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This isn't science. "Multiplicity" isn't real. The Wikipedia article on disassociative identity disorder ("multiple personality disorder") is much more extensiv

This isn't science. "Multiplicity" isn't real. The Wikipedia article on disassociative identity disorder ("multiple personality disorder") is much more extensive, and while some psychiatrists consider that to be clinically real, the majority don't. There's no evidence of any of it being anything more than an act. It's all crackpot nonsense.

bulgagoo 6y ago
calling something crackpot nonsense is unwarrantedly cruel, violates the site's guidelines, shows lack of empathy with people who might believe that and you should stop doing it. thank you are you unacquainted with the concept of expressing your disagreement without pretending you're better than someone else? if you do that it'll make your point stronger, and should come across as less insecure , less compensating, and less triggered. you can be right from your point of view and so can someone else, and that's okay. no need to try to trash someone else in the process is there?
marcan_42 6y ago
"It's all crackpot nonsense" isn't a very good argument when it comes to the human brain, now is it? That sounds like the same class of garbage argument that transphobes use to claim trans people aren't real. You can call it whatever you want, but DID is indeed recognized in the DSM-5 and fits the OP story, and the disorder vs neurodiversity argument is largely tangential to the question of whether the condition exists at all, which it clearly does. "Science" in general has a terrible track record when it comes to the human brain, because we still have no idea how most of it works and you can't exactly attach a JTAG debugger to someone's head. So saying psychological conditions "aren't science" is unscientific, because a proper scientist in the field would accept the limitations of the field, and be open to consistent phenomena (which telepathy isn't with the hard sciences, but multiplicity is).
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  > DID is indeed recognized in the DSM-5 and fits the OP story I'm not sure that it fits the OP story, though, at least at is told. As far as I understand, DID would be recognizable to others, it would not be purely perceived as a hallucination by the patient. Even if she were not aware of this, her husband or others around her would have reported behavioral changes, presumably. Otherwise, I tend to agree with what you are saying.
  - marcan_42 6y ago
    The thing is fitting psychological conditions into neat little boxes is just a convenient diagnosis mechanism; human brains don't have on/off switches for different conditions, and actual presentations vary. So it's entirely reasonable that her behavioral changes (which could be as minor as looking up certain things on the internet) were not noticeable to others.
asveikau 6y ago
I don't know too much about it. But I knew somebody who said they had it and it turned out to be a more ordinary psychosis that they eventually had treatment for. Seems to me that if you are correct that it doesn't exist, that there can still be people who genuinely believe they have it and may have another illness. Those people deserve better than to be dismissed as crackpots. Like maybe to approach it as one would schizophrenia may help. From there I may say that a more accepted diagnosis like "schizophrenia" still has imprecision and wiggle room, owing in part to the fact that we don't fully understand mental illness.
- caymanjim 6y ago
  Let me clarify that I wasn't referring to the patient as a crackpot. I fully believe that there are people suffering from mental illnesses with frightening and confusing symptoms, including auditory hallucinations and hearing voices. I do think that the idea of multiple personalities is a "crackpot theory" that some mental health professionals are proponents of. I don't think a plurality of psychiatrists accept the notion of independent personalities. Some of them do, and push the notion, to the detriment of their patients. I'm referring to that when I say "crackpot". Maybe I'm wrong; I'm no professional. But I'm in good company in being critical of the idea. Hyperbolic, to be fair.
- thanatropism 6y ago
  Up to the mid-70s psychoanalysis was one of the core clinical practices in American psychiatry (the evidence is the shift between the DSM-II in 1974 and the DSM-III in 1980), and what psychoanalysis means by "schizophrenia" is something entirely different from what the modern approach means. This was a wildly serious problem. Psychoanalysis was really only practiced at scale in the US and Argentina, so people made up theories of why New Yorkers were more psychotic than Londoners (this is somewhere in "Listening to Prozac"). I think what has happened in the mental health field (and I've been a psychiatric patient-consumer for 15 years) is that the DSM movement has finally fixed definitions in place. But defining something doesn't mean it exists (except as a cluster of symptoms that front-line clinicians treat out of "data science" type knowledge). It's possible that the only clear-cut differential diagnostic is the one made by Kraepelin in the 1890s between what's now called bipolar and "precocious dementia" (more or less schizophrenia, but who knows what schizophrenia IS rather than IS NOT). And even this is challenged in the literature. How could it not -- looking at an episode and not doing the elegant analyses made possible to Kraepelin from working in a psych ward full of unmedicated bipolars -- how could you distinguish manic and schizophrenic hallucinations? My doctors have kept me reading the academic journal literature over the years (abeit literature about bipolar, not dissociative disorders); but by the same token I figure it's difficult to place someone's multiple-personality story in any one of the available boxes (dissociative disorders, together with amnesias and fugues; schizophrenia; malingering). What the bleep do we know.
tsimionescu 6y ago
> while some psychiatrists consider that to be clinically real, the majority don't Given its inclusion in the DSM-5, I would venture to say that the opposite is true - that the majority (or at least, the majority of the more prominent psychiatrists) do believe it is a real condition.

