that something is real, whether or not that's a delusion, it's something they believe strongly enough for it to affect them. That's what a mental disorder is, and that's why I don't think the issue of child abuse and SRA should be so prominent on this page. Whoever has faked DID in the past, that's as irrelevant as faking a headache is to the existence of headaches. DID is, by its nature as a mental disorder, something we have to take the sufferer's word on. Otherwise, we may as well question every disorder in the book.

Aargh, things are getting too indented. I think you're missing out on part of the "disease" process, the cultural part. How people are going to perceive and manifest problems is highly culturally dependent -- and, the presentation can be a cultural performance designed to DO things. From my POV, the "reality" of the DID diagnosis is vital for people who want to use it to manipulate those around them, by manifesting "littles" and demanding to be treated as children. I agree that it's evidence of some form of mental disorder to engage in such twisted strategies, instead of being able to say, "I feel very scared and vulnerable and needy right now, and I'm begging you to pamper me a little". IMHO, it bespeaks a need to control the interaction and demand the pampering as of right, instead of asking for it and being possibly being hurt by means of the exposed vulnerability.

Mental "disease" is not something like smallpox, which is going to manifest the same way whether you're American or Chinese. Take something like BDD, body dismorphic disorder, which is only recently being recognized, sorted out, whatever. In BDD, people locate their feelings of wrongness, misery, shame, their mental anguish, in a body part. The body part is wrong or extraneous, or it's being attacked, and all would be right if the body part were fixed. Some have speculated that people who opt for transgender surgery have BDD (if only I didn't have this damn penis, everything would be OK). Amputees by choice may have BDD. East Asians who think they are being attacked by a witch, who is causing their penises to shrink into their body, probably have BDD. How the BDD manifests would seem to be culturally determined.

DID would seem to be like BDD, except that "states of mind" are quarantined and rejected, rather than body parts. These states of mind can only be recognized or dealt with as "others" or "alters". If this is right, then DID would be transcultural. However, how it is perceived and manifested is highly cultural. Whether you go to shrink or a shaman is cultural.

I didn't put any of this in the article, because it's my own thoughts, my own "original research", which is prohibited. I'm just bringing it up to try to jolly you out of a DID=smallpox mental model. It's not that simple. Zora 19:29, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

