Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) manifested by alter selves usually referred to as multiple personalities, is a lifestyle fraught with more difficulties and chaos than initially meets the eye.
Think logically for a moment – how could an individual with many other persons living in their head function well? How could that person teach children or nurse the wounded in an emergency room? These are only two example of professions reportedly held by these individuals.
Research, and I use that world loosely, that backs the existence of dissociative identity disorder (DID), once called multiple personality disorder (MPD) claim that alter selves/inner parts/ and the like are distinct personalities with their own emotions, memories, and mannerisms. Logically, this cannot be so and this is why:
I once wondered why James Randi, a magician, is an advisory board member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF). The Foundation brought to public awareness the rash of false accusations of child abuse levied on parents by their adult-children following psychotherapy in the early 1990s. Mr. Randi, as a magician, was an enigma and an oddity to an advisory board comprised of the most highly respected researchers, educators, university professors, and department chairs across the United States and Canada. A magician? Many laughed at the prospect and poked fun at the Foundation – but did any wonder why he is there?
The links below are mind twisters that illustrate how our brain perceives the environment.
Let’s take it a level deeper. If indeed each personality is experiencing something different, it would render the individual in a constant state of chaos due to the inability to focus. This was my experience during treatment for multiple personalities based on sketchy memories of childhood sexual abuse that never actually occurred.
We are easily fooled and our perceptions easily manipulated. Give the video a look.
James Randi with some expensive art (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/brain-games/videos/the-fastest-pickpocket/
Questioning Dissociative Identity Disorder, Multiple Personalities, and Plurals 
Lady Quixote (@LadyQuixote)
/ 10/29/2012Thank you for your prompt and thoughtful reply.
In my family, the diagnosis for several family members has been both MPD/DID, and schizophrenia, sometimes concurrently, and in some cases, the schizophrenia diagnosis came first, and later on, MPD/DID was added. It’s a double-whammy of a nightmare, however it develops.
What I have observed firsthand over the past 5 decades, was that the ego-destroying, stigmatizing psychiatric diagnosis, followed by the forced “treatment” for said diagnosis (i.e., long-term hospitalization, powerful brain-and-body-damaging psychotropics, and electric shock) caused far more severe and long-term psychological and physical damage, than whatever caused the symptoms of mental illness in the first place.
As to what may have initially caused these psychotic symptoms, it has been my observation and experience that the precipitating factors in every case could be readily traced back to severe, life-threatening, overwhelming trauma, followed by self-medicating with drugs or alcohol, and/or an attempt to escape the pain of reality via trance states.
In my family, the abuse that I either witnessed or experienced firsthand was not ritualistic, not occultic, and almost none of the abuses were the least bit sexual in nature, nor was anyone’s abuse “repressed” and then later “remembered.” The abuses in my own family have, in my opinion, been a learned dysfunctional parenting behavior passed down from generation to generation, with its basis in the biblical admonition that if you spare the rod you spoil the child — exacerbated by the pent-up incandescent RAGE that a helpless child tends to accrue when they are “spanked” to the point of nearly passing out on a regular basis for the tiniest “sin,” both real, and imagined/exaggerated; thus when the child becomes a parent with a small child of his or her own at their mercy, LOOK OUT.
I certainly do agree with you that “repressed” and later “recovered” memories of trauma and abuses are highly suspect. I never forget any of my traumas; I only wish I could! I have had more than one therapist suggest to me that my PTSD issues may have stemmed from repeated, long-term, full-blown sexual abuse that I have “repressed.” I have also, in years past, had a therapist suggest that I may have DID/MPD and “not know it.”
I didn’t buy those suggestions then, and I’m even more of a doubter now.
Lady Q
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Jeanette Bartha
/ 10/30/2012Your family sounds like they have been through the entire mental health system. I find the flipping between schizophrenia and MPD/DID interesting – yet horrifying at the same time. If someone has an organic brain disorder and is being treated by goofy MPD/DID therapy, it is shameful say nothing about medical malpractice.
