I'd really like the author who has no idea what is going on with Dissociative Identity Disorder to not go about mentioning DID in the same breath as schizophrenia.
They are not related in any way. Schizophrenia is explicitly neurochemical and treatable with medication. Schizophrenia is something you can be genetically predisposed to and born with.
DID and related dissociative disorders are based in trauma and are NOT something you can be born with. While trauma can cause neurological changes, they are not neurochemical in nature, and they DO NOT respond to medication. There is no medication for DID, and its incredibly irresponsible to equate these in a crackpot Jungian-style bicameral mind theory blog post. I discovered Jung's bicameral mind shortly after becoming aware of my own dissociative disorder, and while it provided a nice distraction and piece of thought, it ultimately has nothing to do with my disorder.
My alters ARE NOT VOICES, they are not hallucinations, they do not present audibly. They are me, they are my thoughts and feelings and preferences presented in different ways from different points in my life. They present as internal thoughts and feelings the same way anyone else would think and feel internally, and we (my alter states and dissociative people) organize them as individuals because the dissociation makes that easy, but they are all me. They are my competing emotional states that arose because I was forced to hold these states inside me to survive my ongoing abuse.
If the author is reading this, DO NOT bring up Dissociative Identity Disorder with schizophrenia and then go on to refer to both as "the schizophrenic". That's frankly insulting to me, people like me, and the INTENSE trauma we went through at the hands of rapists and abusers (usually parents and family members) and your entire piece is trash just for that alone.
I wish I had enough karma here to downvote your post.
Hey, many apologies, I in no way meant to conflate DID with schizophrenia. I only meant to mention DID in passing - the following sentences were only meant to apply to schizophrenia. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
I'm sorry for what you went through, and if you feel my post misrepresented you.
Edit: I've modified the article a bit to hopefully make this clearer.
I'll give you a freebie edit, you can qualify it as the thoughts of an individual dissociative reader:
> Important to note, that the alters in dissociative disorders are not voices, in the classical sense of hallucinations, they do not typically present audibly. They are generally perceived as the individual's mind states (thoughts, feelings, preferences, and memories) from different points in their life. They present as internal thoughts and feelings the same way anyone else would think and feel internally, yet the language used by those with DID organizes them as individuals because the dissociation makes that easy. They are all still that individual even if the alters perceive themselves to be separate in that way.
This, I think, might back up your point more saliently than the schizophrenic angle anyway, but I admit I didn't read the article to take your point as once I saw you mention multiplicity, I speed-scrolled to the inevitable mental health/psychology section to see just how bad it was.
I moderate AskDID and used to moderate the DID subreddit before the mod team devolved into hurt people hurting hurt people, so I have some exposure to how the community perceives themselves.
You seem to really not want people to confuse DID with schizophrenia, but why? Because DID suffers are innocent victims who deserve sympathy for their trauma while schizophrenics are just born mental and don't deserve such good treatment?
You remind me of those people who get angry about type 1 and 2 diabetes. One is the sufferer's own fault and the other is innocent people who deserve to be seen as higher status.
> Because DID suffers are innocent victims who deserve sympathy for their trauma while schizophrenics are just born mental and don't deserve such good treatment?
Search your mind for why that is the first thing you go to, because it was the farthest thing from mine. You don't know what goes on in our head or anyone else's and it would behoove you not to guess at such. Much less state outright that I remind you of a dichotomy in an unrelated disorder because of this projected line of thinking.
> You seem to really not want people to confuse DID with schizophrenia, but why?
Perhaps because, as stated, DID is not neurochemical and does not respond to medication. Perhaps it would be good to differentiate between the neurochemical and the neurological disorder to prevent people who don't need strong drugs from taking them and suffering unnecessary side effects, which is a VERY common thing in populations with DID because of the misunderstandings of the differences between DID and schizophrenia.
>My alters ARE NOT VOICES, they are not hallucinations, they do not present audibly.
What if a healthy individual and a individual with dissociative disorder are just experiencing the same process from a different angle?
The author of the bestselling book "The Power of Now" speaks about some mental processes as if they were other entities (inner voice, pain body, etc) and yet he is not in a mental health unit.
