Talk:Dissociative identity disorder/Archive 2

message: On the whole I like your edits, Bluejay. However, I'm not sure changing skeptics to detractors is such a great idea. Skeptics is a neutral word, detractors is negative. How about debunkers? That gives the same idea of attacking an idea, but has a more positive connotation. I'll make the change and we'll see how it looks. Zora 08:20, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't particularly like any of those words as they tend to be ambiguous and in the weasel word category.  Words like advocates, proponents, exponents, supporters and opponents -- used in relation to the actual names of such people -- are much more neutral.  I've found that you need to be very careful with the word "skeptic" in this context, as it can be manipulated.  See the climate change and global warming pages for good examples of how the word "skeptic" is misattributed.  --Viriditas  | Talk 08:26, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Detractors? 

message: Aloha, Zora.  I added the cleanup header per Wikipedia:Cleanup resources.  The article needs just about everything: copyediting, formatting, wikifying, POV checking, removal of weasel words etc.   I'm hoping the header will bring others in to help.  If you think another header would be more appropriate (attention?) then feel free to change it.  As a very small example, the table of contents needs to be moved below a lead (which also needs to be tight) so that the casual reader will be able to glance at the definition at the top of the page without having to read through the TOC and ~four paragraphs just to find out what this article is all about. --Viriditas  | Talk 09:58, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Cleanup

message: We are a healthy multiple collective, and we would like to see more attention paid to the healthy Multiplicity section. We may even do it ourselves.
----
Um, right now the healthy multiplicity section is one of the longer ones, so making it even longer doesn't seem like a good idea to me. That unbalances the article and seems to slight the other viewpoints. But what about writing a separate article on Healthy multiplicity? Then we could link to that article from the DID page. Just be sure that it's a summary of current views, research, news, etc., and not original research. You can start the article just by clicking on the red link in the sentence above. 
There may be some argument about whether or not that's the right name for the article, but articles can be moved to a new name, so just start and we can argue later <g>. Zora 15:37, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Healthy Multiplicity

message: I have just now put onto the chronology Being Pamela, a Channel 4 documentary in the UK about Pamela, a patient suffering from DID due to her abuse as a child. There is currently no individual article about it but I've mentioned it. I thought it was really moving. Her personality had split into 4 "inner characters" - Margaret, Susan, Sandra and Andrew. Celestianpower 22:41, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The story of Pamela is in itself controversial. She is described as disabled by her multiplicity to the point that she needs 24-7 caretakers. This is very unusual even according to the psychiatric literature. Some web-reviewers have speculated not so much that the documentary itself was phonied up (although you never know with television, considering what happened to Linda Massey when she was interviewed for BBC's Horizon) but that Pamela is being deliberately kept nonfunctional for some reason. My guess is financial. --Bluejay Young 17:30, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Being Pamela 

message: Someone in an online forum complained that this article said that use of the term MPD implied that the alters were real, while use of the term DID implied that the alters were delusional. I think that a good argument could be made for this position -- that the changes in the DSM from the MPD to the DID diagnosis implied this subtle but important change in POV -- but that argument should be spelled out in detail, where it could be rebutted. So I removed the offending phraseology. If it's not set up in a way that it could be refuted, it's POV.
Someone also seems to have added a rebuttal to the critics in the "critics" section. I thought that the whole point of the various sections was to allow each side to lay out its case fully and not to go into detailed controversy. That way lies muddle. So I deleted the rebuttal. 
This also is a complex question. The person who added the rebuttal (I haven't looked through the history to find out who it was) says that of course most DID diagnoses are made by a few specialists, that's why they're specialists. Um, well, the way medical specialists usually work is that they see patients who are referred to them by generalist doctors. So the generalist, the ordinary every-day shrink who deals with all sorts of disorders, would have to suspect DID before referring a patient to a DID-specialist. I believe that some of this MUST happen. But there are also too many stories, from the critical camp, of people visiting shrinks whom they believed to be generalists, for problems like anxiety, marital conflict, etc., and being assured that they had MPD/DID, and the generalist not referring, but proceeding to treatment. I believe that the huge spike in MPD/DID diagnoses during the 1980s and 1990s must have come from shrinks of the latter variety -- but that's an impression. The only way we could really be sure is to look at the referral pattern statistically, and I'm not sure that there's enough data to do that. I'd have to look at more detailed sources and report back. Zora 08:45, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  DID/MPD differentiation, remove argument in "critics" section 

