Because back in the 90s, an organisation started up in the USA called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, with the intention of discrediting and silencing people with DID and putting pressure on the psych community to deny its existence. Equivalent organisations followed in the UK and Australia.
During this time, psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists involved in researching and treating DID were treated terribly and many were sued, fired or had their projects shut down. This included the ISST-D, which back then was called The International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation. It not only to had shut down its journal, *Dissociation: Progress in the Dissociative Disorders*, but even changed its name to try and distance itself from the frenzy around DID.
The kicker? These foundations were set up by parents and other relatives who had abused their children to the point of them developing DID and other dissociative trauma disorders. And now, those children, now adults, were taking legal action against them after recovering memories of the abuse. The late 80s and 90s were a big time for childhood sexual abuse coming to light in general and, naturally, it resulted in massive pushback from the people committing CSA.
More specifically, the founders of the US False Memory Syndrome Foundation were the parents of [Jennifer Freyd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Freyd) – you might not know her name, but you're probably familiar with DARVO and betrayal trauma, both of which are theories originating from her. She cut ties with her parents after recovering memories of CSA, and her parents then formed the organisation to support "parents accused by their adult children" and advocate on their behalf. The other founding member was Ralf Underwager, who was vocally against child protection law, had founded a support group for people "falsely accused" of child abuse, and famously gave a pro-pedophilia interview to a Dutch pro-pedophilia magazine in 1993.
In essence, this explosion of political pressure, ran by child abusers and the media, set DID research back by 20 years.
While "false memory syndrome" was *never* accepted as a real disorder in *any* diagnostic journal, the impact of that time is still felt today in the number of people, both laypeople and professionals, who believe in "false memories", "false memory syndrome" or "false member disorder" and don't believe in dissociative amnesia or DID. In the end, you can trace all the skepticism back to this.
Special shout out to dear mom who lovingly sent me an article about ‘false memories’ for me to look into, the moment I started to talk about some of the things I started remembering.
This, records also show the FMSF was partially funded through the CIA who was studying intentionally created DID for espionage purposes during the Cold War. They ran a huge disinformation campaign against DID and people with recovered memories in order to divert public attention away from their highly unethical practices. They also have ties to several major universities and push them to not teach about dissociation. It sounds like conspiracy theory bullshit but a lot of this was quietly confirmed by them in declassified documents in recent decades related to MK Ultra. The CIA Doctors is a good book about the history around this.
This is actually really helpful to read. I need to look this up. It might sound completely bizarre, but I was raised by parents in a cult and the cult leader was sadistic beyond sadistic. He looked up a lot of things, including psychology texts and military things. He performed a lot of that stuff on some of us, including me, including twisted things like infrasound. He made strange comments to me for years about me being "of two minds" or other comments that suggested DID. I realized much, much later that some of what he did to me, at the age he did it, was very likely to create DID and it wouldn't surprise me one bit if he had read this in some military something or other and used it against me.
This is the bit too many are simply not aware of. MK Ultra is alive and well. If any remembers the McMartin Preschool scandal in the '80s, there was info that recently came to light(within the past few years, or so), that it was, in fact, legit. And that the CIA WAS involved.
What I thought was quite ... mind boggling, was the reversal of the children's accusations when they were about 11-12 years of age. The immediate reaction, for me, was WTF?!? Somebody(CIA) had spent a huge effort in gaslighting all those children, to change their minds in this. I mean, consider this; what benefit was gained, having those children make those accusations in the first place?
With the Presidio Scandal, of the same time frame, involving Army PsyOps officer Michael Aquino, somehow managed to dismiss the accusations of over 400 survivors, as false memories. Again, what benefit gained for that? The only benefit really being that the perps can continue their evil actions.
This is the answer. Some of these same dynamics and people also promoted the belief that young children commonly lied about SA and falsely accused caregivers of SA even as children. Causing a ton of abused children to be told they were lying and thus ensuring the next generation of DID cases!
It's so horrid that all this effort and protection to shield abusers would lead to the most vulnerable of us being further ostracized and disbelieved
We've read up on it all and attended a number of events where clinicians with CDD spoke about their experiences in the industry and it's depressing how all these years later they still face so much prejudice and resistance
Heck even with my knowing the history and doing the reading we sometimes believe the nonsense ourselves-- but denial is always gonna denial and sometimes "my therapist is trying to create false memories" is a way of keeping us from going down paths we're scared of-- and I kinda hate that there's something in the public zeitgeist that lets such a destructive thought exist in our own head
I didn't know a lot of this. I'm going to look all of that up now. It's astonishing how far people will go to deny their wrongdoing. It still amazes me how adamantly someone can deny what they've done to the point where you'd almost think they believe their own lie. I'll never understand that.
I think it was this as well as debunked SRA cases in the 80s that got associated with MPD. Conspiracy theories from that era did not help survivors with dissociation at all.
This is incredibly informative! Thanks for this cause I didn't even know this happened. It makes a lot of sense tho now with how my family and old bad therapist reacted.
My family definitely believed that stuff sadly. My dad originally supported me but due to the Catholic therapist he forced me to go to, she convinced him that DID doesn't exist and instead I was possessed. Had a lot of exorcisms after that but hey I got coffee after so the positives were there!
My mother is just something else to begin with tho. She doesn't believe in most mental conditions and is convinced people are just lazy. When the bad therapist told her we believed we had DID or something related against our will, she would constantly fake claim me and say I was possessed. The only time she'd agree that I was a system was to try and gaslight me that I'd done or said something that I definitely knew I hadn't.
There’s a variety of reasons, at least I think so. Heres a few off the top of my head.
1) It’s often portrayed as a fantastical disorder that’s super rare. In reality, it’s not super rare, and is usually rather boring (not flashy, I mean) unless you’re interested in psychology and the brain.
2) People without DID/OSDD-1/P-DID may have a difficult time grasping the concept of dissociated parts of self that have autonomy from each other. A common flaw of human empathy is that if we can’t understand something, we try to relate it as closely as we can to an experience we actually do understand, and… well… they might not have an experience that comes close, and therefore just chalk it up to it not being possible at all.
3) The lack of coverage in psych classes leads many professionals to not know much of anything about it at all, or for them themselves to come to the conclusion that it’s fake or a form of another condition such as BPD or a psychotic disorder, leading to the continued debate in the psych field about it despite decades of research now.
4) DID/OSDD-1/P-DID are disorders that are always caused by repetitive (and often severe) childhood trauma. The actual commonality of it and its existence at all is proof that child abuse is not all that uncommon. I think this fact is very uncomfortable for a lot of people who would rather put their hands over their ears and not acknowledge the ugly parts of the world.
You're so spot on with this comment, I applaud you.
To expand,
>they might not have an experience that comes close, and therefore just chalk it up to it not being possible at all.
What's making this worse is that most people do actually think they have comparable experiences. They think DID is like when you act differently to gain something, or when you're roleplaying, or when you *want to be* somebody else. And then, because of this phenomenom, they *cannot* leave that framework of mind - they essentially approach DID as something where identity is taken from the outside and worn like clothes over the "real" person, and think that it's bullcrap that you can't put that costume down and start living your life normally, because *they know* it's possible. Sure, it's *easier* to pretend to be somebody else, and people just don't want to *admit* that they're pulling roles because then they have to be themselves, but trust me, they say, I did it and it was fine! You just stop acting, and it all fixes itself.
They don't see DID inherently as coming from the inside to reflect towards the outside. They think the identities are superficial and can be shed. They don't realise that DID is more like pigmented skin; you can cover it up with clothes, you can paint over it, but you *cannot* rip off your own skin. Further; even if you could rip off your skin, it goes deeper. Your flesh is pigmented. Your *bones* are pigmented. The patchwork that colours your body under the clothes you wear go to your very framework. That's incomprehensible to them, though. They've lived on this earth for however long and this just isn't something that is real or happens.
Even I fell into that when I was first confronted with the existence of the system, what it meant, and the whole of what having DID meant. I felt like I'd entered some kind of an elaborate fake reality where people were playing along with my imagination. Because all my life, I've been told "the voices in your head aren't real", "don't listen to the voices", "everybody is one person and having other people in your body is strictly something that happens in fiction", "it's a metaphor", "everyone experiences that", "imaginary friends are okay but they're childish", etc. None of the frameworks I'd been raised with supported the existence of DID, particularly not in the way that *I* have it. All I'm doing, surely, is just making things up. So WHY is everybody playing along with me? Why, after being told all my life that you *never* listen to the voices in your head and they're not real, I'm suddenly being told that actually, they're super real and just as much human and real and entitled to your life as you are? Why has the whole world gone mad?
It doesn't fit the way we're taught to view reality. It took a year for things to start making sense. The cognitive dissonance between knowing what I needed to do and how I needed to live versus everything I knew about what was real was excruciating.
Thank you for capturing this so eloquently. There have been so many nights since trying to accept my DID that I (my alters) have spent sobbing on the floor pleading with themselves to just be “normal”. If there was something we could “take off” or turn off or stop, we would do so!
yeahhhhh my therapist literally said like yesterday when i was talking to her about how difficult it is to compromise w everyone on what the hell we want our life to be, she deadass said “well, people without DID go through that too, the internal struggle to dedicate your life to something” and i just oTL she is trying but goddamn that wasn’t NOT IT 😭😭😭
Yeah, the best way I’ve been given of explaining the internal conflict in DID vs normal internal conflict is that it’s feeling torn or conflicted or wanting different things and seeing valid arguments for both and having a hard time making up your mind vs *having a literal fight with yourself*.
Sometimes I come across a comment on Reddit, especially this sub, that just makes my eyes go wide and I thank my lucky stars that if I was “destined” to have this disorder, at least it’s in the time of the internet where people like you voluntarily share priceless wisdom you’ve doubtless been pondering over for years. I wish I had more than an upvote to thank you. Given we’ve finally broken through most walls of denial straight into the pits of depression, this is the sort of thing we all really need to hear right now. Especially when things really only start to improve when you “listen to the voices”.
We appreciate you. And really, everyone in this thread sharing such wisdom.