You see your body as part of you but not the chair you are sitting on. The brain is certainly able to move the boundaries of what is you and what not. For example, some musicians experience the instrument they are playing as part of themselves. it's not far fetched to think that the same can also be applied to mental processes.
The perspective presented re: schizophrenia is awful too.
The author appears to be very ignorant of the last 20? 30? years of research in both schizophrenia and DID. I can tell just at a glance both by having professional experience in those areas, and by having to deal with both disorders of them every day (my life partner has both DID and schizophrenia).
Making this sort of publications without actually acquainting with the state of the art is dangerous, reckless, and frankly just plain insulting.
Freudian/Jungian psychology and its derivatives have done enough damage already, let them die.
First, sorry for being so rude in my previous comment, and what i might put here. There is a lot of misinformation out there (and in the article) and it hurts people in very tangible ways. Stigma and misinformation can very literally kill.
There is a lot of inaccurate information, and a lot of unknowns being taken as fact in this article.
For starters, almost any model of the mind based on ideas of wither Freud or Jung have been thoroughly... i won't say "disproven" because there is no proof for any of this within reach of humanity so far, but they are effectively useless. Those models don't account for a lot of things, lead to wrong outcomes in others, and overall they are a bad way to describe what's going on inside the psyche of a person.
Some characteristics of those models can be inherited into newer models, but basing anything off them will lead to routes that won't be representative of the way the mind of a person works, whether is neurotypical or not.
Having this in the middle of the article demolishes whatever credence one might hope to sustain about what it further develops.
As you point out, the "voices" that schizophrenic people might hear are not a simple auditory hallucination; though just saying it's reasonable to say they are actual selves is taking an idea in a very simplistic way. Here is where the issue begins, a person not versed whatsoever in psychology reads the article and believes as gospel what is said here in a very simplified way, the nuance is lost in the middle.
Whether the voices of a person with schizophrenia, schizotypal disorder, or schizoaffective disorder might actually be discriminated as having the same qualities as a disembodied being, is dependent on the specifics on the case, how is it treated, and how other comorbidities might interact with it. Things regarding mental illnesses are extremely messy and extremely hard to grasp even for trained professionals with specific experience in the area (years to find a psychiatrist qualified enough to treat my partner. years!).
The article contains a lot more bad sources, inaccurate understanding of the self and the inner dialogue (that not even everyone has) and has a haphazard mixture between pop-psych and neuroscience that conflates things that are pertinent to a certain domain as generalizable or universal.
I'm sorry but this is not good and it's not as simple as correcting a thing or two about schizophrenia, because when i read the whole thing it screams "i don't really know what i'm talking about but i will throw a bunch of sources and topics and pretend i do". Maybe you're knowledgeable about this stuff and just the process of simplifying things for the article butchered everything, or maybe you don't really have much idea about what you're writing. In any case if you want i can give you some books/papers/sources, or chat about the subject, feel free to contact me.
I appreciate the apology! Not strictly necessary though, it's the internet after all :) I also appreciate the detailed response.
I'm not sure how much of your criticism to chalk up to disagreement (totally valid!) versus me being factually wrong. E.g. while Jung and Freud have fallen out of favor with mainstream psychology, I and many others find their ideas both intellectually and practically useful. Jung in particular has helped me deal with issues around psychosis and depression. I understand it's not for everyone, but it helped me a great deal, when little else did.
> The article contains a lot more bad sources
Any specific sources I should have avoided? I went through all the links, and it's mainly Wikipedia, Nature, The Atlantic, NYT, etc, aside from one article by Tanya Luhrmann (who I think is brilliant) in Wilson Quarterly (which I know nothing about).
> Jung in particular has helped me deal with issues around psychosis and depression. I understand it's not for everyone, but it helped me a great deal, when little else did.
The same can be said for supernatural belief systems like Christianity: oftentimes people find them useful or helpful.
That doesn't make them true or accurate or related in any way to reality.
Your article has an authoritative tone on a scientific topic. You should fix that, given that modern science has rejected the cited models as without merit.
You are welcome to constrain your thinking to the artificial, speculative Overton Window laid down by The Science (which is based on hypotheses in the Motte version), but some of us choose to do otherwise, thanks.
