While I am on the journey of finding out if this disorder is real, I think it would be helpful to know a little bit of history about the disorder. It was actually first reported all the way back in 1646! It was reported as "double consciousness", or a sleepwalking-like state where people had different behaviors depending on the level of consciousness. Cases of multiple personalities increased in the 19th century, with nearly 100 reported cases. Many psychologists of the time devoted conferences to discussing dissociation and trying to figure out what it was/what caused it. They were actually able to correctly hypothesize that it the emotional instability was caused by traumatic experiences, however the culture during this time still viewed the disorder as weird and very unknown. In the 20th centuries, many cases of D.I.D., Schizophrenia, and PTSD were reported mostly due to a "re-framing" of many psychological disorders. World War I and II also greatly increased mental illness due to soldiers returning from service and not reporting their mental distress. There were many movies and books that were published in the mid-20th century that showed the public's immense interest in the disorder. Books like "The Three Faces of Eve" and "Sybil" led to popular movies that would later be deemed by some as exaggerated and inaccurate.
Fast forward to the 1980's, the overlap of Schizophrenia and D.I.D. became apparent when psychologists start questioning the diagnosis of the two and tried to figure out how to differentiate them. In 1994, the DSM IV (which is basically a diagnostic handbook used to give criteria, symptoms and causation for all mental disorders) changed the name from "Multiple Personality Disorder" to "Dissociative Identity Disorder" in order to change the emphasis from different personalities to dissociation and identity disturbances.
Finally in 2006, there was a study that basically looked at all of the scholarly research done on D.I.D. and compared to research done on other mental disorders. "The results were found to be unusually distributed, with a very low level of publications in the 1980s followed by a significant rise that peaked in the mid-1990s and subsequently rapidly declined in the decade following." Basically, it shows this "phenomenon" that occurred with D.I.D.mainly because of media attention and a lack of education on the new plethora of psychological disorders. Scientists had a very hard time accepting this disorder because of a huge lack of research and understanding on how the brain worked at a deep level. This piece of the puzzle is interesting because it shows how much new research, technology and knowledge has developed in ONLY the last 20-30 years!
I want to talk about symptoms, because many of them seem pretty common, but when put together they create a nightmare that is virtually inescapable:
- Depression
- Mood swings
- Suicidal tendencies
- Sleep disorders (insomnia, night terrors, and sleep walking)
- Anxiety, panic attacks, and phobias (flashbacks, reactions to stimuli or "triggers")
- Alcohol and drug abuse
- Compulsions and rituals
- Psychotic-like symptoms (including auditory and visual hallucinations)
- Eating disorders
Now, what't interesting is that you will never see a symptom about "changing identities or personalities", because it has not been proven on a level to make it an official symptom. Why is this....?
Next week I will post interview results with a Dissociative Expert and analyze some evidence on both sides of the "Is D.I.D. real?" argument.
Interesting people suffer memory loss from this. Also astounding D.I.D is often joked about light heartily when the cause is often a result from such suffering. Greatly appreciated the informative nature without reading like a wika page.
ReplyDeleteAgree with Aurora. We make light of so much pain for humor's sake. There are some scholars who claim that pain (someone else's) is the root of comedy. In any case, I am learning a lot from reading your blog.
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