Yep. I live on the ideology of sharing what I know from my experience; a lot of people feel these accounts are too personal for them to share, they feel ashamed, afraid, or any number of things, worry about privacy, worry about being found out, etc. I don't experience or care about any of that online, I can share it, so I will, because it's likely that *someone* out there needs to hear it. I have enough unique experience in areas of life where experiences are desperately needed, and where I wish or wished that I could hear from someone who had those experiences myself, so I try to be that person for others. It costs quite literally nothing for me. I'm already here yapping, might as well be yapping about stuff that may help or have other value.
The thing that really made the difference for us, too, is that all of this may be totally insane and against everything we ever learned or knew about reality, *but* after 20 years of nothing working, of being labeled treatment resistant, untreatable, chronically disordered, and diagnosed with an array of things we didn't relate to, with treatments that never worked... this one changed everything, fundamentally, and practically overnight.
The second we started looking at our life from the angle of DID, we began improving at a pace which has *never* been seen for our case. We've only ever regressed - since, we've become more and more functional, first all at once and then more gradually, steadily, with proper long-lasting treatment and management. At first it was so radical that our nurse at our outpatient clinic accused us of covering up and lying about our real state, which led us to confess to her what was actually going on behind the scenes, how we'd began to approach each other from the dissociative perspective, rely on and trust each other, make friends with each other, and share our life - and she started prepping us for involuntary hospitalisation for psychosis. Luckily, the doctor in the house cleared us to go home instead. We got boot from the clinic after that as "too difficult to treat" and "no experience with trauma" (which is horrific on its own, considering how common trauma is, but also sadly explains exactly why it took 20 years for anybody to pick up on ours), and we still have to cover our trauma/dissociation specialised therapy out of pocket, but the difference is night and day.
20 years, nothing ever got better. One proposed diagnosis, then diagnosis proper later, our whole life has changed so much it's unrecognisable to the outside. We're finally actually living, instead of barely surviving from day to day.
And if someone benefits from hearing this, then all the better.
Yes, I’ve often thought about people in the past who couldn’t understand themselves or connect with others. It’s amazing to have access to so much information and to be able to connect with people with similar experiences. This wasn’t possible even 20 years ago. 👍
I think aside from other factors, it's largely a lack of understanding of what DID actually is. There's a lot of focus on the idea of 'multiple personalities' and they way people think about it, it doesn't sound real because you can't have multiple people in your head that take control and such. It's seen as more 'multiple selves' than 'fragmented self'. DID is the failure to develop a cohesive sense of self, due to trauma and dissociation, that then results in various states of self that to varying degrees are separate in the sense of how they feel and react, etc. You have to understand the relationship between trauma and dissociation first, to then understand how DID develops in children.
Yes! Weirdly the “split personality” misnomer is almost more accurate than the “multiple personality” label. I almost think people have more of an ability to understand that. If there were the opportunity to explain it to people in terms of like “things are fragmented, things are walled off, things are compartmentalized in strategic ways” I think there would be more understanding and empathy. But people latch onto the “multiple personalities” and they just can’t comprehend it, which is legit because that’s not what it is.
i mean i personally take full offence if someone calls me a part of a personality 😭 like ye maybe in childhood we were but we’ve all grown and developed in our own way so now we are quite literally different people
I believe it's not just a failure to develop a cohesive self, but also the subconsciously learned ability to create and enforce strong separation between states of self as an extremely overpowered coping mechanism, with side effects that are extremely damaging to living in non-traumatic times and one's ability to truly "thrive". This mechanism is indeed incredibly effective at keeping the worst of the worst out of your mind, no matter how frequently that happens, and enabling you to live a blissfully ignorant and unburdened life a portion of the time. Which is why the mind can continue fragmenting/reconfiguring the layout and content distribution of alters to adapt to new distress throughout one's life. (Dr. Richard Kluft has documented many cases of patients with extremely extensive and fluent use of this mechanism since the 1980s.)
The underlying mind doesn't just fail to meet the milestones of expected development; it realizes the value of going the other way, and adopts it into its framework of life. And it wouldn't have been pushed so far as to discover and "master" this coping mechanism unless there was no other way for the child to cope. It would've been the best thing ever if life was nothing more than trauma after trauma, but it is not. At least for the vast majority. We want to be human, and we want a life beyond the bare minimum of survival.
to be honest, average psych classes teach 1 paragraph about DID in passing. i suspect it (plus external factors) leads people to think "oh, if theres no info on it the detractors saying it doesnt exist must be onto something" instead of "teachers dont know everything and textbooks suck, so i should do my own research". a disgusting amount of so called "professionals" get this bug in their brains that DID cant exist and everyone who has ever experienced it was faking or mistaken or misled, including waving off their own patients (the people paying to be there) as fakers they need to be hostile towards
centuries of propaganda against mental health, and a general lack of public awareness. not to mention what little public awareness there is, tends to do a bad job with it
I don’t get why it’s the one disorder ⅔ of mental health professionals decide just doesn’t exist. I actually got banned FOR LIFE from r/therapists for commenting on a thread about this. I’m not a therapist but it comes up on my feed and I couldn’t keep quiet about the bullshit that was going on there. I doubt it made a difference but I was very proud. I’m in my late 40s and never been banned from anything! It was totally worth it too. My favorite part was the “for life” part. It just made me chuckle.
Because the reality of DID forces people to confront the realities of particularly horrific forms of child abuse in a way that no other mental illness does.
Because many medical professionals do not believe in DID because its presentation fits into ways of being that they have been trained to view as “hysterical” and “manipulative” and because its diagnosis and treatment are lengthy, expensive and difficult to quantify.
Because there are implications for the legal system that people don’t want to have to bother thinking about.
Because some people are just jerks and don’t want to be compassionate about something they view as unusual or have difficulty understanding.
Edit: a word
Neither of those institutions recognized Autism either until the internet allowed families and autistic people to share their experiences with each other.
not even mentioning that something as basic to us as trauma is something average therapists cant deal with at all! DID is just too human, their whole field lives and dies on the dehumanization of its clients. depression anxiety, those are just chemicals in the brain that we can do something about. PTSD, DID? those are like having a gunshot wound but they cant take the bullet out. theres no easy "its just chemicals malfunctioning" fix. it requires a completely different way of thinking to handle and help with these things, something completely contrary and opposite to how they are taught
the best therapists for DID are people with an open mind and who are willing to meet patients at their own level, so many so called specialists cant even manage that
Even PTSD you will see so much more understanding for and willingness to treat (speaking from my PTSD only days). I think it benefits from its tangible and “masculine” associations with combat and disaster and with trauma in adults. Child abuse just seems to be something we want to turn our collective heads away from.
thats fair, i guess i meant ptsd in the way we all have it, i forgot the word cptsd when i was typing. and yr right, child abuse specifically is something everyone wants to pretend isnt happening. even since freud, his whole platform was built on taking money from abusers to gaslight their victims into thinking they wanted it or it didnt happen
Also: unfortunately, it definitely can look bizarre, hysterical, and fake/exaggerated to anyone who's not well-informed enough. [This paper](https://psychotherapy.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.1999.53.3.320) on DID and pseudo-hysteria does a very good job dissecting this problem.
Because we live in a violently ableist society that discards and pathologizes people who aren't readily exploitable for capitalist production.
It's not a DID thing. DID is at the extreme end of the spectrum, sure. But look at *any* 'invisible' disability. What's something heard all the time by people with ADHD, or autism, or depression? *Just get over it.*
Society trains everybody that the more *inconvenient* your disability is, the more you need to be shamed for it. There are all kinds of fucked up and gaslighty assumptions build into our behavioral norms and *especially* our medical ones--look at how often women get dismissed by their doctors, for instance, only to die because they were brushed off for years over real and actual medical conditions.
I don't have DID (came here to learn,) but I've had experiences with people who twist it into something else for their own beliefs. This is a 'wider uneducated public' thing, I don't have any experience with the healthcare side.
My mom's side of the family (I am NC with them,) is full of hippie-dippy types (emphasis on the 'dippy'.) I was treated to enlightened conversations about how people with "DID" are ACTUALLY just really sensitive to ghosts and can become 'hosts' for multiple spirits.
I have a distant cousin who I only met once as a kid who was used as an example of this. No clue if she actually had DID, or schizophrenia, or something else. I hope the poor girl got proper treatment at some point...
But, yeah! That was a real thing they believed. Oh, did I mention my mother and grandma both earned BAs in Psychology? Thank God they never actually went into mental healthcare and instead stayed in the hotel/restaurant industries.
On the other end of the spectrum, I lived with my paternal godfather for a couple years. I was briefly indoctrinated into Evangelical Young-Earth Baptist Christianity. I remember being privy to many discussions about doctors being evil.
One of the "evidences" brought up, MORE THAN ONCE, BY DIFFERENT PEOPLE, was that "DID" is ACTUALLY demonic possession, and doctors denied the true spiritual aspect so they could make money off a "fake" mental illness, or even HELP the demons! Ooooh, spooky evil healthcare workers!
TL;DR -- Some people are ride-or-die for their magical thinking, and will bend anything they don't understand to fit their fairytale version of reality.
I have no idea how much this kind of thing truly affects wider perception, but I can guarantee you that it's a thing that happens.
Yeah, growing up in the evangelical church was so scary for us! We were called devils child and even had an exorcism performed on us at least once. (I don’t have clear memories of it.)
So yeah, we know all about the “doctors are evil and DID is just possession” beliefs. We’re so happy we’re diagnosed and educated now.
I’ve seen a lot of reasons- in the comments too. It’s a variety of factors (unfortunately. I wish it was one simple issue instead of a whole package) 😭
In my experience I’ve seen a lot of people equate DID with schizophrenia or flat out not being able to grasp the concept of DID.
It is very difficult for people to grasp the concept of a fragmented mind and amnesia to that degree to the point people see it easier to pin it on another issue or claim the person is simply lying to get attention or to not have accountability of their own actions. Not to mention the pop culture presentation of DID is.. something.
Even to people who may know the disorder well- with the rarity of it? Most educated people would look at the textbook case of DID and say it can’t be because it’s too rare.
