Dissociative Identity Disorder Research Paper

Dissociative Identity Disorder, called Multiple Personality Disorder until 1994, is a personality disorder where the victim of the disease suffers from dissociation, dissociative amnesia, and dissociative fugue. These symptoms mainly occur due to the presence of ‘alters’. Alters have “…their own identities…they have a characteristic self-representation, which may be different from how the patient is generally seen or perceived…and they have a sense of ownership of their own experiences, actions, and thoughts...” (Gillig 2009). Alters are the result of childhood trauma or abuse, mostly of sexual or emotional nature. A small portion of the psychological community believes victims of this psychological disease are faking in order to elicit sympathy …show more content…
Fugue, amnesia and dissociation are deliberating symptoms to a person’s daily life. People would not just fake a diagnosis like DID for no reason. If they did so, it would be to elicit sympathy from onlookers. There is no exact way to diagnose someone with DID, but Healthy Place says, “Ultimately no one but a skilled clinician with experience diagnosing and treating DID can make that call” (Gray 2010). Someone who is faking DID ruins the good name of those who actually live with the illness. Typically people who fake disorders are malingering or have Munchausen syndrome. Munchausen syndrome “…is a mental illness, in which a person repeatedly acts as if he or she has a physical, emotional or cognitive disorder when, in truth, he or she has caused the symptoms” (Cleveland Clinic 2007). Dissociative amnesia is forgetting entire parts of your life and memories. As much as we’d all like to at some point forget bad memories, there is a difference between pretending and actually losing those memories. The latter is someone with DID; the former is someone who is malingering or has another dissociative disorder besides …show more content…
This trauma at a young age is the reason that a person’s personality splits into different alters. The host may retain some memories of abuse, but the majority doesn’t. This is because in order to cope with reality, the host’s alters have the abusive memories in order to allow the original person to believe they had a normal childhood. These memories can be recovered through prodding of the alter’s by psychiatrics or by hypnotherapy. Because people with DID are weak to hypnotherapy, many people believe that the diagnosis isn’t real. They believe that the ‘abusive memories’ were implanted by the psychiatrist. “Some people worry that clients may “remember” abuse that didn’t actually happen and innocent people may get blamed for abuse” (Tartakovsky 2011). This happens because most times a person’s family is to blame for the abuse and “families may be reluctant to reveal information that might put them in a negative light”(Tartakovsky 2011). People who are deemed mentally ‘healthy’ are more likely to be believed about the presence of abuse, especially if the person with DID cannot remember the occurring abuse. This therefore extends the belief of these families and others that DID is not

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