I can understand where you're coming from with culture affecting the manifestation of DID (although the same could be argued, not just of BDD, but of all mental diseases).
I dunno. There are some diseases, like schizophrenia or OCD, which are found all over the world, and manifest in much the same fashion. These are also the ones for which chemical remedies are being found, and genetic pathways being explored. So it's possible that some of the things we classify as "mental disease" are biochemical in origin. Others seem to have a more cultural basis or expression. There's no hard line btween biochemical and cultural, however (lots of studies on how experiences and mindsets affect the actual functioning of body and brain). That's why I didn't want to generalize too far. Zora 00:14, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
I know two people with a DID diagnosis and both have other diagnoses in addition to DID. One of these people is polyfragmented and has many "littles", the other is not and has only one. Neither of them "switch" to "littles" when they feel scared or vulnerable or needy. They do both have alters for such times but they are especially trained not to panic or seek attention, but to fit in with whatever situation. A difference in culture and upbringing could have lead to different results, I agree.
It would seem that you have only had one experience with DID, and that with someone trying to emulate DID from what they've read of it and use it to gain attention (thus manifesting histrionic symptoms) rather than being diagnosed with DID because they manifested signs of it and only then began to learn what DID itself is. Only in the case of someone pretending to believe they have DID (histrionic/hypochondriac) is the "realness" of the DID diagnosis important. Jdbartlett 23:55, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
Again, I dunno. Based on my observations of that one person, and the social milieu in which he learned how to be multiple, I can't say that I've EVER known of anyone who had DID without social cueing, whether from friends, therapists, books, TV shows, or movies like Sybil. I might admit that the terrified "That's not ME!" or "It's not happening to ME!" response -- dissociation -- is universal, but DID as described in the DSMIV seems to be culturally shaped. No, wait -- I know one more person who dissociated -- she was a Tongan woman who as a teenager had been avea, possessed by demons. She seemed perfectly ordinary to me as I interacted with her in day-to-day village life. She didn't act in any way like the Westerner I knew. She was also acting out a social script -- Tongan teenage girls are prone to avea and manifest it in the same scripted way. Not that I ever got to watch, only heard stories.
If DID were as biochemical, and universal as schizophrenia, it would show the same statistical profile -- invariant across cultures. As per the Wikipedia article over which we're arguing, the DID stats don't show that at all. Zora 00:14, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
There is no known link between DID and biochemical imbalance and the manifestation of "alters" often varies from individual to individual.
Both the two people I mentioned diagnosed with DID are markedly antisocial and only spend time around others when circumstances require it. Both have tested with IQs far above MENSA level. This is not unusual in DID patients. One of the two (the polyfragmented one) has shown signs of DID since early childhood. As a child, X watched no television depicting DID nor any movies depicting DID (this confirmed by X's mother, who was very strict about the amount of time and type of material X watched) and read no books depicting DID. X would "black out" for periods of time but believed this to be normal. Often, we have discovered, an "alter" would take control of the body during these times, often caused by specific triggers. X's mother is particularly aware that sometimes, X's behavior was markedly different. As X grew older, handwriting, spoken and written language, gender, and many other features of the alters became more prominent when "switching" occurred and, when X began therapy, X was diagnosed with DID.
What is invariant about DID is that two or more distinct personality systems develop in the same individual. That is as good to say, "What's universal about DID, is DID." However, just as the attitude and presence of "voices" varies from individual to individual with schizophrenia, the attitude and known (to the DID patient) "presence" of alters varies from individual to individual suffering from DID. There is record of some alters of some different DID patients displaying different EEG results, but such studies have been performed in a deficient number of cases (partly due to the rarity of the DID diagnosis itself).
DID is a rare condition and is rarely diagnosed as such. Possibly, some instances of demonic possession could have lead to a DID diagnosis had the sufferer visited a therapist. Similarly, though, schizophrenia is known to have been believed to be demonic possession by some.
As you said, "triggered" involuntary dissociation [i]is[/i] a universal phenomenon. One of the theoretical causes of DID is that the DID-diagnosed "learn" how to trigger such dissociations and perform them voluntarily. Often, though, such voluntary dissociation (or "switching") is learned after the sufferer has already developed "multiple personalities". Another theory is that constant involuntary dissociation leaves such an impression that the mind "splits". The current article alludes to this theory.
However, the "blame" for DID's cause often lies in some other trauma, such as child abuse. Since this is only the cause and not effect (in the case of DID, the effect being "multiple personalities"), the treatment of accused child abusers and the probability that many recovered memories of such abuse contain inaccuracies is not incumbent or beneficial to the discussion of DID itself. Jdbartlett 14:44, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
I think I'll follow your advice and put a DID page on my talk page. I'll try to include as much of the information in the current article as possible, excepting the stuff that's not really about DID and merely clutters the article. Jdbartlett 13:51, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
Part of the problem may be that the distinction between "believers" and "mainstream professionals who still use the diagnosis" is primarily historical. At one point, when the diagnosis was new, everyone was a believer and wacky beliefs and therapies grew like kudzu. Over time, the problems in an "anything goes" approach have become apparent, and professionals are a lot more cautious. But ... there are still "true believers" out there, consulting their dreams and "body memories" and coming up with bizarre stories. Just not so many. Perhaps merging the two categories and talking about the historical process would be useful.
I think this could be a step in the right direction, but if we did it, I think we'd have to rename the "believers" section. Jdbartlett 03:52, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
I'm not sure that the healthy multiples viewpoint should be changed in any way. That has primarily been contributed by people who think that they are healthy multiples. It's a strong viewpoint, at least on the net. The critics section also seems good to me ... though it could also be described as mostly historical, in that the worst of the abuses have stopped and there's little of the flamboyant behavior that made such good copy.
I agree. Jdbartlett 03:52, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
If you want to try to reorganize the article on a historical basis and put it up on YOUR own talk page, for comment, we might be able to get through this without coming to hate each other <g>. Zora 01:29, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

Currently, “believers” in this article are defined as those who believe that child abuse such as that which could have triggered DID, occurred. “Believers” are not, then, defined as those who believe that DID occurs or exists or is a valid disorder. Whether or not child abuse occurred in specific cases of DID is always debatable and should be debated in the proper place, which is in the articles related to child abuse, repressed memory and recovered memory. This is an article about DID, not about child abuse or repressed/recovered memory. We should make this distinction clearer, not blur it.

