DES Test

It is not something bad but about imagination and thinking style, read the whole paper: The Colin A. Ross Institute. Daydreaming is dissociation. Being able to get lost in a book/concentrate is dissociation (because you are not paying attention to what is going on around you -- I had a coworker and we use to tease him because we'd have to start sentences with, "Five hundred thousand dollars, Ray!" to break him out of what he was concentrating on). Driving to work and then "getting there" and not remembering the trip is dissociation. There is nothing wrong with dissociation, we all do it. DID interferes with one life. If you find you walk into fountains when you are texting :-) you could have a dissociation problem. If you find you drive past your exit on the freeway too often (did that a couple times after my therapy sessions) you could have a problem. Just because you are a good dissociator does not mean you have a problem. If you have a problem you have a problem :-)

I got 36. I definitely don't have DID but I have some kind of DD-NOS thing going on.

My therapist explained dissociation to me early on after something that happened in a session and it made so much sense as it's something I did a lot in childhood. Basically I came in one week and got angry with my T, I was having a go at him and I started shaking. He asked why I was shaking. I gave him reasons. Next session I told him I'd had no idea I was shaking as I couldn't feel my body. He asked why I gave him answers anyway. I said it was like I went into a space where I couldn't feel anything and I also couldn't argue or do anything except comply.

I really relate.

When I dissociate in session, I get silent and can't move. I can't speak, even if I try. It's like my voice doesn't work and my muscles tense up. I end up thinking and feeling that I need to be as still and as quiet as possible to become invisible.

Holy hell. I was thinking my dissociative issues had improved a lot, but I scored a 63. I think they over-count the voices in the head thing, and having writings you did but don't recognize, because those are the only two things that remain really big for me.

Really? Because I scored 100% on two symptoms that relate to my ADHD, not my dissociation, and I only scored 29. So there has to be more symptoms you're still experiencing.

Well, yeah, but those all fall into the 'sometimes' category.

Ah, okay.

I'm not sure what is meant by the question in that test. I just used mine for an example because it seemed to fit.

Yep, it even laughed at me recently when T didn't text me back one night...

It makes sense that they give that question/response more weight. If you look at the link Perna posted (or did I read that somewhere else?), people who reported X symptom were X times more likely to be dx with DID.

Some of the questions are subject to interpretation and you do have to be careful to read and consider the fine details of each question. If you don't some of these things are things everyone does sometimes. And I'd think the frequency is really important too. A lot of people with ADD can be listening to someone speak and then not recall a word they've said. But if it happened on a daily basis that is different.

It means you do not have DID. The threshold score to have DID is 30 and above, so you are right on the cut off but just below. Dissociative Experiences Scale

Even though you are not at 30 or above, because you have a 29.28 you have more DID symptoms than the average person, according to the graph on the link.

It's not about whether you have DID, it's about how often you experience dissociative experiences. Obviously, a higher score will indicate more serious dissociation (this above 30 indicates more severe dissociation, and higher likelihood of something like DID). But one of the links indicated that a normal average college student scores an average of 7.9...so my score is very high by comparison. It's a screening test to determine who might have dissociative symptoms and need further testing. My T specifically said she wanted to know the frequency in which I dissociated when she gave it to me.

Oops-sorry, MKAC-I made a mistake. All the questions are weighted the same. That seems odd to me since other scales use weights, but I wanted to make that correction because I don't like inaccurate stuff posted out there!

Explanation of use from the test from the link posted earlier:

I got a 90, but i was already diagnosed with DID years ago.
However, one of my alters can take that test and get a lower scale- each of us scores differently.