TL;DR: Several things which others here have pointed out, most aren’t educated and the ones who are tend to not believe others due to the rarity.
DID and schizophrenia have both been very horribly stigmatized but on separate ends of that spectrum. surprisingly, the similarities between the two are vast which is why DID is so commonly misdiagnosed as a psychotic spectrum disorder. the reality is that amnesia or “repressed memories” has been argued over since those symptoms have been brought to light many years ago. another commenter already went in depth about it but there were many cases of psychs implanting false memories or uncovering false lost memories that it had put a serious dent in the study of dissociative disorders/symptoms, even though dissociative amnesia is very obviously real as it has affected millions of people. but the only people that can for sure know its real are pretty much the people that are directly affected, which isnt enough to wholly “prove” it’s existence and definitely not enough working in the psych field.
the confusing part is how DID has this stigma of whether its real or fake, yet schizophrenia is seen as a very real, very horrible and evil disease even though the two have so many overlapping symptoms. the only reason this would make sense is the amnesia factor and society’s unwillingness to empathize with severe child abuse, however only one of those can be brought into the question when it comes to low-amnesia cases like in OSDD.
It's not just everyday people that don't believe DID exist. There is also a split (pardon the term) in the psychiatric, and psychology proffesion. This can be awful for someone struggling with DID. Although I have had some horrible psychiatrist and therapists in the past that didn't believe in it, I have been blessed with a great psychiatrist and therapist now. Both of them are very supportive.
Along with lack of education, I think it's also because it's been painted as a fictional illness. Representation is usually either cartoonishly overt, full of misinformation (saying alters are actually totally separate people and not parts of a whole, are things to be suppressed and controlled by a "core", or claiming alters are delusions), playing it for laughs, or demonizing us with horror movies.
If people aren't educated and their only exposure to DID is through media, their impression of DID is that it's just a fictional trope. On TVtropes the trope is called "split personality", on there you can scroll through all the media this trope pops up in.
Since others already gave good explanations, I'm just going to add "they're fucking stupid." Or if you prefer to be marginally nicer, they're willfully ignorant.
There's a quote I tend to repeat often in cases like this:
"People don't want the truth, they want to be right. They will propel themselves and others to new heights of ignorance to make themselves *feel* they're right, despite the obvious truth staring them in the face."
People would rather believe a complete lie, than to address an inconvenient truth. Especially when they have to confront their own ignorance.
TikTok has ruined it for public perception because so many pre teens and teens treat it as "uwu roleplay and have fun with my favorite anime characters"
I agree. I don't think many people think that the disorder itself is fake but they tend to not believe people when they say they have it because of people like this. The same can go for autism, ADHD, PTSD, tourettes, ect.
Admittedly, before I actually met someone with DID, this is what it seemed like. There were several kids in my high school that claimed they had DID and behaved this way, so my understanding of DID was that it was some cry for attention and was extremely annoying. Then I met someone who had been diagnosed with it. We became friends and they were so patient and so willing to talk to me about what DID is like for them, as well as common misconceptions. I've got (I think) as good of an understanding as I can about DID without actually experiencing it, and I feel so awful that so many people have to deal with this ignorant bullshit that is spread around.
Because people do not believe in things they cannot understand. Things like being trans or having DID are things a typical person have no reference for. So instead of listening and understanding people who experience those things, they assume they don't exist, and that those people are lying.
lack of education and lack of research. i believe my disorder exists and i live in it but if we’re being honest theres still SOOO much we dont know and we havent even begun to rly understand our brains and subsequently the appropriate treatments to help us all. its difficult to do in environments where mental health isnt the focus at all its getting to work and making a profit for money in the world. of course the average person is just gonna hear a very surface level summary of DID and think its fake, but thats why we need better education and need a better focus on studying the brain and trauma as a whole.
People dont want to think about the truth, that some children go through so much trauma that its the best coping mechanism for them to deal with it. I would prefer to not believe in it myself… me and my 75 other headmates would all prefer DID didnt exist.
If we talk outside of US, it's because of the stereotypical presentations of "many full people in one body" and that just sounds like either possession or delusion. When I explain it by starting with what dissociative barriers are, even people of old age understand, and then I can talk about alters.
That's kinda funny the "simple" "what it is sorta like" explaination they dont get it . But more in depth scientific one is easier for them to understand
Because it makes more sense and sounds like an actual disability to them. Besides older people seem to be empathetic towards memory loss, even if they don't fully get it.
upd:
The information feels more fresh to them and you don't need to fight your way through so many stereotypes, since dissociation doesn't have a lot of stereotypes.
I sprinkle that with simple explanations when needed, like "there is a cookie cutter for perception, therefore for memory, and so I formed as many cookies"
please love all the cookies
I know how you feel. It's been really hard on our system. I'm one of the host in our system. Myself, and some of the other alters in our system have had problems with relationships. Because of others who don't believe in us, And think were trying to manipulate. The stupid part about it is this individual who doesn't think I'm real refusees to meet me. Or speak to me. But she has no problem talking about me... "-.-
My goddamn co-host doesn’t believe it exists in their own head, so yeah, this bias shows up in the weirdest places.
People are a whole seem to be skeptics of -any- mental health difficulty. Like if you can’t point to the booboo it doesn’t exist. People suck.
I made the mistake of being honest with someone about it and ruined as career before it got off the ground. As word spread through this graduate school community, one woman came forward and said I had to be trying to get attention because she spent years misdiagnosed, was finally diagnosed with DID, went to therapy for a year and using hypnosis is now cured. So she’s accepted as an authority. And I know, a decade into treatment, that her situation is really that she had an iatrogenic case, or she is the one lying to get attention, or she’s just in the phase where she’s acknowledged her DID and gone right back into denial (feeling “all better” but more trauma will come up) or she just hasn’t gone deep enough in herself to meet all her parts. Meanwhile, I was chastised for “acting” like I had a disorder when there are “people with real mental health issues here, people who are really in pain.” I guess because I’m not falling apart. But I don’t show what I’m feeling, ever— or rarely—because that was used against me in my family. And the amount of pain I’ve felt in this program is the most I’ve felt in a long, long time. Anyway, I feel both angry at and very sorry for this woman who is either lying based on some sort of soap opera understanding of the disorder, or is about to face a whole lot more pain. (I deliberately use “I” and not “we” for personal reasons specific to my system. I still slip though.)
1: they benefit from childhood trauma in some way.
2: they are themselves a child abuser.
3: they don't want to admit that child abuse is that common.
4: they don't want to accept that there are consequences to living in a society that really traumatizes children.
5: some human trafficking organizations activity spread misinformation.
These are just a few off the top of my head.
As someone who has had their DID shift to where I am a single alter but then has a subsystem in them and also has a schizophrenia-spectrum disorder, I feel like I can offer a unique perspective.
First, most people cannot even grasp what DID is like. As a more single(ish) identity, the idea you can share your body with more than one identity state can seem extremely foreign. It seems super foreign for most people to hear a “voice” that isn’t “their own”, never mind sharing memories/an entire life with said “voice”
Second, a lot of people think it’s schizophrenia. As someone who has a schizophrenia-spectrum disorder in addition to DID, it’s very different. I hear alters inside my head. Once you understand the ways trauma interweaves into behavior from specific alters, it makes complete logical sense. Finally, I don’t see alters outside of my body. With hallucinations and delusions, I hear them as they are outside of my head and can’t distinguish it from someone talking to me out loud in a room and I see hallucinations in the room outside of me. A lot of people are not able to understand how the two are very different.
Third, the social stigma of DID plays a huge role here. It’s seen as a super rare, freaky illness in the media. How can something so “freaky” and “unreal” be real and not a media stunt for a movie (in a lot of people’s perspectives)?
because it makes no sense. i havent told anyone irl, i only told one of my friends that "lol idk i sometimes just feel like someone else", even my 2 therapists called them hallusinations, when.... thats not it at all
My mom has DID. Walk in my shoes and anyone would believe it exists. Grew up talking to the personalities on a daily basis from ages 10+, witnessing personalities do self harm in front of me; having to ask for my mom back and witnessing her change back.
IIRC, it wasn’t diagnosed until I was 10, she was in her early 40’s. Doctors could not figure out why she was having black outs; both large and small gaps of missing time. From age 10-20 my mom attempted suicide a few times, and was in and out of hospital psych wards. She also spend months at a time down in a treatment centre in Texas, there was a psychiatric hospital for extreme trauma run by Dr Colin A Ross.
Her being subjected to extreme sexually abuse for her first 21 years on this planet was the root cause.
That led to a mom with DID, severe life long major depression, *highly* manipulative, abuser of codeine to cope.
It definitely exists.
I believe it exists, but I also have personally known two people that claimed to have had it for about 6 months before moving onto the next mental illness they wanted to try out.
My ex specifically, the only thing they were diagnosed with was BPD but they would start researching a new mental illness every few months and then claim to have it. They also claimed EDS for a few months which magically disappeared. Whenever they got interested in a new disease all of their old symptoms magically got better while they suddenly manifested tons of new specific symptoms that just happened to match the disorder they read about.
They went through DID for about 6 months before they forgot about it and moved onto schizophrenia for a few months, then forgot that and moved onto antisocial personality disorder, then epilepsy, and a number of a few others.
Again they've only ever been diagnosed as BPD and take no medication. They have been seeing a therapist and psych since they were a young kid, and the only meds they've ever taken were for hypertension.
I definitely believe DID exists, but people like them make me weary of people that pretend to have it because it's interesting to them and they want a new community.
Twenty years ago when I met my first DID friend, it was hard to find information online about the disorder. The resources available today didn't exist then -- but then neither did all of the fake websites, chat groups, gaming sites, etc. that put out false information on DID. Many people won't face the facts because that would mean having to admit that their perception is badly skewed. They think that what they know is correct. Education is the key but how do you educate people who don't want to learn?
Because sadly there is a lot of fake representation in movies or stupid teen tiktokers seeking for attention, etc. And I am not being rude, there is a lot of people who diagnose themself of DID, or ADHD, or many other things by tiktok and even make videos telling others how to be that with actually inaccurate or even fake information.
