From the article: "And in the UK, at least, DID is a controversial diagnosis. It is listed in both of the main psychiatric manuals used around the world (the D

From the article: "And in the UK, at least, DID is a controversial diagnosis. It is listed in both of the main psychiatric manuals used around the world (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, produced by the American Psychiatric Association, and the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, produced by the World Health Organization). But in practice, says Aquarone, there can still be reluctance among psychiatrists to accept it. DID is now thought to affect perhaps 1% of people (about the same rate as schizophrenia), yet there have been claims from sceptics that perhaps patients are simply acting out different identities, and that a proneness to fantasy explains the entire disorder. "Brain imaging work supports the idea that people with DID are not acting, and there is other research refuting such claims. In 2016, for example, a team at King’s College London published a study of 65 women, including some diagnosed with DID. They concluded that the women with DID were no more fantasy-prone, suggestible or likely to generate false memories than those without a diagnosis. According to the authors, this result challenges the core hypothesis of the ‘fantasy model’. "Melanie is now a director of First Person Plural, a dissociative identity disorders association, and she frequently talks to psychologists, psychiatrists, GPs and care workers, spreading the word that DID is real. She and Aquarone recently helped to organise the first conference on services for people with trauma-related dissociation – it brought together clinicians from the NHS and the private and voluntary sectors. One of the big challenges, they note, is that it can take many months of therapy with a specialist in dissociative disorders to help a patient, but this is generally only available privately."