As I said previously, they present together, in at least this culture. Zora 01:29, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia is not restricted to one culture or POV. DID is most commonly described as a disorder in which a sufferer displays more than one personality system, child abuse is the abuse of children. These are two different things. This article should be about DID, there's not even a mention of terms such as 'polyfragmented'. At the moment, all this article is, is a cat fight between people who do and do not believe DID patients suffered severe childhood trauma. My response: irrelevant. We need to address the issue, which is DID. We need to LINK to the possible causes: child abuse, Sadistic & Cult Ritual Abuse, etc. But these things are not the issue itself, the issue itself is DID. Whether or not people in certain cultures are used to seeing these things presented together is irrelevant. The article, as it stands, is a shambles because people tried to present the child abuse issue. Jdbartlett 03:52, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

As with my other recent talk topic, this is a call for a major edit and I believe we should discus it here before taking action. Jdbartlett 15:18, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

PS: Why does FMSF have its own section in the article? Certainly, there should be a link to an FMSF Wikipedia article when discussing criticism of DID, but this is a matter that concerns False Memory Syndrome distinctly from DID. Jdbartlett 15:18, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
It's there because we had a visit from someone who sounded just like Sue Blume (I've seen her in action on Usenet) going into conniption fits about the article, we were FMSF dupes, pedophiles, whatever. At least I think that was it. When people charge into an article screaming that Wikipedia is trying to whitewash something terrible, I usually try to treat the matter at least cursorily in the article, if necessary linking to another article, because that heads off the accusations of bias and the vandalism. If you want to move the FMSF stuff out to another article, that's fine, as long as there's a link we can point to.
I think doing so might be for the best, using the same reasoning as I did on the child abuse stuff. It's a different topic, not strictly related, etc. User:Jdbartlett/jdbartlett

To whoever said that they have a great understanding of the healthy multiplicity issue, you don't. Period. Healthy multiplicity is many people in one body, a group that can be very diverse. Our own system has a huge number of people, and we are working on expanding the number of Collective members who can front. Don't take the arrogant attitude of telling US what our truth is. (Johnathan and James Christian.)Battrarules

I have no idea what your complaint is, if any. It's possible you misunderstood my choice of words for stating something malefic, though I have no idea how. It's possible you believed I misunderstood the term Healthy Multiplicity, though I have no idea why. In short, I have no idea what it is you are assuming I'm telling you your "truth# is or how (or why) on earth you assume so. It seems as though you are actually trying to take offense. I can assure you, I intended my comment to be completely innocuous. Again, I have no idea what it is you are assuming I am assuming! Perhaps empathy would have been a better word than understanding; other than that, my best advice to you is, don't take the arrogant attitude of assuming your truth is the only one, especially regarding something so complex as MPD/DID/HM! However, I've taken down that comment in case it causes further unintended offense. That aside, I'd appreciate any helpful research you've uncovered on the matter. Currently, I have an outline of a sketch of a sketch for a new DID article on my user talk page, but have been very busy since I first posted it. It's my hope to eventually replace the current DID page with something that's actually about DID, as opposed to the current article which is mostly about child abuse. One of my thoughts was that Healthy Multiplicity deserves its own page, but I'm worried that in doing so its mention in the DID article will be lost and people wanting to read about DID won't see it. Either way, I plan on ref. to the Layman's Guide to Healthy Multiplicity (http://www.kitsune.cx/blackbirds/layman/) a great deal as it is a notably well-researched brochure. Jdbartlett

Being Pamela

I have just now put onto the chronology Being Pamela, a Channel 4 documentary in the UK about Pamela, a patient suffering from DID due to her abuse as a child. There is currently no individual article about it but I've mentioned it. I thought it was really moving. Her personality had split into 4 "inner characters" - Margaret, Susan, Sandra and Andrew. Celestianpower 22:41, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The story of Pamela is in itself controversial. She is described as disabled by her multiplicity to the point that she needs 24-7 caretakers. This is very unusual even according to the psychiatric literature. Some web-reviewers have speculated not so much that the documentary itself was phonied up (although you never know with television, considering what happened to Linda Massey when she was interviewed for BBC's Horizon) but that Pamela is being deliberately kept nonfunctional for some reason. My guess is financial. --Bluejay Young 17:30, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

DID/MPD differentiation, remove argument in "critics" section

Someone in an online forum complained that this article said that use of the term MPD implied that the alters were real, while use of the term DID implied that the alters were delusional. I think that a good argument could be made for this position -- that the changes in the DSM from the MPD to the DID diagnosis implied this subtle but important change in POV -- but that argument should be spelled out in detail, where it could be rebutted. So I removed the offending phraseology. If it's not set up in a way that it could be refuted, it's POV.