I totally agree that the treatment for mental illnesses can be worse than the illness itself. Psychotherapy can be very damaging with long-lasting consequences. That is why I try so hard and consistently to bring mental health care to high standards and to get psychotherapists off the street if they are selling bogus treatment like dissociative identity disorder.a
Having a mental illness is difficult and many people self medicate with alcohol and drugs – not a news. I don’t negate the effects of trauma, nor do I negate that dissociation occurs to cope with many life’s circumstances – we all do it consciously or not. I stop short of believing that people create other selves/personalities.
I was reading elsewhere on the Internet a conversation between multiples where they say that just because they were severely abused does not mean they will turn and do the same to others which is in contrast to what you are saying.
You dodged many bad therapy bullets – good for you. As you and other survivors of sexual trauma repeat over and over and over and that is you do not forget it.
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Lady Quixote (@LadyQuixote)
/ 10/29/2012Thank you for shaing this link, these National Geographic Brain Games videos are fascinating. They remind me of the Invisible Gorilla videos, have you seen those? If you haven’t, google “Invisible Gorilla videos” and you will find them. They are amazing and enlightening.
We think that the things we know and remember are correct, we believe that we see and hear and are cognitively aware of everything important that is going on around us. But I am learning now, at the ripe old age of almost-60, how very little I can be certain about! It’s humbling, but also a freeing thing, for me to realize this. In particular, my new understanding makes it much easier for me to understand how people can have beliefs and attitudes that, to me, seem patently and outrageously ignorant, yet their beliefs make perfect sense to them; whereas my own beliefs, which are absolutely sensible and sane to my mind, may seem insane and unreasonable to many others.
Do you believe that when a person has symptoms of what is known in the psychiatric community as DID/MPD, schizophrenia, and other so-called psychotic disorders, that what may have actually happened to produce these symptoms was a delusion brought on by some kind of hypnotic trance?
Lately I have been doing a huge amount of reading and online research for answers to the MPD/DID/schizophrenia that seems to run down through the generations in my family; my renewed interest in this topic has been spurred by the fact that my first great-grandchild is now on the way. The more I read, particularly of those authors whose points of view do NOT agree with the prevailing psychiatric paradigm of “genetic defects” or a “diseased brain” being the root cause of psychosis, the more I am finding that some kind of trance-like-state, either caused by self-hypnosis, prolonged sleep deprivation, and/or a bad reaction to illegal or prescribed drug(s), very often preceeded the symptoms of what is called Dissociative Identity Disorder or Multiple Personality Disorder, schizophrenia, and other psychotic episodes.
This actually makes perfect sense of what I experienced more than 45 years ago, when I was “sick” for 2 years, from age 14 – 16.
I’m very interested in your take on this. The more I read on your site, the more I am impressed with your insight into reality.
Thanks,
Lady Q
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Jeanette Bartha
/ 10/29/2012You are welcome for the links, they are fun..
Sorry, you gave me an LOL at the end. I don’t profess any insight into reality, rather, I only ask that people be logical and use reasoning (as best as possible) regarding many of the issues we discuss here.
I frequently see schizophrenia linked to and confused with Dissociative Identity Disorder and Multiple Personality Disorder on the Internet all the time. I believe DID and multiple personalities/selves/parts/others – whatever you want to call them are fabricated – not always intentionally, but through interactions with others.
I worked with children and young adults diagnosed with schizophrenia & they were in a state of psychosis all the time. I would do disservice to individuals living with schizophrenia (and their families) to put their diagnosis in the same sentence of the bogus & contrived multiple personalities & dissociative identity disorder.
I attribute “symptoms” of multiple personalities to be attributed to many things – the most prevalent is the interaction with The Psychology Industry, self-help books & memoirs, and medical malpractice & negligence.
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