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Originally Posted by goodneighbor
Dissociative Identity Disorder Symptoms (the new name for Multiple Personality Disorder)
Individual with dissociative identity disorder describe a wide variety of symptoms, some of them resemble other mental disorders. Approximately 70 percent of the patients diagnosed with DID meet the DMS-IV diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), both conditions being conceptualized as trauma-related disorders. The posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms exhibited by patients with DID include: intrusive symptoms, hyperarousal, and avoidance and numbing symptoms.
Approximately 40 to 60 percent of the DID patients meet the diagnostic criteria of somatoform pain disorder or conversion disorder due to the presences of multiple types of psychophysiological and somatoform (bodily) symptoms. Some of the somatoform symptoms present in patients with DID include: seizure-like episodes, headaches, abdominal, musculoskeletal, and pelvic pain, asthma and breathing problems.
Patients with DID also meet the criteria of mood disorders, especially depression. Some of the symptoms that resemble mood disorders, include: mood swings, depressed mood, dysphoria (mood state characterized by sadness, anxiety, irritability, or restlessness), anhedonia (inability to experience pleasure), suicide attempts and suicidal thoughts, self-mutilation, helpless, hopeless, and guilt feelings, or sleeping problems. Some of the DID symptoms can resemble traits of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) such as: obsessive counting, singing, arranging, checking, or washing. (4)
The main four symptoms of dissociative identity disorder are:
1. Amnesia. A very common manifestation of the disorder is amnesia or loss of time usually observed by those around the person. Patients with DID experience frequent memory gaps in personal history (as extreme as an overall loss of biographical memory for extended periods of time during childhood, adolescence, or adulthood years), past events (they can forget what had happened during a certain period of time such as 3 years in a row) or recent events (they find items in their house that they do not remember purchasing, written notes with a different handwriting than their, or evidence of activities they don't remember engaging in). Some experts hypothesis that amnesia might be possible due to the fact that passive identities tend to have more constricted memories, while the more hostile, controlling, or protective identities have more complete memories. "An identity that is not in control may nonetheless gain access to consciousness." (2)
Approximately, 98 percent of patients with DID display amnesia (from mild to severe forms) when an alternate personality surfaces. When the host personality takes charge, the time spent under the control of other alters is either completely lost to memory, or only remembered as confusing bits and pieces.
2. Depersonalization is a dissociation symptom characterized by an alteration in the perception or experience of self, in which the patient either feels that their body is unreal, changing or dissolving, or detached from it, similar with an outside observer of their own mental processes or body while having no control over the situation.
3. Derealization is also a dissociation symptom in which the external world is perceive as strange or unreal.
4. Identity disturbances is one of the most distinct symptoms of dissociative identity disorder. Individuals with DID usually have a main personality and several alters that take charge in different situations. The alternate identities "are intrapsychic entities that have a sense of self, have an emotional repertoire, and can process information." (9) Some of the alters handle and act out emotions the patient cannot deal with such as rage or terror, others (called internal self helpers) watch what is going on and give advice, or act as friends. Some alters can know, observe, and interact with one another in an extremely elaborated inner world, while others may not be aware of the existence of some alters. When they interact with one another, the patient can report hearing inner conversations which are usually diagnosed as auditory hallucinations. However, DID auditory hallucinations differ from schizophrenia auditory hallucinations due to their distinct qualities. In DID, the voices are perceived to be heard internally in the brain, while in schizophrenia the voices are perceived to come from outside the brain.
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Thanks for the clinical write up. if Im not mistaken your information comes from
http://www.omnimedicalsearch.com/con...r-symptoms.htm
Are you a college psych student? If so you have a great start for your thesis or term paper but theres more to being DID then this and some of your information is outdated or different than what is believed depending on location, cultural beliefs and treatment providers..
For example under amnesia you state it is observed by people around the dissociative person that notice, here in the USA it is now known and believed that the amnesia and other things like switching into and out of alters are rarely if ever noticed by other people outside of the dissociative person.. it is the person with DID their self that recognize they have lost time from becoming aware that the conversation is different than they last remembered it to be, or they become aware doing different things than they remember they were in the process of doing or they find that the day, week, month or year is different than what they last remembered it to be. Friends, family members co workers and others usually notice nothing wrong. Outside of the dissociative person life continues on like normal.
People outside the dissociative rarely recognize the switching from alter to alter unless under extreme cases. Rarely are dissociative’s with DID to the extreme you see on television or in movies.
Here in the USA –
Depersonalization is a - dissociative disorder - not a symptom. Symptoms of depersonalization are things such as feeling spacey, feeling numb, feeling like everything is far away, feeling like their body parts do not belong to them.
Derealization is not a symptom it is a dissociative disorder. the symptoms if this dissociative disorder are feeling disconnected, like they don’t fit in with the world around them, feeling like the world around them is not real, feeling disconnected from people places and things around them.
Under identity you or this article you are quoting calls the main person a personality, here in the USA the main person is not considered to be a “personality”. They are considered to be the “host” for the alternate personalities to reside with in.
Here finding things around the house, not remembering things and all that is not actually how to tell when a person has alters. Those things are the result of having alters.
Dissociatives who have co consciousness know they have alters because they are able to communicate with their alters so they know they are there. But even then they believe they are normal and everyone is this way.
Dissociatives without co consciousness do not know they have alters. They believe they are perfectly normal and everyone forgets things.
Mental health providers in the USA don’t go by things like intrusive thoughts, hyperarousal, numbing, headaches and all that you found within this article for diagnosing whether or not someone has alters.
We rely upon actual psychiatric evaluations that include oral questions and an hour or two long interview session with a psychiatrist where conversations with at least two or more alter. These alters must fit the diagnostic criteria set down by the American psychiatric association in the DSM IV TR that says an alternate personalities is one that recurrently take control of the body, their in laymans terms “way of being” remains consistent each and every time we talk with them.
we do this because all those things you quoted can be any other mental and physical health problem, and also any of those things ca appear in many alters that may share symptoms, memories.
For diagnosing DID and whether a person has alters we have to look for the individuality factors between host and alters. The host may exhibit all or some of those things but each alter has their own way of being that is fixed and unchange able.
We also have to look at the host’s full medical and mental history because the diagnostics say these fixed alters we look for must not be there because of certain parameters like drugs and alcohol, seizure disorders and any other medical or mental disorder / problem. For example numbing happens with depression, PTSD, schizophrenics, drug use, alcohol use seizure disorders, so that problem gets wiped out in the diagnostics for DID but only a person with DID can switch more than a couple times into an alter that has their own consistent way of being.
my point is if your write up is for a paper my suggestion is take into consideration your listeners/readers may not be from the same background, same location and under the same beliefs you or this article makes.
the same goes for people who are here on psych central.. whats in this article may be true where you are but for where I am - my location and what I was taught in my college and training to be a therapist, and how the disorder was explained to be by my treatment providers is different than what this article states.
nobody has to be exactly like this article states.