message: The simple fact of the matter is, there's a lot of psychological conditions out there made out to be what they aren't.  ADD/ADHD, depression, being bipolar, those are all genetic and behavioral, not something anyone can change.  They represent how a person thinks or acts based on what personality traits they inherited from their parents.  DID is exactly like hypnosis and amnesia:  There's no such thing.  People are either just being stupid or they're looking for attention.  It happens everday, all over the place.  ADD is real -- it represents a persons inability to focus for some reason or another that they can't change or can control to only a limited extent.  Someone who is bipolar either simply has a bad attitude yet a lot of charisma (which gives them their high), and goes back and forth, which is even worse if they are naturally depressive.  Hyponosis, amnesia(caused by stress) and DID are all absolute BS.  Anyone with any critical thinking skills, who applies the slightest amount of logic to the circumstances of the subject will be able to disprove their condition easily.  My best advice for any psychologist treating a subject like that is to tell them to go home and get a life.
****
:and your qualifications for making this assessment are...
:and what? people are being stupid and looking for attention ever day all over the place?  
:When I first started dealing with my DID in therapy, I had a hard time believing it myself, and I asked my therapist if she thought I was making this up for attention.  She said it was hard to imagine someone with my intelligence and varied interests spending her time and money on therapy just to get attention.  She has a point--I have generally always attracted more attention than I am entirely comfortable with.  
:And believe me it is WAY NO FUN to be DID.  Either you go through life half-alive and never knowing yourself and never having a chance to love yourself, or you go into recovery and experience five to ten years of the most excruciatingly painful and disabling therapeutic work you can imagine.   (It's worth it in the end, though.)
:Anyway, I'm rattling (Mom's been smokin again), but why I actually got onto this page is because I could not make heads nor tails of the description of how to mark an article for cleanup, and really that's not my question anyway.  What I want SOMEbody to know (somebody who cares) is that this article is worse than no article at all in its current condition.  It's full of stuff that sounds like the writer was just making it up.  All that business about the "controversy" about does DID exist--Not, really.  Maybe on message boards for people who have nothing better to do with their lives than trash talk other people, I don't know, but in the professional community, no controversy.  It's in both Merck and the DSM-IV.  That only happens once there's a fairly general consensus.  Among some picky people.  What IS a controversy is the whole recovered-memory thing, which is peripherally related but not the subject of the article.
:I would be willing to slash and burn, but I don't have time to run down all those allegations and find and site the works that would clarify or refute them.  I'd be glad to take out everything I'm not fairly sure is true, but I don't want to piss people off, and it would be a much shorter article.63.231.119.135 05:39, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  The professional controversy is there and several books are cited. It's not just "trash talk". Please don't delete everything you don't like. The article tries to present all sides of the controversy, not just "the truth". If you feel that one of the positions is true, and that the position isn't fairly or fully represented, you could work on that section to make sure that it's more representative. Zora 07:07, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Um... as a multi with difficult-to-identify etiology, I think the point about over-emphasis on childhood abuse is well taken. I remember way back when it was the general consensus that MPD was solely caused by not just Satanic Ritual Abuse, but by a worldwide SRA conspiracy. ! 
Clearly, they'd never met any actual Satanists. While it's not at all difficult to imagine some particular Satanist (I'm imagining, of course, some particular ones) abusing some particular victim, the idea of a conspiracy... well, to paraphrase P.E.I. Bonewits, it's hard to imagine Satanists successfuly conspiring to order a pizza.
It seems to me that a wide variety of stressors may well cause people who have a predisposition to dissociation to do that, and often enough that particular stresses and situations would become confused with the normal process of personality formation. Whatever that process may be. If indeed, there is such a thing. My last search for reliable data on personality formation came up with a big fat zero.
My point here is that while we may reliably guess that if there was sexual abuse, then we can with at least rhetorical accuracy that MP and the abuse were somehow entangled. Where the problem lies is in taking it a step further, to "since you are multiple, you must have suffered sexual abuse." 
Such statements - and the assertion that those who disagree are "in denial" are depressingly common in some fora, most often those most closely associated with the "Medical Model." 
I've got to come back to this and add supporting cites; I'm having a bad google day today. Firewheel 06:48, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Another weird condition 

