Shattered minds: the basic explanation of the dissociative spectrum ranging from common, everyday experiences to those faced by people who have Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Date: October 18, 2016.
This paper will do its best to explain, in the format of a 5 paragraph essay, exactly what the title says it will. We will be answering the following questions, the first of which is a rather simple one. What is Dissociation, and how can it effect a person’s ability to live life? The others build off of this question’s answer. What is Dissociative Identity Disorder (Did?) What is Otherwise Specified Dissociative Disorder (OSDD?) How can the symptoms impact daily life and functioning? What is the cause of a disorder such as this, and how can it be treated?
To begin, let us answer the first question. What is dissociation? Simply put, Dissociation is the unawareness of, or disconnection from, the reality around you, either as being real, or as existing, or both. For example, a driver who goes to work every morning, using the same rout every time, may start off aware of what they’re doing, only to come to a stop at their destination and realize that they don’t remember driving there. This is typical, and should not cause any limited functioning for that person or anyone else. Daydreaming is another common form of dissociation, and some would argue that listening to music and ignoring the reality around you is another form of dissociation. As one gets farther down the spectrum, however, things become strange, with experiences of your surroundings, loved ones, and even your own body being unreal becoming more common, and some even reporting feeling detached from their body as though it does not belong to them. These kinds of dissociation can make a person so frightened or otherwise incapacitated that it can prevent them from having a job, going to school, and enjoying life at all, and it is at this point that one might consider such experiences as a disorder if they also meet other criteria for being such.
What is Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and what is Otherwise Specified Dissociative Disorder (OSDD?) First, let’s start with what you may know of best. Dissociative Identity Disorder used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder, but at some point in the 90s, the name was changed to Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID. DID is diagnosed when 2 or more distinct personality states take control of someone’s behavior at different times, and this change in behavior isn’t caused by things like a drug or lack of sleep, or by an illness like a seizure disorder . There must be a level of forgetfulness that is larger than the everyday kind, for example not knowing where you were or what you were doing the night before, and having others tell you that you were, in fact, doing things on that night. This also cannot be caused by things like lack of sleep or illness. There are many other criteria, but the one that must not be forgotten is that these experiences must cause the person to be destressed or somehow impaired from functioning in order to be called a disorder, and in practice, they often do just that.
In OSDD, people report their personality states as feeling less distinct from themselves, but not quite blended enough to be seen as one. For example, someone might feel as though their body is not their own and watch from outside of it as though watching someone else control it. They might later say that they knew what was going on the whole time, but that it didn’t feel like they, themselves, were doing it. This is what divides DID from OSDD; the person remembers what goes on when other personality states, or alters are in control, or out. However, the person who doesn’t feel as though they are in control of their own behavior can still experience destress and have impaired functioning which is why OSDD is thought of as a disorder. So what is thought to cause DID and OSDD?
The key factor in both of these disorders is early childhood trauma. Research has been done on many cases of DID and OSDD and in 96 percent, a significant trauma, usually over an extended period of time, in the age range of 2 or 3 to 9 or 10, resulted in what would have been aspects of a person’s personality developing separately into what, to some, seem like fully developed people, much like any other person who had never experienced early trauma. The treatment for both of these disorders is, usually, standard talk therapy, and depending on the person, can take years. While some people choose integration, the fusion of alters back into themselves, other people decide that integration is not what they want and so live in cooperation with their alters.
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