Someone also seems to have added a rebuttal to the critics in the "critics" section. I thought that the whole point of the various sections was to allow each side to lay out its case fully and not to go into detailed controversy. That way lies muddle. So I deleted the rebuttal.

This also is a complex question. The person who added the rebuttal (I haven't looked through the history to find out who it was) says that of course most DID diagnoses are made by a few specialists, that's why they're specialists. Um, well, the way medical specialists usually work is that they see patients who are referred to them by generalist doctors. So the generalist, the ordinary every-day shrink who deals with all sorts of disorders, would have to suspect DID before referring a patient to a DID-specialist. I believe that some of this MUST happen. But there are also too many stories, from the critical camp, of people visiting shrinks whom they believed to be generalists, for problems like anxiety, marital conflict, etc., and being assured that they had MPD/DID, and the generalist not referring, but proceeding to treatment. I believe that the huge spike in MPD/DID diagnoses during the 1980s and 1990s must have come from shrinks of the latter variety -- but that's an impression. The only way we could really be sure is to look at the referral pattern statistically, and I'm not sure that there's enough data to do that. I'd have to look at more detailed sources and report back. Zora 08:45, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

Recent edits by anon

An anon rewrote the article and pushed it towards the "of course DID is real" position in various ways. I don't think that this is being even-handed. I took the various arguments, claims for experimental validation, etc., and put them in the "current mainstream opinion" section. They have not been removed, just moved.

I must take issue with one supposed research finding advanced by the anon, the statement that "researchers also found that the degree of skepticism about DID among a sample of mental health professionals was correlated with their lack of knowledge of the diagnostic criteria for the disorder". Interpreting lack of INTEREST in DID diagnostic criteria as lack of KNOWLEDGE of the criteria, and then correlating this with scepticism as if these were idependent variables is bad analysis. They are NOT independent variables. Those who believe in DID are going to have read up on the matter, considered the possibility that they might have to diagnose it, and in general paid some attention to the criteria. Those who think it's all a fad (and a passe one at that) are not going to have bothered to memorize the criteria. I don't think the implicit conclusion, that "the more you know about it, the more likely you are to believe in it", holds. Zora 13:34, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

Hi, Zora. Sorry I haven't been around much lately, I'm stuck in a nasty project for work. I agree that we should keep the article even-handed and agree that the anon's "arguments" you removed are flawed. I still don't understand the "believers/critics" argument, though. What exactly is it about DID that is either "believed" or "not believed"? Why is an article about mental illness being turned into a holy war? It's even tacitly implied in the current article that patients diagnosed with DID are liers (guilty until proven innocent). Jdbartlett

My experiences

Diagnosed with schizophrenia (starting 12 years ago), and recently (1.5 years ago) told I dissociate. Riseridone 50mg every 2 weeks injection, amitriptyline 150mg every night. I liked clozapine (worked well) and other atypical antipsychotics (worked ok), too many side-effects to take clozapine.

I became conscious 6 months ago, following a delivery of vitality through thoughtspace (see www.dissociation.com). Various mental tricks and serious mental trials with or without psychoactive substances, within thoughtspace were given continously over next 6 months. I believe I am multiple (2 months ago). I realised today that alters are actually me and not something or somebody else. I have learned healing and try to "heal up" alters; as a result my dissociating is not so fractured or sudden. Today, I felt other alters, I believe a conduit was made between me and the alter by another person. I have never been able to contact, talk to or feel alters, only remember different states. I healed this alter via the conduit. I am not in control of my dissociation. I feel that others can provoke my dissociation.

False memory syndrome. Its true, I make things up. I also have genuine memories. The more experience I have , the easier it is to separate what is real.

Learning about the spirit world and life essence is much more interesting than being ill. It gives me a better outlook.

Day +1: Became conscious in one of my alters.

