How I learned to live with multiple personalities
bbc.com
bbc.com
> One psychological benefit of religious belief may be that, in theory, a relationship with God, with all its associated memories, can extend from early childhood through to death, and no matter where you are on the planet, it is there. As Aquarone says, “You can’t take it away – and it transcends where you are.”
Besides not even attempting to provide evidence that religious people were less likely to develop DID, it also just doesn't make sense. People talk about having a "relationship" with God, but it's not a real relationship. The article says having a relationship with a parent helps avoid DID because the parent helps you learn how to manage yourself, but God certainly isn't doing this. Similarly it talks about how being with people with whom you have plenty of shared memories can enhance the sense of an ongoing self persisting through the years, but you don't have any shared memories with God. This paragraph would make just as much (or rather, little) sense if you claimed to have a "relationship" with Mister Rogers, because you watched Mister Rogers' Neighborhood for decades.
Perhaps believing it is a real relationship is enough.
"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."
I know multiple "collectives", as I've heard them called, on some online chatrooms. They seem perfectly functional and logically consistent.
The burden of proof for the diagnosis is on the assertion; people can act as though they have multiple personalities, and that's why there is controversy on the disease itself.
I understand not wanting to clinically treat it if there isn't much evidence.
Else we'd also have some burden to prove that fairies don't exist.
Yes, but there's this thing called science, that doesn't care about hurting feelings...