Dissociative Personality Differences

Words: 1010
Pages: 5

In a psychiatric hospital, there are a lot of disorders or issues with people that one must take into account. Especially the nurses, different disorders can stand out but there are two that seem to be very similar, yet they have a large number of differences. These disorders or diseases, depending on how somebody would like to look at them, are schizophrenia and dissociative personality disorder, or DID for short. These are both mental issues within people that have very similar effects on people, and yet are completely different things. So, with nursing in a psychiatric ward, there are two big disorders that make up the majority of patients that people mistake for one another all the time. First off, schizophrenia is often viewed in a negative …show more content…
Known mainly as multiple personality disorder, the main effects of this disorder is that a patient sufferers from having multiple personalities. Many times, people mistake this for schizophrenia because it seems like somebody with DID has no grasp of reality, and that is where there is a difference. According to Richard Kluft, who wrote a book completely on DID, is that DID patients have a complete grasp of reality, the only setback is, “because they have multiple personalities then they have multiple realities.” So, because they have many different personalities in their head, and they each live in their own world, that means when one is present, they are in that reality. Brady Phelps, an analyst on personality disorders said in his article that, “Many times, one personality is not aware of the others. So say one personality went to bed, another one woke up, they would no have a grasp of what happened in the time since they were last present.” This can be a scary thing for those dealing with DID. With multiple realities, once can find reality hard to understand. Especially with those who do not have a grasp of what they are really going through. However, DID sets itself apart from schizophrenia with one thing. That thing is, DID can be traced back to somebodies early life of abuse and neglect. Brady Phelps said, “Many times, DID is …show more content…
They both seem to have different realities than the rest of society. However, getting to what those realities are, is where they separate. Schizophrenic patients have no grasp of a real reality, because they deal with hallucinations that alter the real and the fake. Making the world hard for them to grasp, because they constantly have to question if what they are seeing, hearing, or smelling, is real. While in DID patients, reality is real, just there are a couple realities that somebody has to deal with. And many times, people with DID do not realize that they are dealing with multiple realities because their different identities do not cross over. So, they seem to be living in multiple worlds, while in one body. The biggest difference in these two disorders, is the origin of them. Schizophrenia is a biological disorder. People are born with this disorder, and it becomes present in somebody as they get older. While DID cannot be claimed as a biological disorder. There is nothing wrong with the coding of the people, they created the disorder themselves, usually because of a previous dealing with abuse or neglect. Both DID and schizophrenic symptoms can however be controlled to a certain extent with medicine, and with the help of a psychologist to distinguish to them what their reality consists of. Although they both look similar on a surface level, with an understanding of what schizophrenia and DID