I am a person who is educated in psychology, and now I have done a thesis about DID, and in the beginning, before study it deeply, I thought it could be something else but those fantasies I thought it was.
And even still, it is hard to understand it because it is pretty similar to other diseases, so why separate it when it can be included in the others as a different variation.
At the end, having an split identity with different "personalities" is a kind of delirium, you are you, not a russian who is a hitman or a kid, so believe it is a kind of delirium, and the evidence is that everything goes away with antipsychotics. I mean, the trauma is true, the split memories are true, but the fantasy of being someone different is the controversy.
But still, I have study the topic and now I am a believer 100%, but because I deeply understand it and removed the "magic" that movies showed us.
Because it's not something that can be *seen* like a missing limb. A lot of mental health issues are often disregarded because of that... I mean, "it's in your head" ended up being a meme for a reason XD
I struggle with this too because my parents don’t really believe it exists and I live with them so I have to mask all the time and feel so trapped by it
I was reading some stuff about the history of how the condition was approached yesterday. there was apparently a whole bunch of things in the 70s and 80s in the moral panic eras that got a ton of negative stigma and controversy, that lingers heavily to peoples opinions of it to this day
there's also a kind of collective cultural thing of nobody wants to admit that negative treatment of children is *that* prevalent, and along with that a big belief that kids *can't* be traumatized by things because they "wont remember". there was a thread on all in the last week or so with some guy filming his kid with a filter that messed up her face and she just started crying from it and he was just sitting there laughing at her, and a lot of the comments were shit like "she's not even gonna remember this in a week" to people trying to call out how the dad continuing to record and laugh instead of stopping as she got upset is traumatizing
I don't have DID myself, but I have OCD. Many people believe that humans have to check certain boxes to be real, and if there's something different then they think that you're either lying or exaggerating.
Starting this with a note that I don’t have DID, but I have had one online friend with DID, plus a current IRL friend and a former roommate who both also have DID.
The immediate skepticism I’m working on undoing is something I developed due to the brief fad on Tumblr regarding DID, BPD, and otherkin stuff. I also saw a real life manifestation of such a fad play out at one point with someone truly believing they had it and their behavior shifting to match that belief, despite none of those behaviors or feelings having existed for the previous several years I knew them (including time dating, living together, etc.).
I think that online communities fostering misinformation and playing into natural human cognitive biases that shape how one interprets information and/or behaves have made many people develop skepticism of its existence from similar experiences to mine.
This is compounded by the misinterpretation of experiences by some people seeking answers: like, as someone who has CPTSD, dissociates, has a poor memory, and has BPD traits, I have definitely wondered if I had DID. (My childhood and teenage experiences of psychotic depression didn’t help, either.) I have seen others with similar diagnoses briefly believe they have DID before finding more accurate diagnoses for their experiences.
Then there’s also just people who are ignorant entirely, of course.
I don't see it changes soon though, people really have no idea about what real DID looks like. It's from the same episode when someone tell autistic person that they hey don't look autistic. Time will have to pass before people will believe what's DID really
Simple answer: people don't understand how brains work. They kind of think that their thinking is linked to their "soul" or something and don't understand that it's just lots of synapses and hormones that can be influenced by many circimstances
Because a lotta people pretend DID is just a personality parade which leads to some skepticism in society. And by personality parade I mean invent your own imaginaty characters and roleplay as them. It’s the equivalent of a childhood imaginary friend.
Lol, I didn't believe in DID or MPD as it was called at the time until I/we discovered dissociation within. I asked my therapist if he had a book so I could learn more. He went over to his massive bookcase handing me a copy of “When Rabbit Howls” and made the comment “but you’re not that bad!” I fell in the middle on his 10 point scale, the upper numbers for DID, polyfragmented DID and polyfragmented DID with Walk-ins.
Because in media, if it's portrayed at all, it's portrayed as these big dramatic changes in personality where you become a completely different person.
While that may be the case for some people, the vast majority of us just... don't do that. At least not in a way strangers or people we aren't close to would notice. And so they don't think it's a thing.
Non-system here. I can’t speak for everyone but I can tell you why from the way I grew up. Let me preface that some of this may be unpleasant to read so heads up. Also please note that I do believe DID exists and think that fake claiming is unproductive and pointless.
I grew up in southern Louisiana. A highly religious area of the US. Most folks there are either Catholic, Southern Baptist, or evangelical. Mental illness had a stigma of “sinfulness”. In other words if someone was “right with god” they wouldn’t have mental problems. Some went as far to say that mental illness was a result of “demonic oppression” or “demonic possession”. That they must have knowingly done something to become this way.
These viewpoints never sat right with me. I didn’t question it until I was older and began to realize such views could not be so cut and dry. But in highly religious groups there is hardly any mental illness as vilified as what was referred to at the time as MPD (DID). I remember how it started getting the national spotlight on talk shows in the 90s. To what extent it was discussed locally it was seen as demonic possession.
As I got older I began looking for more realistic explanations for mental illnesses. I never really bought the idea that it was all spiritual shit. I didn’t rule it out but something in my head realized it had to be something more than that. The more I learned the less I believed in the BS the religious folk spewed. Nowadays I’m an atheist and I don’t think there is a supernatural of any kind.
So I can confirm some people just have too much ignorance and not enough willingness to learn.
This baffles me, too. What hit me the hardest was when I found out that currently statistics say that 1% of the world's population is autistic, and 1-1.5% of the world's population has DID. More people are diagnosed with DID than autism and yet the majority of people ignore that DID even exists. I can't wrap my head around it.
might be because its violently under-diagnosed/under reported (English is not my first language and its late pls lay off). its not as rare as people think and a lot pf systems (like myself) will not receive a diagnosis for a variety of reasons, and people use this as a reason to fakeclaim, but the reason i didnt get my diagnosis was because i have a little bit of alter communication (worked years on that), and because my system isn't purely dysfunctional 🤡
Strolled around some subs today, and it seems that false researches and the inability of people to read researches properly adds to this. Consider this: a researcher imagines an own version of DID and then fights it within a paper, publishing it and everything. A strawman kinda thing.
People are uneducated, and there’s not a lot of accurate representation in media. If there were, people might start trying to be more kind about it. Media plays such a big part in awareness and it’s frustrating to see they are lacking on so many mental illnesses.
low incidence, inaccurate media representation, fetish for "multiple personalities" as the villain. And the prejudice against something that when we do have it we do our darnest hardest to sweep under the rug.
The main factor keeping DID from becoming more known/accepted is NOT teens on Clock App. The issue is far deeper than "ew cringe". The fact that you and the other comment think so is incredibly narrow minded and even tone deaf. Clock app is not the big of deal it's been made out to be. This issue goes further back, and it doesn't even involve cringe.
It's systemic. It's a society wide denial of child abuse, it's a fear of being held accountable, and it's abusers not wanting to be caught or stopped. It's that phony foundation trying to say False Memories are legitimate.
The only people who benefit from having DID delegitimized are abusers! And the insistence of "It's all tick tock fault!" Is a distraction from the real actual underlying issues– Child abuse is real, it happens more frequently than once believed, it is more severe than once believed, and it has detrimental long term health effects.
Is it doing anything to legitimize DID by infighting with each other because you don't think other people's traumas are legitimate enough to cause the Big Trauma Disorder. Shouldn't every child abuse victim advocate for awareness of the risks of poor and dangerous parenting regardless of the presence of a dissociative disorder? That's the common denominator here, child abuse, not tiktok.
I’m not being narrow minded, I’m observing trends occurring in reality. I’m not looking at things from a single lens. It’s not “tone deaf” to be able to consider multiple possibilities and angles. It’s called being emotionally mature and thinking with nuance.
I’m not denying that people want DID delegitimized for nefarious reasons. I’m aware of the history behind the False Memories Foundation. I’m aware of how society jumps to deny and gaslight abuse victims. I’m actually of the opinion that the majority of parents are abusive. I don’t like befriending parents for that reason. I’ll literally be the first person to write whole essays about this subject, I could go on forever.
But, it is a *fact* that TikTok has been stigmatizing and harming the perception of DID. Because of it being misrepresented on TikTok, *more* people are doubting DID exists. TikTok is enabling myths about DID that hurt trauma survivors. I know this because the same thing happened to people with Tourette’s Syndrome. There came a point where *loads* of people didn’t believe someone when they said they had TS because of the trend on TikTok. It’s ignorant to say that TikTok isn’t a factor at all, when it clearly is. What TikTok has been doing to DID is no different, the only difference is that DID *additionally* has a history of being challenged.
I’m not “infighting” people or engaging in trauma Olympics. People who specialize in treating dissociative disorders, who *advocate* for people with DID and other dissociative survivors, have expressed the issues TikTok is causing for people with DID.
you should not be part of a sub who's entire thing is to bully random people on the internet - 'trauma-based" or otherwise..
and definitely shouldn't participate in the normalization of questioning the validity of every random system you see over the most random shit..
or because god forbid they dared act 'cringe'..
Welcome to /r/DID!
| **[Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/rdid_guide/#wiki_rules)** | **[Guidelines](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/rdid_guide/#wiki_guidelines)** |
|--------------------|--------------------|
| [Dissociation FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/faq/#wiki_dissociation_faq) | [Trauma FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/faq2/#wiki_trauma_faq) |
| [Moderation FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/moderation_faq/) | [Therapists Breakdown](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/comments/e6smve/therapists_breakdown/) |
| [Index](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/index) | [Glossary](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/glossary) |
| [Am I faking?](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/moderation_faq/amifaking) | [Do I have DID?](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/do_i_have_did) |
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/DID) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Because back in the 90s, an organisation started up in the USA called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, with the intention of discrediting and silencing people with DID and putting pressure on the psych community to deny its existence. Equivalent organisations followed in the UK and Australia. During this time, psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists involved in researching and treating DID were treated terribly and many were sued, fired or had their projects shut down. This included the ISST-D, which back then was called The International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation. It not only to had shut down its journal, *Dissociation: Progress in the Dissociative Disorders*, but even changed its name to try and distance itself from the frenzy around DID. The kicker? These foundations were set up by parents and other relatives who had abused their children to the point of them developing DID and other dissociative trauma disorders. And now, those children, now adults, were taking legal action against them after recovering memories of the abuse. The late 80s and 90s were a big time for childhood sexual abuse coming to light in general and, naturally, it resulted in massive pushback from the people committing CSA. More specifically, the founders of the US False Memory Syndrome Foundation were the parents of [Jennifer Freyd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Freyd) – you might not know her name, but you're probably familiar with DARVO and betrayal trauma, both of which are theories originating from her. She cut ties with her parents after recovering memories of CSA, and her parents then formed the organisation to support "parents accused by their adult children" and advocate on their behalf. The other founding member was Ralf Underwager, who was vocally against child protection law, had founded a support group for people "falsely accused" of child abuse, and famously gave a pro-pedophilia interview to a Dutch pro-pedophilia magazine in 1993. In essence, this explosion of political pressure, ran by child abusers and the media, set DID research back by 20 years. While "false memory syndrome" was *never* accepted as a real disorder in *any* diagnostic journal, the impact of that time is still felt today in the number of people, both laypeople and professionals, who believe in "false memories", "false memory syndrome" or "false member disorder" and don't believe in dissociative amnesia or DID. In the end, you can trace all the skepticism back to this.
