How do I know if someone is a multiple? Has multiple personalities?
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I have had a lot of experience with people who have DID....and count them among my friends. So yes, I know a lot about it.
For one thing.....some people seem to really want to hang onto the idea that it's really rare. I see this opinion all the time on this board and it's just not true. Curent estiments are that about 3-5 % of psychiatric admissions are folks that have DID. So it's simply not as rare as some people seem to have a need to think that it is.
However, the fact that, at least in the beginning, people with DID generally have **no clue** that they have it .......well I think you can see where that in itself could make it hard to diagnose. Because one of the criterion for DID is ( again, at least in the beginning) .....amnesia on the part of the "host", about the other personalities. So......there can be a really long period of years where they have no clue at all about any of it. To them, having big chunks of time that they can't remember anything about is.....just how life has always been.
" Golly, it seems like I was just having breakfast, and here it is, dinner time. How time flies !! "
Plus, the theme of "protection" is much of what DID is ultimately about, so in general, most of the personalities are going to do their best to pass themselves off as the host, in order to not rock the boat.
When it comes to how you tell if someone has DID......from a practical standpoint, it seems like most therapists finally start believing that something of this nature might be up when one of the "little" personalites shows up in therapy. I mean...all of a sudden the person is talking and acting like they are 6 years old. That might catch your attention, if you were a therapist.
Also, sometimes therapists will recieve letters in the mail....or in this day and age, e-mails from some of the persons' personalities. Often, in essance, telling the therapist to stop being so stupid and get with the program. Something like that might catch a therapists' attention too. If the client is lucky, I mean.
So often something fairly dramatic happens before someone else catches on. The going estimate is that people with DID spend an average of 6-7 years in the mental health system before somebody finally figures out what the deal is.
The other thing is.......people with DID are ( in the beginning) often HUGELY resistant to the idea that they have it. I mean...since people are amniesic about all of it...well.....think of how you would feel if your therapist told you that you had DID ??
You would be going : NO FU*KING WAY !
Believe me, very few people are going to be going : Woopie, I have DID !!
Most people with DID will tell you that accepting the idea that they have it is just about the hardest step of the whole thing.
I have a couple of web friends who pretty much know for certain that they have it, but at the same time are like...." I don't have it, I don't want to know about it, I don't want to read about it, I don't want to make any effort to get in contact with my alters, I don't have any awarness of what they say or do, I wish they would go away, and to be truthfull, I just don't want to think about it ever at all."
While at the same time, I'm spending more than half the time talking to their alters, a good percentage of who are talking about how angry and frustrated they are at getting the host, and what a useless woss the person is for not wanting to know them.
The result of which is often......lots and lots of bad headaches for the host....hearing "chatter" all the time......stuff like that. Once the personalities know that the host is beginning to suspect that they are there.....but that they deny them or don't want to get in contact with them.....usually they start making it bad for the person.
Having made all these generalizations....you have to remember that what causes DID is almost always severe child abuse, and the personalities form in response to the abuse. Like...often when the person is only 2 or 3 years old. And there's no handbook on how to be DID.....so different peoples "systems" are often structured quite differently. And since the personalites initially form in response to the abusive events.......in my experience, usually 50% or more of the personalites are little kids....because that's how old the person was when the precipitating events happened.
So.....if a person found a lot of drawings around that looked like a little kid drew them...but there was not child in the house....that might be a clue as well.
Or if you had a friend who seemed not to remember some of the things that you had just talked to them about....real recently ??
In any case, it's not real easy to tell.....considering that at least in the beginning.....even the person themselves can't tell.
Another thing to remember is that people with DID are NOT "crazy". They generally do not have delusions, nor do they normally behave in ways that are wild and attention getting.
But yeah, they are the victims of some truely horrrible stuff. Stuff which their systems evolved as they did in order to protect them from the emotional damage that a waking awareness of such events would have caused them when they were innocent children.
A habit that was protective then......but maybe not so much now...now that the person is older.
Bob
Other Answers:
It's a very rare disorder.
You cant tell.. if theyre good at hiding it.. it may look like parinoid scitsophrenia(sp) or like a bipolar disorder.. or it could be drugs. Anyway the treatment is usually the same for paranoid..
