As many of you have been waiting for, I am honored to present the Burble’s first guest post by Holly Gray, author of Don’t Call Me Cybil. If you haven’t already done so, check out Is Multiple Personality Disorder Real, and then enjoy!
My name is Holly Gray. I have Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder. When I was diagnosed with this mental illness in 2005, all I thought I knew about DID was born of misconceptions and stereotypes. I’d never met anyone with DID. I’d never read any books or articles other than sensationalistic material that pops up in a search engine query. I couldn’t have cited an educated source for any of my supposed knowledge. A movie perhaps, a television crime drama, or a friend of a cousin’s boyfriend’s friend.
In other words, I had no legitimate knowledge of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Like any other mental illness, if your education comes from anecdotal evidence and entertainment media you’re not just uninformed, you’re misinformed.
Myths About Mental Illness: Dissociative Identity Disorder
Some common perceptions of DID are that it’s:
- Multiple people living in one body. Not literally, no. Does that mean alters aren’t real? Far from it. They’re just as real as the various aspects of your identity. You may crassly joke about something with friends that you’d never discuss at work. Your kids, nephews or nieces may know you as composed while your lovers experience a wilder side. These different sides of your personality are all authentic. You have a multi-faceted identity. DID is an extreme manifestation of that same thing. In other words, what is multi-faceted identity for you is severely fragmented identity for those of us with DID. We feel like we’re different people in one body. But in fact, we’re an identity that is so severely fragmented that we experience ourselves and operate separately.
- Dramatic. Dissociative Identity Disorder is designed to go undetected. Its purpose is to hide – hide information, aspects of self, experiences, feelings. Regularly flamboyant switches in personality states would undermine that purpose. Extreme stress can provoke such dramatic presentation, but even then DID doesn’t look to the causal observer like multiple personalities. To others, people with DID often appear moody or even erratic at times, but rarely as blatantly multiple.
- Created by therapists. True DID cannot be formed in a non-dissociative person by a therapist. DID develops in early childhood when identity is highly malleable. If you’ve made it to adulthood without a dissociative disorder, you’re not going to suddenly develop DID. However, this myth wasn’t born in a vacuum. Misdiagnosis does occur. And it’s possible for a deeply confused and suggestible person, particularly one who is already severely dissociative, to begin not only to exhibit but experience many of the symptoms of DID. Are there shady therapists purposefully creating an army of multiples? No. Are there naïve or unskilled clinicians inadvertently misdiagnosing patients who then adopt the symptoms of a disorder they never really had? Sometimes, yes.
Dissociate Identity Disorder Is a Mental Illness, Not a TV Show Plot
Like most mental illnesses, Dissociative Identity Disorder is complex and many-layered. Still, full-scale research isn’t necessary to achieve a basic understanding of it. [pull]Would you let a doctor who wasn’t drained in depression treat your depression? You need a DID specialist.[/pull]
It is necessary, however, to treat information about DID the same way you would about anything else. That is to say, consider the source. Your doctor may be a competent and skilled physician. But have they ever studied DID? Have they had clinical experience treating it? Let me ask you this: if you had Bipolar Disorder, would you trust information about it from a doctor who’d never treated it or been trained to treat it? What about information from hearsay? Entertainment media? If all I knew about your mental illness was what I’ve heard on tv or from undereducated sources, would I understand it well enough to form an opinion?
Holly Gray is also the author of Dissociative Living, at HealthyPlace.com.
This is a really good article, especially about stereotypes and mental health. It’s sad that Holly is no longer blogging though. At the end – I disagree with her statement that DID specialists are needed to treat DID. There are not many who work mostly with DID since it is very demanding for therapists. Someone willing to work very long term is essential, and many therapists working in trauma centres or places like rape crisis do have experience in working with DID. DID is caused by early and repeated trauma so it’s no surprise that many trauma specialists treat DID too.
Some information on treatment it’s here http://www.dissociative-identity-disorder.net/wiki/Treatment
So often i feel alone noone to talk to or be with. i donot trust many people including drs.. they are not educated on did I do not know many days if i should be alive. my family are very skeptical of me.How does a person live with no support?
For the most part……right up until the last few sentences, I really appreciated this article. I worked as a therapist and came to a place where, because of so much fraudulent research and other shenanigans in alopathic medicine, I came to doubt that this really existed. I’ve seen some impressive research (and I am a stickler, I’m trained to find research flaws). I was wrong. So let me address one question at the end of the article. Would I want to see a “specialist”, like I would want to see a “specialist” in depression? Well…….no, I certainly would never go to someone trained as a “specialist” in depression because I would be #! lied to about biochemistry and physiology and #2 given drugs that have never been tested beyond eight weeks or in combination with any of the other drugs I might be taking. If my depression worsened, it is doubtful I would be told the truth that the drug could be the reason, and even if I were told a drug could be causing problems, I would be told that I just haven’t found “the right drug”. My liver would disagree. On the other hand, I definately would seek a specialist in Multiple Personality (I don’t use the word disorder because it implies disease where no disease has been found) because the treatment is psychotherapy directed at resolving trauma and reintegrating (where possible and/or desireable). So, aside from that last comparison of apples to oranges, I thought it was a great article and I applaud the author for her bravery in going public in order to help others sift through urban myths. Nancy Rubnstein Del Giudice; Director of Education, PsychRights.org
Thanks, Holly! This is good information, easily understood by laypeople (like me). Salud!
thx so much i will definatlly speak to my therapist and doc about the ways i feel @ times. i think it has alot more to do than just my bi polar diagnosis, and i def feel a change of prsonalities =)
Thank you, Natasha, for publishing this. I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to address some of the mythology surrounding DID in venues other than my own blog. Thank you to Lisa and midnight rainbow for reading and taking the time to comment. I truly believe Dissociative Identity Disorder won't always be so misunderstood. Getting solid information out to the public is the primary way to achieve that goal.
Very good description. I agree with everything you stated. Thanks for exposing the myth.
Holly – Thank you for sharing this info about DID; while I knew it _was not_ anything like they talk about on TV and movies, I didn't really understand what it truly was. The media tends to portray only the extreme (or extremely fictional) cases of any mental health illness. It's great to have real people like you and Natasha around as a source of truth and personal experience in a world of misinformation and outright lies. Great post!