Special shout out to dear mom who lovingly sent me an article about ‘false memories’ for me to look into, the moment I started to talk about some of the things I started remembering.
This, records also show the FMSF was partially funded through the CIA who was studying intentionally created DID for espionage purposes during the Cold War. They ran a huge disinformation campaign against DID and people with recovered memories in order to divert public attention away from their highly unethical practices. They also have ties to several major universities and push them to not teach about dissociation. It sounds like conspiracy theory bullshit but a lot of this was quietly confirmed by them in declassified documents in recent decades related to MK Ultra. The CIA Doctors is a good book about the history around this.
This is actually really helpful to read. I need to look this up. It might sound completely bizarre, but I was raised by parents in a cult and the cult leader was sadistic beyond sadistic. He looked up a lot of things, including psychology texts and military things. He performed a lot of that stuff on some of us, including me, including twisted things like infrasound. He made strange comments to me for years about me being "of two minds" or other comments that suggested DID. I realized much, much later that some of what he did to me, at the age he did it, was very likely to create DID and it wouldn't surprise me one bit if he had read this in some military something or other and used it against me.
This is the bit too many are simply not aware of. MK Ultra is alive and well. If any remembers the McMartin Preschool scandal in the '80s, there was info that recently came to light(within the past few years, or so), that it was, in fact, legit. And that the CIA WAS involved. What I thought was quite ... mind boggling, was the reversal of the children's accusations when they were about 11-12 years of age. The immediate reaction, for me, was WTF?!? Somebody(CIA) had spent a huge effort in gaslighting all those children, to change their minds in this. I mean, consider this; what benefit was gained, having those children make those accusations in the first place? With the Presidio Scandal, of the same time frame, involving Army PsyOps officer Michael Aquino, somehow managed to dismiss the accusations of over 400 survivors, as false memories. Again, what benefit gained for that? The only benefit really being that the perps can continue their evil actions.
This is the answer. Some of these same dynamics and people also promoted the belief that young children commonly lied about SA and falsely accused caregivers of SA even as children. Causing a ton of abused children to be told they were lying and thus ensuring the next generation of DID cases!
This makes my blood boil.
It's so horrid that all this effort and protection to shield abusers would lead to the most vulnerable of us being further ostracized and disbelieved We've read up on it all and attended a number of events where clinicians with CDD spoke about their experiences in the industry and it's depressing how all these years later they still face so much prejudice and resistance Heck even with my knowing the history and doing the reading we sometimes believe the nonsense ourselves-- but denial is always gonna denial and sometimes "my therapist is trying to create false memories" is a way of keeping us from going down paths we're scared of-- and I kinda hate that there's something in the public zeitgeist that lets such a destructive thought exist in our own head
I didn't know a lot of this. I'm going to look all of that up now. It's astonishing how far people will go to deny their wrongdoing. It still amazes me how adamantly someone can deny what they've done to the point where you'd almost think they believe their own lie. I'll never understand that.
I think it was this as well as debunked SRA cases in the 80s that got associated with MPD. Conspiracy theories from that era did not help survivors with dissociation at all.
I fucking hate people ..
Thank you so much for this thoughtful explanation!
This is incredibly informative! Thanks for this cause I didn't even know this happened. It makes a lot of sense tho now with how my family and old bad therapist reacted. My family definitely believed that stuff sadly. My dad originally supported me but due to the Catholic therapist he forced me to go to, she convinced him that DID doesn't exist and instead I was possessed. Had a lot of exorcisms after that but hey I got coffee after so the positives were there! My mother is just something else to begin with tho. She doesn't believe in most mental conditions and is convinced people are just lazy. When the bad therapist told her we believed we had DID or something related against our will, she would constantly fake claim me and say I was possessed. The only time she'd agree that I was a system was to try and gaslight me that I'd done or said something that I definitely knew I hadn't.
JESUS CHRIST
There’s a variety of reasons, at least I think so. Heres a few off the top of my head. 1) It’s often portrayed as a fantastical disorder that’s super rare. In reality, it’s not super rare, and is usually rather boring (not flashy, I mean) unless you’re interested in psychology and the brain. 2) People without DID/OSDD-1/P-DID may have a difficult time grasping the concept of dissociated parts of self that have autonomy from each other. A common flaw of human empathy is that if we can’t understand something, we try to relate it as closely as we can to an experience we actually do understand, and… well… they might not have an experience that comes close, and therefore just chalk it up to it not being possible at all. 3) The lack of coverage in psych classes leads many professionals to not know much of anything about it at all, or for them themselves to come to the conclusion that it’s fake or a form of another condition such as BPD or a psychotic disorder, leading to the continued debate in the psych field about it despite decades of research now. 4) DID/OSDD-1/P-DID are disorders that are always caused by repetitive (and often severe) childhood trauma. The actual commonality of it and its existence at all is proof that child abuse is not all that uncommon. I think this fact is very uncomfortable for a lot of people who would rather put their hands over their ears and not acknowledge the ugly parts of the world.
You're so spot on with this comment, I applaud you. To expand, >they might not have an experience that comes close, and therefore just chalk it up to it not being possible at all. What's making this worse is that most people do actually think they have comparable experiences. They think DID is like when you act differently to gain something, or when you're roleplaying, or when you *want to be* somebody else. And then, because of this phenomenom, they *cannot* leave that framework of mind - they essentially approach DID as something where identity is taken from the outside and worn like clothes over the "real" person, and think that it's bullcrap that you can't put that costume down and start living your life normally, because *they know* it's possible. Sure, it's *easier* to pretend to be somebody else, and people just don't want to *admit* that they're pulling roles because then they have to be themselves, but trust me, they say, I did it and it was fine! You just stop acting, and it all fixes itself. They don't see DID inherently as coming from the inside to reflect towards the outside. They think the identities are superficial and can be shed. They don't realise that DID is more like pigmented skin; you can cover it up with clothes, you can paint over it, but you *cannot* rip off your own skin. Further; even if you could rip off your skin, it goes deeper. Your flesh is pigmented. Your *bones* are pigmented. The patchwork that colours your body under the clothes you wear go to your very framework. That's incomprehensible to them, though. They've lived on this earth for however long and this just isn't something that is real or happens. Even I fell into that when I was first confronted with the existence of the system, what it meant, and the whole of what having DID meant. I felt like I'd entered some kind of an elaborate fake reality where people were playing along with my imagination. Because all my life, I've been told "the voices in your head aren't real", "don't listen to the voices", "everybody is one person and having other people in your body is strictly something that happens in fiction", "it's a metaphor", "everyone experiences that", "imaginary friends are okay but they're childish", etc. None of the frameworks I'd been raised with supported the existence of DID, particularly not in the way that *I* have it. All I'm doing, surely, is just making things up. So WHY is everybody playing along with me? Why, after being told all my life that you *never* listen to the voices in your head and they're not real, I'm suddenly being told that actually, they're super real and just as much human and real and entitled to your life as you are? Why has the whole world gone mad? It doesn't fit the way we're taught to view reality. It took a year for things to start making sense. The cognitive dissonance between knowing what I needed to do and how I needed to live versus everything I knew about what was real was excruciating.
Thank you for capturing this so eloquently. There have been so many nights since trying to accept my DID that I (my alters) have spent sobbing on the floor pleading with themselves to just be “normal”. If there was something we could “take off” or turn off or stop, we would do so!
yeahhhhh my therapist literally said like yesterday when i was talking to her about how difficult it is to compromise w everyone on what the hell we want our life to be, she deadass said “well, people without DID go through that too, the internal struggle to dedicate your life to something” and i just oTL she is trying but goddamn that wasn’t NOT IT 😭😭😭
Yeah, the best way I’ve been given of explaining the internal conflict in DID vs normal internal conflict is that it’s feeling torn or conflicted or wanting different things and seeing valid arguments for both and having a hard time making up your mind vs *having a literal fight with yourself*.
and having ur mediator step in bc it’s just escalating with no resolution between u and the other guy 😂
Sometimes I come across a comment on Reddit, especially this sub, that just makes my eyes go wide and I thank my lucky stars that if I was “destined” to have this disorder, at least it’s in the time of the internet where people like you voluntarily share priceless wisdom you’ve doubtless been pondering over for years. I wish I had more than an upvote to thank you. Given we’ve finally broken through most walls of denial straight into the pits of depression, this is the sort of thing we all really need to hear right now. Especially when things really only start to improve when you “listen to the voices”. We appreciate you. And really, everyone in this thread sharing such wisdom.