A claim above is "they are effectively useless" - this is a claim of fact, but science does not know the facts about such matters.
> DID and related dissociative disorders are based in trauma and are NOT something you can be born with. While trauma can cause neurological changes, they are not neurochemical in nature
2nd paragraph of the wikipedia article says that although mostly caused by trauma, "Genetic and biological factors are also believed to play a role."
So i'm not sure you can claim that there is for sure no neurochemical basis. Seems like we don't understand it well enough to make that claim.
what is truly flabbergasting is the use and application of trauma induction as a technique by shadowy persons within governments and other "for the science" and later on "for the [your cause of choice], we must use these techniques, lest the rivals use them too and we lose".
traumatized people passing on their traumas. some very clever powerful persons using traumatized people like they use other tools and instruments.
IDK what you mean by people who have had no trauma. This is the stupidest take on DID and trauma I see (that there are people without trauma), and I see it everywhere. Do you consider children growing up in a school system where they are taught to fear gunmen coming in and killing them traumatic? I do, and we have millions of kids in the US school system going through that trauma even if everything else in their life is perfect (it's not, life under the capitalist system is traumatic in ways most can't begin to grapple with)
Life is full of things that an adult won't find traumatic but a child who doesn't know what it is or how to handle it will, and THEN the core feature of the disorder is amnesia.
I will say it again. THE CORE FEATURE OF DISSOCIATIVE IDENTITY DISORDER IS AMNESIA FOR TRAUMA. And yet I still get chodes coming around asking me to explain why there are systems "without trauma".
A broken arm at 8 years old is traumatic just as a missed meal a the right age, say 2yo, is traumatic. Small enough to be forgotten in amnesia, but still significant enough early on for it to have affected the child. By the time you're an adult, neither are generally considered "traumatic" because we've experienced or learned of MUCH worse things. Trauma Olympics sucks and we should stop doing it.
Having your caretakers not be responsive due to money stress is trauma to a young, developing child. Later they have already dissociated and their parents got their finances together, so they were attentive and the child forgot. Did the trauma not happen?
Please don't pretend like everyone on earth makes it to adulthood without some form of trauma. It's incredibly ignorant of reality.
If (by your definition) everyone has trauma, how can you say trauma causes anything? You can't really establish cause and effect for something that literally everyone has.
Genetic and biological factors (from the 2nd paragraph of the Wikipedia page, as you so helpfully pointed out above) play a role in the body's response to trauma.
Everyone has trauma, not everyone has DID from it, and that's where those factors come into play. Just as not everyone has red hair or the genetics for schizophrenia.
In the absence of trauma one can still be schizophrenic due to neurochemistry. DID does not form in the absence of trauma, but we cannot prove that because we cannot purge trauma from life.
They are not related in any way. Schizophrenia is explicitly neurochemical and treatable with medication. Schizophrenia is something you can be genetically predisposed to and born with.
DID and related dissociative disorders are based in trauma and are NOT something you can be born with. While trauma can cause neurological changes, they are not neurochemical in nature, and they DO NOT respond to medication. There is no medication for DID, and its incredibly irresponsible to equate these in a crackpot Jungian-style bicameral mind theory blog post. I discovered Jung's bicameral mind shortly after becoming aware of my own dissociative disorder, and while it provided a nice distraction and piece of thought, it ultimately has nothing to do with my disorder.
My alters ARE NOT VOICES, they are not hallucinations, they do not present audibly. They are me, they are my thoughts and feelings and preferences presented in different ways from different points in my life. They present as internal thoughts and feelings the same way anyone else would think and feel internally, and we (my alter states and dissociative people) organize them as individuals because the dissociation makes that easy, but they are all me. They are my competing emotional states that arose because I was forced to hold these states inside me to survive my ongoing abuse.
If the author is reading this, DO NOT bring up Dissociative Identity Disorder with schizophrenia and then go on to refer to both as "the schizophrenic". That's frankly insulting to me, people like me, and the INTENSE trauma we went through at the hands of rapists and abusers (usually parents and family members) and your entire piece is trash just for that alone.
I wish I had enough karma here to downvote your post.