We all got different sides to our personalities, but not a lot of people believe in dual or multiple personalities with different names and stuff.
You would know when they start acting weird like assuming another person's identity or creating another identity of her own... I suggest that you get that person to a psychiatrist for possible treatment and/or intervention immediately.
Its not just one sight decision. May be u will not know it 4 years. It all depand on person how he or she changes the personality and when.
Treatment: Psyclogist
it can be hard to tell sometimes. one big thing is that they may have a conversation with you and not remember even seeing you the next day and not know why, at this point they are acting different than normal. If you think you do.....ask some friends if you act very differently under certain circumstances. try and monitor each day and if you remember the day before or even a few days before. keep a dairy.
blessed be
"michinoku" is right, except that multiple personality disorder is EXTREMELY, PROFOUNDLY, rare. Maybe, one in a billion. Everyone else who claims to have it is lying.
Hi,
multiple personality disorder is now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). This was once considered to be rare and unusual.
However Dissociative Disorders are now understood to be fairly common effects of severe trauma in early childhood, most typically extreme, repeated physical, sexual, and/or emotional abuse.
In Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994), Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) was changed to Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), reflecting changes in professional understanding of the disorder resulting from significant empirical research.
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), widely accepted as a major mental illness affecting 8% of the general population in the United States, is closely related to Dissociative Disorders. In fact, 80-100% of people diagnosed with a Dissociative Disorder also have a secondary diagnosis of PTSD. The personal and societal cost of trauma disorders is extremely high. Recent research suggests the risk of suicide attempts among people with trauma disorders may be even higher than among people who have major depression. In addition, there is evidence that people with trauma disorders have higher rates of alcoholism, chronic medical illnesses, and abusiveness in succeeding generations.
WHAT IS DISSOCIATION?
Dissociation is a mental process, which produces a lack of connection in a person's thoughts, memories, feelings, actions, or sense of identity. During the period of time when a person is dissociating, certain information is not associated with other information as it normally would be. For example, during a traumatic experience, a person may dissociate the memory of the place and circumstances of the trauma from his ongoing memory, resulting in a temporary mental escape from the fear and pain of the trauma and, in some cases, a memory gap surrounding the experience. Because this process can produce changes in memory, people who frequently dissociate often find their senses of personal history and identity are affected.
Most clinicians believe that dissociation exists on a continuum of severity. This continuum reflects a wide range of experiences and/or symptoms. At one end are mild dissociative experiences common to most people, such as daydreaming, highway hypnosis, or "getting lost" in a book or movie, all of which involve "losing touch" with conscious awareness of one's immediate surroundings. At the other extreme is complex, chronic dissociation, such as in cases of Dissociative Disorders, which may result in serious impairment or inability to function. Some people with Dissociative Disorders can hold highly responsible jobs, contributing to society in a variety of professions, the arts, and public service -- appearing to function normally to coworkers, neighbors, and others with whom they interact daily.
There is a great deal of overlap of symptoms and experiences among the various Dissociative Disorders, including DID. For the sake of clarity, this brochure will refer to Dissociative Disorders as a collective term. Individuals should seek help from qualified mental health providers to answer questions about their own particular circumstances and diagnoses.
HOW DOES A DISSOCIATIVE DISORDER DEVELOP?
When faced with overwhelmingly traumatic situations from which there is no physical escape, a child may resort to "going away" in his or her head. Children typically use this ability as an extremely effective defense against acute physical and emotional pain, or anxious anticipation of that pain. By this dissociative process, thoughts, feelings, memories, and perceptions of the traumatic experiences can be separated off psychologically, allowing the child to function as if the trauma had not occurred.
Dissociative Disorders are often referred to as a highly creative survival technique because they allow individuals enduring "hopeless" circumstances to preserve some areas of healthy functioning. Over time, however, for a child who has been repeatedly physically and sexually assaulted, defensive dissociation becomes reinforced and conditioned. Because the dissociative escape is so effective, children who are very practiced at it may automatically use it whenever they feel threatened or anxious -- even if the anxiety-producing situation is not extreme or abusive.