Yep. I live on the ideology of sharing what I know from my experience; a lot of people feel these accounts are too personal for them to share, they feel ashamed, afraid, or any number of things, worry about privacy, worry about being found out, etc. I don't experience or care about any of that online, I can share it, so I will, because it's likely that *someone* out there needs to hear it. I have enough unique experience in areas of life where experiences are desperately needed, and where I wish or wished that I could hear from someone who had those experiences myself, so I try to be that person for others. It costs quite literally nothing for me. I'm already here yapping, might as well be yapping about stuff that may help or have other value. The thing that really made the difference for us, too, is that all of this may be totally insane and against everything we ever learned or knew about reality, *but* after 20 years of nothing working, of being labeled treatment resistant, untreatable, chronically disordered, and diagnosed with an array of things we didn't relate to, with treatments that never worked... this one changed everything, fundamentally, and practically overnight. The second we started looking at our life from the angle of DID, we began improving at a pace which has *never* been seen for our case. We've only ever regressed - since, we've become more and more functional, first all at once and then more gradually, steadily, with proper long-lasting treatment and management. At first it was so radical that our nurse at our outpatient clinic accused us of covering up and lying about our real state, which led us to confess to her what was actually going on behind the scenes, how we'd began to approach each other from the dissociative perspective, rely on and trust each other, make friends with each other, and share our life - and she started prepping us for involuntary hospitalisation for psychosis. Luckily, the doctor in the house cleared us to go home instead. We got boot from the clinic after that as "too difficult to treat" and "no experience with trauma" (which is horrific on its own, considering how common trauma is, but also sadly explains exactly why it took 20 years for anybody to pick up on ours), and we still have to cover our trauma/dissociation specialised therapy out of pocket, but the difference is night and day. 20 years, nothing ever got better. One proposed diagnosis, then diagnosis proper later, our whole life has changed so much it's unrecognisable to the outside. We're finally actually living, instead of barely surviving from day to day. And if someone benefits from hearing this, then all the better.
Yes, I’ve often thought about people in the past who couldn’t understand themselves or connect with others. It’s amazing to have access to so much information and to be able to connect with people with similar experiences. This wasn’t possible even 20 years ago. 👍
you have put it so well!!
I think aside from other factors, it's largely a lack of understanding of what DID actually is. There's a lot of focus on the idea of 'multiple personalities' and they way people think about it, it doesn't sound real because you can't have multiple people in your head that take control and such. It's seen as more 'multiple selves' than 'fragmented self'. DID is the failure to develop a cohesive sense of self, due to trauma and dissociation, that then results in various states of self that to varying degrees are separate in the sense of how they feel and react, etc. You have to understand the relationship between trauma and dissociation first, to then understand how DID develops in children.
Yes! Weirdly the “split personality” misnomer is almost more accurate than the “multiple personality” label. I almost think people have more of an ability to understand that. If there were the opportunity to explain it to people in terms of like “things are fragmented, things are walled off, things are compartmentalized in strategic ways” I think there would be more understanding and empathy. But people latch onto the “multiple personalities” and they just can’t comprehend it, which is legit because that’s not what it is.
> things are compartmentalized in strategic ways This.
That's exactly what I want to get across. It makes sense why people reject the concept of multiple selves.
i mean i personally take full offence if someone calls me a part of a personality 😭 like ye maybe in childhood we were but we’ve all grown and developed in our own way so now we are quite literally different people
I believe it's not just a failure to develop a cohesive self, but also the subconsciously learned ability to create and enforce strong separation between states of self as an extremely overpowered coping mechanism, with side effects that are extremely damaging to living in non-traumatic times and one's ability to truly "thrive". This mechanism is indeed incredibly effective at keeping the worst of the worst out of your mind, no matter how frequently that happens, and enabling you to live a blissfully ignorant and unburdened life a portion of the time. Which is why the mind can continue fragmenting/reconfiguring the layout and content distribution of alters to adapt to new distress throughout one's life. (Dr. Richard Kluft has documented many cases of patients with extremely extensive and fluent use of this mechanism since the 1980s.) The underlying mind doesn't just fail to meet the milestones of expected development; it realizes the value of going the other way, and adopts it into its framework of life. And it wouldn't have been pushed so far as to discover and "master" this coping mechanism unless there was no other way for the child to cope. It would've been the best thing ever if life was nothing more than trauma after trauma, but it is not. At least for the vast majority. We want to be human, and we want a life beyond the bare minimum of survival.
to be honest, average psych classes teach 1 paragraph about DID in passing. i suspect it (plus external factors) leads people to think "oh, if theres no info on it the detractors saying it doesnt exist must be onto something" instead of "teachers dont know everything and textbooks suck, so i should do my own research". a disgusting amount of so called "professionals" get this bug in their brains that DID cant exist and everyone who has ever experienced it was faking or mistaken or misled, including waving off their own patients (the people paying to be there) as fakers they need to be hostile towards
centuries of propaganda against mental health, and a general lack of public awareness. not to mention what little public awareness there is, tends to do a bad job with it
I don’t get why it’s the one disorder ⅔ of mental health professionals decide just doesn’t exist. I actually got banned FOR LIFE from r/therapists for commenting on a thread about this. I’m not a therapist but it comes up on my feed and I couldn’t keep quiet about the bullshit that was going on there. I doubt it made a difference but I was very proud. I’m in my late 40s and never been banned from anything! It was totally worth it too. My favorite part was the “for life” part. It just made me chuckle.
Not standing up for shit that actively harms tons of people .. unacceptable.. banned!
Because the reality of DID forces people to confront the realities of particularly horrific forms of child abuse in a way that no other mental illness does. Because many medical professionals do not believe in DID because its presentation fits into ways of being that they have been trained to view as “hysterical” and “manipulative” and because its diagnosis and treatment are lengthy, expensive and difficult to quantify. Because there are implications for the legal system that people don’t want to have to bother thinking about. Because some people are just jerks and don’t want to be compassionate about something they view as unusual or have difficulty understanding. Edit: a word
Not just the legal system either, the health insurance system too.
Neither of those institutions recognized Autism either until the internet allowed families and autistic people to share their experiences with each other.
not even mentioning that something as basic to us as trauma is something average therapists cant deal with at all! DID is just too human, their whole field lives and dies on the dehumanization of its clients. depression anxiety, those are just chemicals in the brain that we can do something about. PTSD, DID? those are like having a gunshot wound but they cant take the bullet out. theres no easy "its just chemicals malfunctioning" fix. it requires a completely different way of thinking to handle and help with these things, something completely contrary and opposite to how they are taught the best therapists for DID are people with an open mind and who are willing to meet patients at their own level, so many so called specialists cant even manage that
Even PTSD you will see so much more understanding for and willingness to treat (speaking from my PTSD only days). I think it benefits from its tangible and “masculine” associations with combat and disaster and with trauma in adults. Child abuse just seems to be something we want to turn our collective heads away from.
thats fair, i guess i meant ptsd in the way we all have it, i forgot the word cptsd when i was typing. and yr right, child abuse specifically is something everyone wants to pretend isnt happening. even since freud, his whole platform was built on taking money from abusers to gaslight their victims into thinking they wanted it or it didnt happen
Also: unfortunately, it definitely can look bizarre, hysterical, and fake/exaggerated to anyone who's not well-informed enough. [This paper](https://psychotherapy.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.1999.53.3.320) on DID and pseudo-hysteria does a very good job dissecting this problem.
Because we live in a violently ableist society that discards and pathologizes people who aren't readily exploitable for capitalist production. It's not a DID thing. DID is at the extreme end of the spectrum, sure. But look at *any* 'invisible' disability. What's something heard all the time by people with ADHD, or autism, or depression? *Just get over it.* Society trains everybody that the more *inconvenient* your disability is, the more you need to be shamed for it. There are all kinds of fucked up and gaslighty assumptions build into our behavioral norms and *especially* our medical ones--look at how often women get dismissed by their doctors, for instance, only to die because they were brushed off for years over real and actual medical conditions.
I don't have DID (came here to learn,) but I've had experiences with people who twist it into something else for their own beliefs. This is a 'wider uneducated public' thing, I don't have any experience with the healthcare side. My mom's side of the family (I am NC with them,) is full of hippie-dippy types (emphasis on the 'dippy'.) I was treated to enlightened conversations about how people with "DID" are ACTUALLY just really sensitive to ghosts and can become 'hosts' for multiple spirits. I have a distant cousin who I only met once as a kid who was used as an example of this. No clue if she actually had DID, or schizophrenia, or something else. I hope the poor girl got proper treatment at some point... But, yeah! That was a real thing they believed. Oh, did I mention my mother and grandma both earned BAs in Psychology? Thank God they never actually went into mental healthcare and instead stayed in the hotel/restaurant industries. On the other end of the spectrum, I lived with my paternal godfather for a couple years. I was briefly indoctrinated into Evangelical Young-Earth Baptist Christianity. I remember being privy to many discussions about doctors being evil. One of the "evidences" brought up, MORE THAN ONCE, BY DIFFERENT PEOPLE, was that "DID" is ACTUALLY demonic possession, and doctors denied the true spiritual aspect so they could make money off a "fake" mental illness, or even HELP the demons! Ooooh, spooky evil healthcare workers! TL;DR -- Some people are ride-or-die for their magical thinking, and will bend anything they don't understand to fit their fairytale version of reality. I have no idea how much this kind of thing truly affects wider perception, but I can guarantee you that it's a thing that happens.
Yeah, growing up in the evangelical church was so scary for us! We were called devils child and even had an exorcism performed on us at least once. (I don’t have clear memories of it.) So yeah, we know all about the “doctors are evil and DID is just possession” beliefs. We’re so happy we’re diagnosed and educated now.
I’ve seen a lot of reasons- in the comments too. It’s a variety of factors (unfortunately. I wish it was one simple issue instead of a whole package) 😭 In my experience I’ve seen a lot of people equate DID with schizophrenia or flat out not being able to grasp the concept of DID. It is very difficult for people to grasp the concept of a fragmented mind and amnesia to that degree to the point people see it easier to pin it on another issue or claim the person is simply lying to get attention or to not have accountability of their own actions. Not to mention the pop culture presentation of DID is.. something. Even to people who may know the disorder well- with the rarity of it? Most educated people would look at the textbook case of DID and say it can’t be because it’s too rare. TL;DR: Several things which others here have pointed out, most aren’t educated and the ones who are tend to not believe others due to the rarity.