MR

Slant on child abuse

I think the slant on child abuse is far too large in this article. I've been reading this talk page for over an hour and I still can't work out a good place to put this, so move it as you will. Anyway, as a sufferer of DID who acquired it after the death of my girlfriend when I was young (no abuse here), the bias is very clear. I'm going to try to clean up some references to it. Revert it as you feel appropriate. -Danny

You may believe that you have DID, and the etiology in your case may indeed be different, but it is indeed true that the majority of people who believe they have DID also believe that they were abused as children. There is a long and complex controversy about the "trauma causes DID" theory; most researchers felt that that sort of general link could not be substantiated. Children who have been through kidnappings, wars, medical traumas, etc., are not more likely to be diagnosed with DID. Zora 02:03, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
Well that's neither here nor there. I'm merely referring to where there have been references to trauma being related, then are heavily slanted towards child abuse. I'm not arguing whether it does or doesn't cause DID, I'm going past that and looking at the actual content of the article which fails to address the fact that some people believe it may be caused by trauma unrelated to child abuse. -Danny
Are there any "some people" besides you? If you can come up with cites from academics and mental health professionals saying that ANY trauma can cause DID, then we can include that theory. I don't know if there are any academics upholding that theory, as it has been debunked by numerous studies. If you feel that your particular case proves the theory, well ... that's your feeling, but if it is not widely shared, it's not NOTABLE enough for inclusion in the article. Here's an example from another article -- there's one gentleman who periodically visits the Kaaba article and tries to insert his theory that the Kaaba was originally a Hindu shrine. The other editors then remove it, because as far as we can tell, this gentleman is the only person in the world who believes that. If he had a million followers, his theory would of course be included.
I might perhaps add that in my own PERSONAL opinion, which of course can't be included in the article, child abuse can cause DID symptoms (I don't say DID, because I'm a sceptic <g>) when the authority doing the abusing is continually insisting that the child's perceptions that he/she is being abused are WRONG, that no abuse is happening, that the child invited it, that the child is at fault, etc. The child's feelings and perceptions are continually being invalidated and dismissed. Children being subjected to sexual abuse are also subjected to a high level of this "mental rape", because the abuser not only wants to hide the abuse, he/she wants to offload the blame. It's not the sexual abuse that's uniquely crazy-making, it's the fact that child sex abuse is so universally scorned and condemned that the perpetrators commit "mental rape" to cover it up. I can well believe that other forms of abuse can cause DID symptoms IF accompanied by "mental rape". But that's my idiosyncratic POV ...
I'm sorry if this makes you feel ignored or excluded, but I hope that you can see the logic of only including widely-held beliefs. Zora 20:09, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
And saying it only exclusively and only due to child abuse is not a widely-held belief either... so why include that? That was what I was targetting. Also note that I don't particularly think going about calling people with mental disorders 'crazy' is particularly appropriate in any Wikipedia discussion. You seem to be missing the fundamental fact: I am not in any way discounting child abuse as a PRIME factor, just not the only one. "Those therapists who accept MPD as a valid, common diagnosis believe that it is induced by extreme, repeated, physical, sexual, and/or emotional abuse during early childhood." - B.A. Robinson, Copyright Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance. That is not exclusively child abuse, that is a variety of different factors.
"If MPD is created by intolerable levels of child abuse during childhood, then one would expect to find MPD symptoms among many children. But MPD seems to be found almost exclusively among adults. In the years prior to 1979, only one case of MPD in a child was reported. By 1988, only 8 new cases had been found. By 1990, 9 additional cases were reported. This represents a minuscule percentage of the total MPD diagnoses." - Multiple Personality Disorder: Witchcraft Survives in the Twentieth Century, August Piper in the Skeptical Inquirer -Danny

The article made that very very very unclear, as though if it were the case that DID was caused by trauma then it was only child abuse. -Danny

Um...I'm not a regular here... but I'm certain I've seen several references in the literature to children who developed DID due to other repeated traumas besides child abuse. It's just that child abuse accounts for the vast majority of cases. I believe I've heard that survivors of the Holocaust who were in the camps at the vulnerable ages, and children who've had to have repeated hospitalizations and surgeries and such, and refugees from wars or extreme poverty, have been found who developed DID without what we conventionally think of as child abuse. (I mean, war and starvation is abuse no matter HOW old you are.)

As far as sexual versus other abuse--same thing, I think--type of abuse doesn't matter. Intensity and frequency of tramatic events during susceptible ages appears to be all that's required. It's just that so few abused children (especially girls) are NOT sexually abused, so it ends up being much more often part of the picture than not.

