Symptoms Of Dissociative Identity Disorder

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Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID, is a severe mental disorder that cause the patient to experience severe dissociation from the environment and others around them. Dissociation is kind of like daydreaming, which most of us have experienced. People with DID experience a “lack of connection in a person’s thoughts, memories, feelings, actions, or sense of identity”, according to WebMD, a reputable site that provides health information (Costello). Many doctors and psychiatrists believe that DID starts because of a traumatic experience and victims of this disorder dissociate themselves from certain situations to alleviate pain and anxiety that the situation may cause. Although many doctors believe this, there is no proven cause of Dissociative…show more content…
Common symptoms of DID include forgetting small parts, or sometimes every part, of a significant event in that person’s life, blackouts, not being able to recall certain situations when others explain them back, hearing voices in your head that are not yours, not recognizing yourself, feeling like a ghost or feeling like you’re imaginary, as well as feeling like more than one person. An explain of an extreme case of Dissociative Identity Disorder is when a person who you’ve encountered previously comes up to you and you do not recall any contact with this person. Also, you may have introduced yourself as a person with a different name, but you have no idea who this person is or how this person thinks they know you. Many victims of this disorder appear to be more than one person living in a single body. These extreme “alter egos” are called alters. A person may have one alter, two alters, or maybe even three or four. When a different alter literally controls the person’s body, the person may not recall anything that occurred while under the “control” of the other alter. As each personality reveals itself and takes over the body, also known as switching, the patient starts reacting to certain situations differently. This process can take from several seconds or minutes to several days (Wright, 2010). A popular story is the one about Susan Hyder. She was shocked when she discovered she was diagnosed…show more content…
Psychotherapy is generally considered to be the most important component of treating patients with DID. Psychiatrists often try to help patients build relationships with others around them and try to help patients cope with experiences from the past. This treatment could take anywhere from months to years because the psychiatrist does not want to overwhelm the patient with extreme feelings of anxiety from remembering any horrific experiences from the past. Psychiatrists often try to integrate all the personalities and have them work together to overcome a fear or anxiety, but sometimes psychiatrists try to “kill” the personality so that the anxiety is gone

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