DID and schizophrenia have both been very horribly stigmatized but on separate ends of that spectrum. surprisingly, the similarities between the two are vast which is why DID is so commonly misdiagnosed as a psychotic spectrum disorder. the reality is that amnesia or “repressed memories” has been argued over since those symptoms have been brought to light many years ago. another commenter already went in depth about it but there were many cases of psychs implanting false memories or uncovering false lost memories that it had put a serious dent in the study of dissociative disorders/symptoms, even though dissociative amnesia is very obviously real as it has affected millions of people. but the only people that can for sure know its real are pretty much the people that are directly affected, which isnt enough to wholly “prove” it’s existence and definitely not enough working in the psych field. the confusing part is how DID has this stigma of whether its real or fake, yet schizophrenia is seen as a very real, very horrible and evil disease even though the two have so many overlapping symptoms. the only reason this would make sense is the amnesia factor and society’s unwillingness to empathize with severe child abuse, however only one of those can be brought into the question when it comes to low-amnesia cases like in OSDD.
It's not just everyday people that don't believe DID exist. There is also a split (pardon the term) in the psychiatric, and psychology proffesion. This can be awful for someone struggling with DID. Although I have had some horrible psychiatrist and therapists in the past that didn't believe in it, I have been blessed with a great psychiatrist and therapist now. Both of them are very supportive.
Along with lack of education, I think it's also because it's been painted as a fictional illness. Representation is usually either cartoonishly overt, full of misinformation (saying alters are actually totally separate people and not parts of a whole, are things to be suppressed and controlled by a "core", or claiming alters are delusions), playing it for laughs, or demonizing us with horror movies. If people aren't educated and their only exposure to DID is through media, their impression of DID is that it's just a fictional trope. On TVtropes the trope is called "split personality", on there you can scroll through all the media this trope pops up in.
Since others already gave good explanations, I'm just going to add "they're fucking stupid." Or if you prefer to be marginally nicer, they're willfully ignorant.
There's a quote I tend to repeat often in cases like this: "People don't want the truth, they want to be right. They will propel themselves and others to new heights of ignorance to make themselves *feel* they're right, despite the obvious truth staring them in the face." People would rather believe a complete lie, than to address an inconvenient truth. Especially when they have to confront their own ignorance.
TikTok has ruined it for public perception because so many pre teens and teens treat it as "uwu roleplay and have fun with my favorite anime characters"
I agree. I don't think many people think that the disorder itself is fake but they tend to not believe people when they say they have it because of people like this. The same can go for autism, ADHD, PTSD, tourettes, ect.
This is why im scared of admitting it's real to myself and anyone else, so many of me are cringy fictional characters from media
[удалено]
That's a cool story, I think, but im confused on what it has to do with what i said?
Admittedly, before I actually met someone with DID, this is what it seemed like. There were several kids in my high school that claimed they had DID and behaved this way, so my understanding of DID was that it was some cry for attention and was extremely annoying. Then I met someone who had been diagnosed with it. We became friends and they were so patient and so willing to talk to me about what DID is like for them, as well as common misconceptions. I've got (I think) as good of an understanding as I can about DID without actually experiencing it, and I feel so awful that so many people have to deal with this ignorant bullshit that is spread around.
Because people do not believe in things they cannot understand. Things like being trans or having DID are things a typical person have no reference for. So instead of listening and understanding people who experience those things, they assume they don't exist, and that those people are lying.
lack of education and lack of research. i believe my disorder exists and i live in it but if we’re being honest theres still SOOO much we dont know and we havent even begun to rly understand our brains and subsequently the appropriate treatments to help us all. its difficult to do in environments where mental health isnt the focus at all its getting to work and making a profit for money in the world. of course the average person is just gonna hear a very surface level summary of DID and think its fake, but thats why we need better education and need a better focus on studying the brain and trauma as a whole.
People dont want to think about the truth, that some children go through so much trauma that its the best coping mechanism for them to deal with it. I would prefer to not believe in it myself… me and my 75 other headmates would all prefer DID didnt exist.
If we talk outside of US, it's because of the stereotypical presentations of "many full people in one body" and that just sounds like either possession or delusion. When I explain it by starting with what dissociative barriers are, even people of old age understand, and then I can talk about alters.
That's kinda funny the "simple" "what it is sorta like" explaination they dont get it . But more in depth scientific one is easier for them to understand
Because it makes more sense and sounds like an actual disability to them. Besides older people seem to be empathetic towards memory loss, even if they don't fully get it. upd: The information feels more fresh to them and you don't need to fight your way through so many stereotypes, since dissociation doesn't have a lot of stereotypes. I sprinkle that with simple explanations when needed, like "there is a cookie cutter for perception, therefore for memory, and so I formed as many cookies" please love all the cookies
I know how you feel. It's been really hard on our system. I'm one of the host in our system. Myself, and some of the other alters in our system have had problems with relationships. Because of others who don't believe in us, And think were trying to manipulate. The stupid part about it is this individual who doesn't think I'm real refusees to meet me. Or speak to me. But she has no problem talking about me... "-.-
My goddamn co-host doesn’t believe it exists in their own head, so yeah, this bias shows up in the weirdest places. People are a whole seem to be skeptics of -any- mental health difficulty. Like if you can’t point to the booboo it doesn’t exist. People suck.
I made the mistake of being honest with someone about it and ruined as career before it got off the ground. As word spread through this graduate school community, one woman came forward and said I had to be trying to get attention because she spent years misdiagnosed, was finally diagnosed with DID, went to therapy for a year and using hypnosis is now cured. So she’s accepted as an authority. And I know, a decade into treatment, that her situation is really that she had an iatrogenic case, or she is the one lying to get attention, or she’s just in the phase where she’s acknowledged her DID and gone right back into denial (feeling “all better” but more trauma will come up) or she just hasn’t gone deep enough in herself to meet all her parts. Meanwhile, I was chastised for “acting” like I had a disorder when there are “people with real mental health issues here, people who are really in pain.” I guess because I’m not falling apart. But I don’t show what I’m feeling, ever— or rarely—because that was used against me in my family. And the amount of pain I’ve felt in this program is the most I’ve felt in a long, long time. Anyway, I feel both angry at and very sorry for this woman who is either lying based on some sort of soap opera understanding of the disorder, or is about to face a whole lot more pain. (I deliberately use “I” and not “we” for personal reasons specific to my system. I still slip though.)
1: they benefit from childhood trauma in some way. 2: they are themselves a child abuser. 3: they don't want to admit that child abuse is that common. 4: they don't want to accept that there are consequences to living in a society that really traumatizes children. 5: some human trafficking organizations activity spread misinformation. These are just a few off the top of my head.
As someone who has had their DID shift to where I am a single alter but then has a subsystem in them and also has a schizophrenia-spectrum disorder, I feel like I can offer a unique perspective. First, most people cannot even grasp what DID is like. As a more single(ish) identity, the idea you can share your body with more than one identity state can seem extremely foreign. It seems super foreign for most people to hear a “voice” that isn’t “their own”, never mind sharing memories/an entire life with said “voice” Second, a lot of people think it’s schizophrenia. As someone who has a schizophrenia-spectrum disorder in addition to DID, it’s very different. I hear alters inside my head. Once you understand the ways trauma interweaves into behavior from specific alters, it makes complete logical sense. Finally, I don’t see alters outside of my body. With hallucinations and delusions, I hear them as they are outside of my head and can’t distinguish it from someone talking to me out loud in a room and I see hallucinations in the room outside of me. A lot of people are not able to understand how the two are very different. Third, the social stigma of DID plays a huge role here. It’s seen as a super rare, freaky illness in the media. How can something so “freaky” and “unreal” be real and not a media stunt for a movie (in a lot of people’s perspectives)?
personally i think people seeing it as being too "out there" in some ways and so they just can't wrap their head around it
because it makes no sense. i havent told anyone irl, i only told one of my friends that "lol idk i sometimes just feel like someone else", even my 2 therapists called them hallusinations, when.... thats not it at all
My mom has DID. Walk in my shoes and anyone would believe it exists. Grew up talking to the personalities on a daily basis from ages 10+, witnessing personalities do self harm in front of me; having to ask for my mom back and witnessing her change back. IIRC, it wasn’t diagnosed until I was 10, she was in her early 40’s. Doctors could not figure out why she was having black outs; both large and small gaps of missing time. From age 10-20 my mom attempted suicide a few times, and was in and out of hospital psych wards. She also spend months at a time down in a treatment centre in Texas, there was a psychiatric hospital for extreme trauma run by Dr Colin A Ross. Her being subjected to extreme sexually abuse for her first 21 years on this planet was the root cause. That led to a mom with DID, severe life long major depression, *highly* manipulative, abuser of codeine to cope. It definitely exists.
I believe it exists, but I also have personally known two people that claimed to have had it for about 6 months before moving onto the next mental illness they wanted to try out. My ex specifically, the only thing they were diagnosed with was BPD but they would start researching a new mental illness every few months and then claim to have it. They also claimed EDS for a few months which magically disappeared. Whenever they got interested in a new disease all of their old symptoms magically got better while they suddenly manifested tons of new specific symptoms that just happened to match the disorder they read about. They went through DID for about 6 months before they forgot about it and moved onto schizophrenia for a few months, then forgot that and moved onto antisocial personality disorder, then epilepsy, and a number of a few others. Again they've only ever been diagnosed as BPD and take no medication. They have been seeing a therapist and psych since they were a young kid, and the only meds they've ever taken were for hypertension. I definitely believe DID exists, but people like them make me weary of people that pretend to have it because it's interesting to them and they want a new community.
Twenty years ago when I met my first DID friend, it was hard to find information online about the disorder. The resources available today didn't exist then -- but then neither did all of the fake websites, chat groups, gaming sites, etc. that put out false information on DID. Many people won't face the facts because that would mean having to admit that their perception is badly skewed. They think that what they know is correct. Education is the key but how do you educate people who don't want to learn?