bulgagoo 6y ago

calling something crackpot nonsense is unwarrantedly cruel, violates the site's guidelines, shows lack of empathy with people who might believe that and you should stop doing it. thank you are you unacquainted with the concept of expressing your disagreement without pretending you're better than someone else? if you do that it'll make your point stronger, and should come across as less insecure , less compensating, and less triggered. you can be right from your point of view and so can someone else, and that's okay. no need to try to trash someone else in the process is there?

marcan_42 6y ago

"It's all crackpot nonsense" isn't a very good argument when it comes to the human brain, now is it? That sounds like the same class of garbage argument that transphobes use to claim trans people aren't real. You can call it whatever you want, but DID is indeed recognized in the DSM-5 and fits the OP story, and the disorder vs neurodiversity argument is largely tangential to the question of whether the condition exists at all, which it clearly does. "Science" in general has a terrible track record when it comes to the human brain, because we still have no idea how most of it works and you can't exactly attach a JTAG debugger to someone's head. So saying psychological conditions "aren't science" is unscientific, because a proper scientist in the field would accept the limitations of the field, and be open to consistent phenomena (which telepathy isn't with the hard sciences, but multiplicity is).

tsimionescu 6y ago
> DID is indeed recognized in the DSM-5 and fits the OP story I'm not sure that it fits the OP story, though, at least at is told. As far as I understand, DID would be recognizable to others, it would not be purely perceived as a hallucination by the patient. Even if she were not aware of this, her husband or others around her would have reported behavioral changes, presumably. Otherwise, I tend to agree with what you are saying.
- marcan_42 6y ago
  The thing is fitting psychological conditions into neat little boxes is just a convenient diagnosis mechanism; human brains don't have on/off switches for different conditions, and actual presentations vary. So it's entirely reasonable that her behavioral changes (which could be as minor as looking up certain things on the internet) were not noticeable to others.

asveikau 6y ago

I don't know too much about it. But I knew somebody who said they had it and it turned out to be a more ordinary psychosis that they eventually had treatment for. Seems to me that if you are correct that it doesn't exist, that there can still be people who genuinely believe they have it and may have another illness. Those people deserve better than to be dismissed as crackpots. Like maybe to approach it as one would schizophrenia may help. From there I may say that a more accepted diagnosis like "schizophrenia" still has imprecision and wiggle room, owing in part to the fact that we don't fully understand mental illness.

caymanjim 6y ago
Let me clarify that I wasn't referring to the patient as a crackpot. I fully believe that there are people suffering from mental illnesses with frightening and confusing symptoms, including auditory hallucinations and hearing voices. I do think that the idea of multiple personalities is a "crackpot theory" that some mental health professionals are proponents of. I don't think a plurality of psychiatrists accept the notion of independent personalities. Some of them do, and push the notion, to the detriment of their patients. I'm referring to that when I say "crackpot". Maybe I'm wrong; I'm no professional. But I'm in good company in being critical of the idea. Hyperbolic, to be fair.
thanatropism 6y ago
Up to the mid-70s psychoanalysis was one of the core clinical practices in American psychiatry (the evidence is the shift between the DSM-II in 1974 and the DSM-III in 1980), and what psychoanalysis means by "schizophrenia" is something entirely different from what the modern approach means. This was a wildly serious problem. Psychoanalysis was really only practiced at scale in the US and Argentina, so people made up theories of why New Yorkers were more psychotic than Londoners (this is somewhere in "Listening to Prozac"). I think what has happened in the mental health field (and I've been a psychiatric patient-consumer for 15 years) is that the DSM movement has finally fixed definitions in place. But defining something doesn't mean it exists (except as a cluster of symptoms that front-line clinicians treat out of "data science" type knowledge). It's possible that the only clear-cut differential diagnostic is the one made by Kraepelin in the 1890s between what's now called bipolar and "precocious dementia" (more or less schizophrenia, but who knows what schizophrenia IS rather than IS NOT). And even this is challenged in the literature. How could it not -- looking at an episode and not doing the elegant analyses made possible to Kraepelin from working in a psych ward full of unmedicated bipolars -- how could you distinguish manic and schizophrenic hallucinations? My doctors have kept me reading the academic journal literature over the years (abeit literature about bipolar, not dissociative disorders); but by the same token I figure it's difficult to place someone's multiple-personality story in any one of the available boxes (dissociative disorders, together with amnesias and fugues; schizophrenia; malingering). What the bleep do we know.

tsimionescu 6y ago

> while some psychiatrists consider that to be clinically real, the majority don't Given its inclusion in the DSM-5, I would venture to say that the opposite is true - that the majority (or at least, the majority of the more prominent psychiatrists) do believe it is a real condition.