Anyone who thinks they got DID from losing a girlfriend needs to talk to a different therapist, and do some reading. I think Sidran is pretty good. ISSD (International Society for the Study of Dissociation) has a good, if somewhat professional-oriented, website. They can generally refer people to legitimate, well-informed, experienced therapists for dissociative disorders and PTSD (pretty much ANOTHER thing that seems to go together almost always.)--63.231.119.135

Can you keep your slanderous comments to yourself Anon? This is a board for people interested in the article, not telling people what conditions they have or haven't got. Thanks. -Danny

Another weird condition

The simple fact of the matter is, there's a lot of psychological conditions out there made out to be what they aren't. ADD/ADHD, depression, being bipolar, those are all genetic and behavioral, not something anyone can change. They represent how a person thinks or acts based on what personality traits they inherited from their parents. DID is exactly like hypnosis and amnesia: There's no such thing. People are either just being stupid or they're looking for attention. It happens everday, all over the place. ADD is real -- it represents a persons inability to focus for some reason or another that they can't change or can control to only a limited extent. Someone who is bipolar either simply has a bad attitude yet a lot of charisma (which gives them their high), and goes back and forth, which is even worse if they are naturally depressive. Hyponosis, amnesia(caused by stress) and DID are all absolute BS. Anyone with any critical thinking skills, who applies the slightest amount of logic to the circumstances of the subject will be able to disprove their condition easily. My best advice for any psychologist treating a subject like that is to tell them to go home and get a life.

and your qualifications for making this assessment are...
and what? people are being stupid and looking for attention ever day all over the place?
When I first started dealing with my DID in therapy, I had a hard time believing it myself, and I asked my therapist if she thought I was making this up for attention. She said it was hard to imagine someone with my intelligence and varied interests spending her time and money on therapy just to get attention. She has a point--I have generally always attracted more attention than I am entirely comfortable with.
And believe me it is WAY NO FUN to be DID. Either you go through life half-alive and never knowing yourself and never having a chance to love yourself, or you go into recovery and experience five to ten years of the most excruciatingly painful and disabling therapeutic work you can imagine. (It's worth it in the end, though.)
Anyway, I'm rattling (Mom's been smokin again), but why I actually got onto this page is because I could not make heads nor tails of the description of how to mark an article for cleanup, and really that's not my question anyway. What I want SOMEbody to know (somebody who cares) is that this article is worse than no article at all in its current condition. It's full of stuff that sounds like the writer was just making it up. All that business about the "controversy" about does DID exist--Not, really. Maybe on message boards for people who have nothing better to do with their lives than trash talk other people, I don't know, but in the professional community, no controversy. It's in both Merck and the DSM-IV. That only happens once there's a fairly general consensus. Among some picky people. What IS a controversy is the whole recovered-memory thing, which is peripherally related but not the subject of the article.
I would be willing to slash and burn, but I don't have time to run down all those allegations and find and site the works that would clarify or refute them. I'd be glad to take out everything I'm not fairly sure is true, but I don't want to piss people off, and it would be a much shorter article.63.231.119.135 05:39, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
The professional controversy is there and several books are cited. It's not just "trash talk". Please don't delete everything you don't like. The article tries to present all sides of the controversy, not just "the truth". If you feel that one of the positions is true, and that the position isn't fairly or fully represented, you could work on that section to make sure that it's more representative. Zora 07:07, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
Um... as a multi with difficult-to-identify etiology, I think the point about over-emphasis on childhood abuse is well taken. I remember way back when it was the general consensus that MPD was solely caused by not just Satanic Ritual Abuse, but by a worldwide SRA conspiracy. !

Clearly, they'd never met any actual Satanists. While it's not at all difficult to imagine some particular Satanist (I'm imagining, of course, some particular ones) abusing some particular victim, the idea of a conspiracy... well, to paraphrase P.E.I. Bonewits, it's hard to imagine Satanists successfuly conspiring to order a pizza.

It seems to me that a wide variety of stressors may well cause people who have a predisposition to dissociation to do that, and often enough that particular stresses and situations would become confused with the normal process of personality formation. Whatever that process may be. If indeed, there is such a thing. My last search for reliable data on personality formation came up with a big fat zero.