Often, even after the traumatic circumstances are long past, the left-over pattern of defensive dissociation remains. Chronic defensive dissociation may lead to serious dysfunction in work, social, and daily activities.
Repeated dissociation may result in a series of separate entities, or mental states, which may eventually take on identities of their own. These entities may become the internal "personality states" of a DID system. Changing between these states of consciousness is often described as "switching."
WHAT ARE THE SYMPTOMS OF A DISSOCIATIVE DISORDER?
People with Dissociative Disorders may experience any of the following: depression, mood swings, suicidal tendencies, sleep disorders (insomnia, night terrors, and sleep walking), panic attacks and phobias (flashbacks, reactions to stimuli or "triggers"), alcohol and drug abuse, compulsions and rituals, psychotic-like symptoms (including auditory and visual hallucinations), and eating disorders. In addition, individuals with Dissociative Disorders can experience headaches, amnesias, time loss, trances, and "out of body experiences." Some people with Dissociative Disorders have a tendency toward self-persecution, self-sabotage, and even violence (both self-inflicted and outwardly directed).
WHO GETS DISSOCIATIVE DISORDERS?
The vast majority (as many as 98 to 99%) of individuals who develop Dissociative Disorders have documented histories of repetitive, overwhelming, and often life-threatening trauma at a sensitive developmental stage of childhood (usually before the age of nine), and they may possess an inherited biological predisposition for dissociation. In our culture the most frequent precursor to Dissociative Disorders is extreme physical, emotional, and sexual abuse in childhood, but survivors of other kinds of trauma in childhood (such as natural disasters, invasive medical procedures, war, kidnapping, and torture) have also reacted by developing Dissociative Disorders.
Current research shows that DID may affect 1% of the general population and perhaps as many as 5-20% of people in psychiatric hospitals, many of whom have received other diagnoses. The incidence rates are even higher among sexual-abuse survivors and individuals with chemical dependencies. These statistics put Dissociative Disorders in the same category as schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety, as one of the four major mental health problems today.
Most current literature shows that Dissociative Disorders are recognized primarily among females. The latest research, however, indicates that the disorders may be equally prevalent (but less frequently diagnosed) among the male population. Men with Dissociative Disorders are most likely to be in treatment for other mental illnesses or drug and alcohol abuse, or they may be incarcerated.
WHY ARE DISSOCIATIVE DISORDERS OFTEN MISDIAGNOSED?
Dissociative Disorders survivors often spend years living with misdiagnoses, consequently floundering within the mental health system. They change from therapist to therapist and from medication to medication, getting treatment for symptoms but making little or no actual progress. Research has documented that on average, people with Dissociative Disorders have spent seven years in the mental health system prior to accurate diagnosis. This is common, because the list of symptoms that cause a person with a Dissociative Disorder to seek treatment is very similar to those of many other psychiatric diagnoses. In fact, many people who are diagnosed with Dissociative Disorders also have secondary diagnoses of depression, anxiety, or panic disorders.
DO PEOPLE ACTUALLY HAVE "MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES"?
Yes, and no. One of the reasons for the decision by the psychiatric community to change the disorder's name from Multiple Personality Disorder to Dissociative Identity Disorder is that "multiple personalities" is somewhat of a misleading term. A person diagnosed with DID feels as if she has within her two or more entities, or personality states, each with its own independent way of relating, perceiving, thinking, and remembering about herself and her life. If two or more of these entities take control of the person's behavior at a given time, a diagnosis of DID can be made. These entities previously were often called "personalities," even though the term did not accurately reflect the common definition of the word as the total aspect of our psychological makeup. Other terms often used by therapists and survivors to describe these entities are: "alternate personalities," "alters," "parts," "states of consciousness," "ego states," and "identities." It is important to keep in mind that although these alternate states may appear to be very different, they are all manifestations of a single person.
Hope this helps.
deeply observe the habbits and schedule of ur frnd and check his behaviour with different people near him, like with the people whom he need and the people who need him. Then observe his reaction on ur success and about ur difficulties....and final point is if he remains a friend in need..then he is a good friend indeed.
Strange behavior could be caused by many things, such as drug use, mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, biopolar manic phases, etc. They would need an accurate diagnosis by a psychiatrist.
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