Essay On Dissociative Identity Disorder

Dissociative Identity Disorder
Madison Detwiler
Psychology 1113-03
Oklahoma State University
Fall 2015
Dissociative Identity Disorder There are many different personality disorders in the world today. Personality disorders are “enduring patterns of thinking, feeling, or relating to others or controlling impulses that deviate from cultural expectations and cause distress or impaired functioning” (CITE BOOK). A type of this disorder is called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). This disorder falls under the category of Dissociative Disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental Disorders 5th Edition, also known as the DSM-V. DID is a severe form of dissociation, such as when someone is daydreaming but they are caught

He had 20 different personalities, all varying quite differently. John does not remember much from his childhood, but in his therapy sessions he would switch to his other personalities and in those he would recollect the abuse he had when he was a child. He would switch to a ten year old boy, named Eduardo, who could remember being pushed down the stairs, Hans who was abused with electricity, Eugene who had no emotions or could not feel pain but could explain more in depth the abuse he went through. He even had a personality for all the sexual abuse, yet John, has no memory of any of this himself. Because of the different personalities, John struggled with a normal life. He was married and divorced three times and then lived alone, he at one point had a drinking problem, and he has struggled with depression. People thought he was “different” and could not keep up with the different people living inside of him. The symptoms John had are fairly normal for this disorder. All of his “alters” have a different name and age and they all remember a different piece of John’s childhood. Each alter helps piece together John’s past that he chooses not to remember. Out of all the cases in the video, each person has over ten different alters, one of them always being in the state of a child. They all have gone through a traumatic experience when they were children that has made them the way they are

There are two sides to this debate: one is that psychiatrists bring this upon their patient making them believe they have this disorder when they truly do not, and the other side being that people believe it is all together fake. Dr. Paul McHugh former head of psychiatry at John Hopkins believes “all DID cases are artificial productions provoked by the attention doctors and others give them and that people are persuaded that they have multiple personalities embedded within them.” For those who believe that this disorder is not real, find it hard to understand why this disorder could be in the DSM-V. In the mid 1950’s two movies came out that related to DID and caused a lot of controversial dispute about how people thought they had this disorder because they believed they had similar symptoms. After this movie released, the amount of people who claimed they had this disorder skyrocketed. I believe that this disorder is real for the people who really went through a traumatic experience when they were a child. For those who watched a movie with this disorder and after watching then self-diagnose themselves with it because they think they have similar symptoms do not really have this disorder. I think it is hard to really know for sure who has it or not, but I believe there are some real cases out