My point here is that while we may reliably guess that if there was sexual abuse, then we can with at least rhetorical accuracy that MP and the abuse were somehow entangled. Where the problem lies is in taking it a step further, to "since you are multiple, you must have suffered sexual abuse."

Such statements - and the assertion that those who disagree are "in denial" are depressingly common in some fora, most often those most closely associated with the "Medical Model."

I've got to come back to this and add supporting cites; I'm having a bad google day today. Firewheel 06:48, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

my viewpoint

Up until about three years ago my primary occupation was outpatient psychotherapy. I worked with a number of individuals who experienced symptoms of DID, as many as eight clients at any one time. I estimate that I diagnosed as many as seventy people with this diagnosis over the length of my professional career(some twenty years). Some people remained in therapy for years and some exited after only a few sessions. Each of these individuals experienced similar and yet different symptoms. I came to see DID as existing, like all other forms of "mental disorders" on a scale, references to which can be viewed in professional articles on the subject. Some of these clients came to me with a knowledge of their other "selves", but many came to understand their condition during the course of treatment. The most common presenting symptom for treatment was depression. Some mental health diagnoses are similar in symptom presentation to DID. It is critical for the mental health professional to understand the subtle and not so subtle differences in making a differential diagnosis. For example, people who have experienced dissociation(which is related to DID) sometimes experience hearing internal voices. People who experience symptoms of schizophrenia often experience hallucinations involving hearing external voices. A standard diagnostic question is to ask the person if they have ever experienced hearing voices when no one else was around. Not distinguishing between hearing internal vs external voices would lead to an incorrect diagnosis. Another example, Bipolar disorder is characterized by changes in mood, which also occurs when different alters take over the control of the body. I have known of instances where the mental health professional did not differentiate between the two presentations. During my professional career, if I refered a client whom I had diagnosed as having DID to a local psychiatrist for medication assessment, the client would usually be told that they suffered from a different diagnosis, often times schizophrenia. Upon questioning by me the client would report, that no, no distiction was made by the psychiatrist of internal vs external voices. Since members of the professional community do not hold similar standards in making the diagnosis of DID, the result has been chaos, suspicion and misunderstanding, for the clients and public alike. Obviously, not all the differences in the viewpoints about DID are attributable to this phenomenae. Trying to understand this diagnosis though, is similar to differentiating between diagnoses, asking the right questions will lead to a fuller understanding of what is going on.209.173.187.117 18:09, 20 November 2005 (UTC)jim

I'm glad they've tagged this article...

I edited it a little but it is really a terrible article. It meanders in general, makes weak points with little or no logic or documented fact as back up and the points it chooses to make seem pretty obscure or irrelevant.

You'd have more credibility if you got a username and signed your edits and comments. Zora 05:35, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

cleanup

this is coming from someone who knows basically nothing about Dissociative Identity disorder, I thought that after reading the article I might understand it better. Unfortunately this article needs a cleanup with coherency, I didnt really understand what it was trying to say. It also introduced the child abuse strangely and seemed to throw me off as I read it. Even not including any possible POV issues the article might have its not very coherent for an encyclopedia. Please someone rewrite the article so it makes more sense, then the POV issues might be easier to adress for people who dont know everything about the condition.

Dear anon, the problem is that not everyone agrees that there is such a condition, or that it's a disease. That's why there are four points of view represented. That may be one reason it confused you. You may have been assuming that there IS such a thing and that you would find out about it here.
We'll think about what you said, because we don't want the article to be confusing. It's hard to figure out how to make a complicated subject less difficult. Zora 06:09, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Cultural Expression of mental distress

The criticism that DID or MPD presents more often in North America is not a valid critique on whether or not the condition exists. Elsewhere on this page there is a reference to "Kuru", a delusional state specific to Asian men. "Windigo sickness" is confined to Algonkin people. Delusional states are shaped by the culture.

If anyone could come up with a simple test to 'show' the existence of the personality then it might be possible to test whether someone has one, two or multiple personalities. The presence of dissociative black-outs seems to be a more useful focus of medical treatment or legal responsibility. There have been test cases in the courts where the altered consciousness of 'sleep-walking' has been raised as a defense for criminal activities.

You may think that the sceptics are wrong, but that doesn't alter the fact that many people hold those views. The views should be described. Wikipedia tries not to take sides, but to present all fairly. Zora 10:36, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
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