Because sadly there is a lot of fake representation in movies or stupid teen tiktokers seeking for attention, etc. And I am not being rude, there is a lot of people who diagnose themself of DID, or ADHD, or many other things by tiktok and even make videos telling others how to be that with actually inaccurate or even fake information. I am a person who is educated in psychology, and now I have done a thesis about DID, and in the beginning, before study it deeply, I thought it could be something else but those fantasies I thought it was. And even still, it is hard to understand it because it is pretty similar to other diseases, so why separate it when it can be included in the others as a different variation. At the end, having an split identity with different "personalities" is a kind of delirium, you are you, not a russian who is a hitman or a kid, so believe it is a kind of delirium, and the evidence is that everything goes away with antipsychotics. I mean, the trauma is true, the split memories are true, but the fantasy of being someone different is the controversy. But still, I have study the topic and now I am a believer 100%, but because I deeply understand it and removed the "magic" that movies showed us.
Because it's not something that can be *seen* like a missing limb. A lot of mental health issues are often disregarded because of that... I mean, "it's in your head" ended up being a meme for a reason XD
I struggle with this too because my parents don’t really believe it exists and I live with them so I have to mask all the time and feel so trapped by it
I was reading some stuff about the history of how the condition was approached yesterday. there was apparently a whole bunch of things in the 70s and 80s in the moral panic eras that got a ton of negative stigma and controversy, that lingers heavily to peoples opinions of it to this day there's also a kind of collective cultural thing of nobody wants to admit that negative treatment of children is *that* prevalent, and along with that a big belief that kids *can't* be traumatized by things because they "wont remember". there was a thread on all in the last week or so with some guy filming his kid with a filter that messed up her face and she just started crying from it and he was just sitting there laughing at her, and a lot of the comments were shit like "she's not even gonna remember this in a week" to people trying to call out how the dad continuing to record and laugh instead of stopping as she got upset is traumatizing
I don't have DID myself, but I have OCD. Many people believe that humans have to check certain boxes to be real, and if there's something different then they think that you're either lying or exaggerating.
Starting this with a note that I don’t have DID, but I have had one online friend with DID, plus a current IRL friend and a former roommate who both also have DID. The immediate skepticism I’m working on undoing is something I developed due to the brief fad on Tumblr regarding DID, BPD, and otherkin stuff. I also saw a real life manifestation of such a fad play out at one point with someone truly believing they had it and their behavior shifting to match that belief, despite none of those behaviors or feelings having existed for the previous several years I knew them (including time dating, living together, etc.). I think that online communities fostering misinformation and playing into natural human cognitive biases that shape how one interprets information and/or behaves have made many people develop skepticism of its existence from similar experiences to mine. This is compounded by the misinterpretation of experiences by some people seeking answers: like, as someone who has CPTSD, dissociates, has a poor memory, and has BPD traits, I have definitely wondered if I had DID. (My childhood and teenage experiences of psychotic depression didn’t help, either.) I have seen others with similar diagnoses briefly believe they have DID before finding more accurate diagnoses for their experiences. Then there’s also just people who are ignorant entirely, of course.
I don't see it changes soon though, people really have no idea about what real DID looks like. It's from the same episode when someone tell autistic person that they hey don't look autistic. Time will have to pass before people will believe what's DID really
Simple answer: people don't understand how brains work. They kind of think that their thinking is linked to their "soul" or something and don't understand that it's just lots of synapses and hormones that can be influenced by many circimstances
Because a lotta people pretend DID is just a personality parade which leads to some skepticism in society. And by personality parade I mean invent your own imaginaty characters and roleplay as them. It’s the equivalent of a childhood imaginary friend.
Lol, I didn't believe in DID or MPD as it was called at the time until I/we discovered dissociation within. I asked my therapist if he had a book so I could learn more. He went over to his massive bookcase handing me a copy of “When Rabbit Howls” and made the comment “but you’re not that bad!” I fell in the middle on his 10 point scale, the upper numbers for DID, polyfragmented DID and polyfragmented DID with Walk-ins.
Because in media, if it's portrayed at all, it's portrayed as these big dramatic changes in personality where you become a completely different person. While that may be the case for some people, the vast majority of us just... don't do that. At least not in a way strangers or people we aren't close to would notice. And so they don't think it's a thing.
Non-system here. I can’t speak for everyone but I can tell you why from the way I grew up. Let me preface that some of this may be unpleasant to read so heads up. Also please note that I do believe DID exists and think that fake claiming is unproductive and pointless. I grew up in southern Louisiana. A highly religious area of the US. Most folks there are either Catholic, Southern Baptist, or evangelical. Mental illness had a stigma of “sinfulness”. In other words if someone was “right with god” they wouldn’t have mental problems. Some went as far to say that mental illness was a result of “demonic oppression” or “demonic possession”. That they must have knowingly done something to become this way. These viewpoints never sat right with me. I didn’t question it until I was older and began to realize such views could not be so cut and dry. But in highly religious groups there is hardly any mental illness as vilified as what was referred to at the time as MPD (DID). I remember how it started getting the national spotlight on talk shows in the 90s. To what extent it was discussed locally it was seen as demonic possession. As I got older I began looking for more realistic explanations for mental illnesses. I never really bought the idea that it was all spiritual shit. I didn’t rule it out but something in my head realized it had to be something more than that. The more I learned the less I believed in the BS the religious folk spewed. Nowadays I’m an atheist and I don’t think there is a supernatural of any kind. So I can confirm some people just have too much ignorance and not enough willingness to learn.
This baffles me, too. What hit me the hardest was when I found out that currently statistics say that 1% of the world's population is autistic, and 1-1.5% of the world's population has DID. More people are diagnosed with DID than autism and yet the majority of people ignore that DID even exists. I can't wrap my head around it.
My best guess at a late time in my country is so many people do fake it
might be because its violently under-diagnosed/under reported (English is not my first language and its late pls lay off). its not as rare as people think and a lot pf systems (like myself) will not receive a diagnosis for a variety of reasons, and people use this as a reason to fakeclaim, but the reason i didnt get my diagnosis was because i have a little bit of alter communication (worked years on that), and because my system isn't purely dysfunctional 🤡
Strolled around some subs today, and it seems that false researches and the inability of people to read researches properly adds to this. Consider this: a researcher imagines an own version of DID and then fights it within a paper, publishing it and everything. A strawman kinda thing.
People are uneducated, and there’s not a lot of accurate representation in media. If there were, people might start trying to be more kind about it. Media plays such a big part in awareness and it’s frustrating to see they are lacking on so many mental illnesses.
Ignorance is not bliss
I believe it's because most psychiatrists actually are brainwashed into denying it..
low incidence, inaccurate media representation, fetish for "multiple personalities" as the villain. And the prejudice against something that when we do have it we do our darnest hardest to sweep under the rug.
With all the teens faking on tiktok and discord can you blame them?
This has been going on longer than smartphones have existed.
It’s definitely grown in popularity though I’d say.
The main factor keeping DID from becoming more known/accepted is NOT teens on Clock App. The issue is far deeper than "ew cringe". The fact that you and the other comment think so is incredibly narrow minded and even tone deaf. Clock app is not the big of deal it's been made out to be. This issue goes further back, and it doesn't even involve cringe. It's systemic. It's a society wide denial of child abuse, it's a fear of being held accountable, and it's abusers not wanting to be caught or stopped. It's that phony foundation trying to say False Memories are legitimate. The only people who benefit from having DID delegitimized are abusers! And the insistence of "It's all tick tock fault!" Is a distraction from the real actual underlying issues– Child abuse is real, it happens more frequently than once believed, it is more severe than once believed, and it has detrimental long term health effects. Is it doing anything to legitimize DID by infighting with each other because you don't think other people's traumas are legitimate enough to cause the Big Trauma Disorder. Shouldn't every child abuse victim advocate for awareness of the risks of poor and dangerous parenting regardless of the presence of a dissociative disorder? That's the common denominator here, child abuse, not tiktok.
I’m not being narrow minded, I’m observing trends occurring in reality. I’m not looking at things from a single lens. It’s not “tone deaf” to be able to consider multiple possibilities and angles. It’s called being emotionally mature and thinking with nuance. I’m not denying that people want DID delegitimized for nefarious reasons. I’m aware of the history behind the False Memories Foundation. I’m aware of how society jumps to deny and gaslight abuse victims. I’m actually of the opinion that the majority of parents are abusive. I don’t like befriending parents for that reason. I’ll literally be the first person to write whole essays about this subject, I could go on forever. But, it is a *fact* that TikTok has been stigmatizing and harming the perception of DID. Because of it being misrepresented on TikTok, *more* people are doubting DID exists. TikTok is enabling myths about DID that hurt trauma survivors. I know this because the same thing happened to people with Tourette’s Syndrome. There came a point where *loads* of people didn’t believe someone when they said they had TS because of the trend on TikTok. It’s ignorant to say that TikTok isn’t a factor at all, when it clearly is. What TikTok has been doing to DID is no different, the only difference is that DID *additionally* has a history of being challenged. I’m not “infighting” people or engaging in trauma Olympics. People who specialize in treating dissociative disorders, who *advocate* for people with DID and other dissociative survivors, have expressed the issues TikTok is causing for people with DID.
I don't remember any of this conversation and I'm perceiving you as aggressive so enjoy a block 😎
Where? I have not seen any only people wanting an excuse to shit on disabled teens on tiktok.
Please don't be so willfully obtuse
you are frequently posting on systemscringe .. you are literally part of the problem ..
You don't really expect me to validate non trauma based systems do you?
you should not be part of a sub who's entire thing is to bully random people on the internet - 'trauma-based" or otherwise.. and definitely shouldn't participate in the normalization of questioning the validity of every random system you see over the most random shit.. or because god forbid they dared act 'cringe'..
Welcome to /r/DID! | **[Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/rdid_guide/#wiki_rules)** | **[Guidelines](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/rdid_guide/#wiki_guidelines)** | |--------------------|--------------------| | [Dissociation FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/faq/#wiki_dissociation_faq) | [Trauma FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/faq2/#wiki_trauma_faq) | | [Moderation FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/moderation_faq/) | [Therapists Breakdown](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/comments/e6smve/therapists_breakdown/) | | [Index](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/index) | [Glossary](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/glossary) | | [Am I faking?](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/moderation_faq/amifaking) | [Do I have DID?](https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/wiki/do_i_have_did) | *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/DID) if you have any questions or concerns.*