message: Up until about three years ago my primary occupation was outpatient psychotherapy.  I worked with a number of individuals who experienced symptoms of DID, as many as eight clients at any one time.  I estimate that I diagnosed as many as seventy people with this diagnosis over the length of my professional career(some twenty years).  Some people remained in therapy for years and some exited after only a few sessions.  Each of these individuals experienced similar and yet different symptoms.  I came to see DID as existing, like all other forms of "mental disorders" on a scale, references to which can be viewed in professional articles on the subject.  Some of these clients came to me with a knowledge of their other "selves", but many came to understand their condition during the course of treatment.  The most common presenting symptom for treatment was depression.    
Some mental health diagnoses are similar in symptom presentation to DID.  It is  critical for the mental health professional to understand the subtle and not so subtle differences in making a differential diagnosis.  For example, people who have experienced dissociation(which is related to DID) sometimes experience hearing internal voices.  People who experience symptoms of schizophrenia often experience hallucinations involving hearing external voices.  A standard diagnostic question is to ask the person if they have ever experienced hearing voices when no one else was around. Not distinguishing between hearing internal vs external voices would lead to an incorrect diagnosis. Another example, Bipolar disorder is characterized by changes in mood, which also occurs when different alters take over the control of the body.  I have known of instances where the mental health professional did not differentiate between the two presentations.   
During my professional career, if I refered a client whom I had diagnosed as having DID to a local psychiatrist for medication assessment,  the client would usually be told that they suffered from a different diagnosis, often times schizophrenia.  Upon questioning by me the client  would report, that no, no distiction was made by the psychiatrist of internal vs external voices.
Since members of the professional community do not hold similar standards in making the diagnosis of DID, the result has been chaos, suspicion and misunderstanding, for the clients and public alike. Obviously, not all the differences in the viewpoints about DID are attributable to this phenomenae. Trying to understand this diagnosis though, is similar to differentiating between diagnoses, asking the right questions will lead to a fuller understanding of what is going on.209.173.187.117 18:09, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  my viewpoint 

message: I edited it a little but it is really a terrible article. It meanders in general, makes weak points with little or no logic or documented fact as back up and the points it chooses to make seem pretty obscure or irrelevant.
: You'd have more credibility if you got a username and signed your edits and comments. Zora 05:35, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  I'm glad they've tagged this article... 

message: this is coming from someone who knows basically nothing about Dissociative Identity disorder, I thought that after reading the article I might understand it better. Unfortunately this article needs a cleanup with coherency, I didnt really understand what it was trying to say. It also introduced the child abuse strangely and seemed to throw me off as I read it. Even not including any possible POV issues the article might have its not very coherent for an encyclopedia. Please someone rewrite the article so it makes more sense, then the POV issues might be easier to adress for people who dont know everything about the condition.
: Dear anon, the problem is that not everyone agrees that there is such a condition, or that it's a disease. That's why there are four points of view represented. That may be one reason it confused you. You may have been assuming that there IS such a thing and that you would find out about it here. 
: We'll think about what you said, because we don't want the article to be confusing. It's hard to figure out how to make a complicated subject less difficult. Zora 06:09, 11 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  cleanup 

message: The criticism that DID or MPD presents more often in North America is not a valid critique on whether or not the condition exists.  Elsewhere on this page there is a reference to "Kuru", a delusional state specific to Asian men.  "Windigo sickness" is confined to Algonkin people.  Delusional states are shaped by the culture.
If anyone could come up with a simple test to 'show' the existence of the personality then it might be possible to test whether someone has one, two or multiple personalities.  The presence of dissociative black-outs seems to be a more useful focus of medical treatment or legal responsibility.  There have been test cases in the courts where the altered consciousness of 'sleep-walking' has been raised as a defense for criminal activities.
: You may think that the sceptics are wrong, but that doesn't alter the fact that many people hold those views. The views should be described. Wikipedia tries not to take sides, but to present all fairly. Zora 10:36, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cultural Expression of mental distress