Multiplicity

um...since i don't feel like typing it again, i'm just going to paste it into here...it repeats some stuff.

about three weeks ago i was diagnosed with depersonalization and put on a drug which i heard was good for it. (i had only met with the APRN for about 20 minutes when she diagnosed me, so it wasn't much time to check and see if it was something more serious or not.) i'm only 16, by the way.

a few days ago i started doing some research on depersonalization because i didn't know enough about it, and i found DID. i started reading about it, and although depersonalization describes me very well, this makes even a little more sense.

i often blank out, stare into space or become so consumed in something that i don't notice the time pass. when i was nine, i was sexually abused, once. but the thing is, i started to feel like this before the incident. i far too often cannot decide whether i did something or i thought about it, or if it was a dream or reality, or even if i ever did it to begin with. after i read about DID, i noticed how extreme my "moods" could get...i almost seem to turn into a person, not exactly a fully developed person, but someone different. i have completely different outlooks on life a lot of times. oh, and also, i completely forgot about being abused until a year ago when i was watching law and order SVU and thought to myself "boy am i glad i was never molested or anything like that! ...wait..." my mother told me about things i said to her, major things from my childhood that tied into the incident, and things that happened recently. sometimes when she tells me i've done thing or said things, i realize that i did even though i forgot about it, but sometimes i still can't remembering them happening.

recently, i've had the overwhelming desire to just sit down on the floor where ever i am, and just starting screaming and crying at the top of my lungs like a little kid when their mom won't give them ice cream. for no apparent reason! more than often than not, when a person is talking to me, one of two things happen, i half space out so i can [i]hear[/i] them, but didn't exactly listen to them, or i'm trying my very hardest to listen, and all i hear are garbled words, even though i know they're talking clearly. i have a terrible time concentrating in school or reading (the wellbutrin i'm on is helping, but not enough), and i'm more than able to go off into my own little world when i'm someplace less than enjoyable.

sometimes i feel a lot different about myself, sometimes i have very high self-esteem, and sometimes very low. sometimes i feel very mature for my age, and sometimes very immature. also, everywhere i've read, it says that people with DID are often very depressed and have suicidal tendencies. all through middle school and my sophmore year of highschool i was in a very deep depression, and tried to kill myself many times. one time i overdosed and finally ended up in the looney bin. the dissociation is very bad, apperently worse than most people with it. i have a hard time sleeping and i'm always tired, mostly psychologically.

THANK YOU!!! there's some other stuff, like watching myself do things instead of feeling like i'm doing them. those kind of things. yea.

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Welcome,

What you have described sounds much more like major depression which affects your concentration. A history of abuse may or may not have anything to do with it. One cannot judge whether or not you are multiple solely on the description you gave. (And yes, that includes feeling differently about yourself at different times, which at your age is quite routine.)

In any case, you need, as others have pointed out, to be evaluated by a physician and perhaps a psychologist -- not a pill-pushing NP with an agenda.

Have you had the experience of sharing your body with one or more other people?

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i'm not entirely sure about that...but when i look back on memories, it's like watching a little girl run around who i never really knew, and when i look back on memories from a few years ago i feel the same. i'll think "jesus, she was so goth." instead of "i was so goth."

i always sort of think of myself in third person...but as though i'm talking about many people.

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A lot of people do that without being multiple. People change a lot throughout their lives. Shirley Temple reports looking at her old films and feeling like that was a little girl she used to know, rather than that it was she herself, yet the memories she relates about making the films are hers.

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this is true. it's dumb to try and convince people that i have MPD, because it sounds like i want it. i suppose i'll just talk to my shrink on tuesday, and the APRN who gives me pills on wednesday and see what they say.

thank you <3

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It's true that if you go to a shrink "sounding like you want" to be multiple, they might diagnose you with a thought disorder -- we've heard that and worse. Be careful about what you tell mental health guys.

You could also be multiple without having MPD. In which case the shrinks might not be much help.

A lot of deciding whether or not you are plural is something that you need to decide on your own, because the resources used by shrinks to decide if someone's multiple are very limited and a lot of times they use standards like Cornelia Wilbur's which may not apply to you.

You do sound like you have depression though. Also that business about not able to concentrate and spacing out can happen because of sleep deprivation and you said you don't sleep very well.

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firstly...how can you be multiple without having MPD or DID? now i'm just confused.

the reason why i want to talk to a shrink about it is because i would like to officially know whether i am multiple or if i'm just so extremely moody that i seem like different people.

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http://www.karitas.net/blackbirds/layman explains it better than I can here. (It needs some updating, but not too badly.)

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AHA!

i get it.

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Incidentally - I do have one other thing to add. Don't go into therapy (since you've said you're going to be seeing a therapist) and say "I think I might have MPD". For one, a lot of therapists don't even believe MPD/DID exist, and some therapists who do believe in it believe radical therapy is required to "cure" you of it, which can include anything from simple regression and talk therapy all the way to shock treatments, depending on what state or country you live in.

It has also become fashionable to diagnose anyone who self-reports multiplicity as being psychotic. That's their new solution for shutting us up now that the MPD/DID diagnosis has fallen into disrepute. Your therapist may appear to be taking you at face value, but you may check your record later on and find that you've been written up as psychotic, schizophrenic, or delusional.

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i have been diagnosed psychotic. sorta. i was told that DP is considered a psychotic disorder, so i'm essentially psychotic. i guess.

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Let me get this straight.

There is such a thing as depersonalization (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&oi=defmore&q=define:Depersonalization). It is a symptom of depression and many other conditions, physical as well as mental. There is also such a thing as depersonalization disorder, which basically means you feel that way all the time. The way culture and society are today, I am absolutely not surprised that more people, especially young people, report it.

Down through history, depersonalization (defined in the 1890s) has been assumed to be part of emotional alienation from the dehumanizing impact of industrial society. Today, the mental health industry claims that it's based in chemical imbalances and attempts to cure it with pills. But whether you agree with one view or the other, DP is not, under any circumstances, a psychosis. Depersonalized people don't lose their ability to test reality, it's just that things in reality seem to be strange or unfamiliar. If everyone who experienced DP or DP disorder was psychotic, the whole country would be locked up in the mental ward.

And now you're saying that your mental health people are telling you that it is?

You need to get this verified. Now.

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DP is not and has never been a psychosis. The DSM classifies it as a dissociative disorder. Whoever gave you the diagnosis is dangerously misinformed.

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one person gave me the diagnosis, a psychotherapist, but my regular therapist was the one who explained it better to me, and as she was looking for more specifics in the book she had, she looked up at me and said "you know this is considered a psychotic disorder, don't you?"

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I would advise that you change therapists.

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elenbarathi.livejournal.com

Ummm... you're only 16, and a nurse prescribed pychiatric drugs for you after talking to you for only 20 minutes?!? I'd really strongly suggest you check out this site (http://www.breggin.com/).

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yea...my mom isn't too crazy about her right now. my shrink is going to talk to me a lot more before she makes any medication desicions.

the site is interesting, i'll look at it more a little later

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iamshadow.livejournal.com

Yeah, what

elenbarathi said.

After all the recent mess in the media where they said "only prozac is safe for under 18s, and then only under extreme circumstances" just goes to show no one listened.

From another angle, I was 17 when I first took Zoloft for depression, but I was prescribed it by a doctor I'd been seeing for years, and I'd had therapy prior to prescription.

I didn't think nurses could prescribe? I thought only doctors/shrinks could...

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Nurse practitioners can prescribe under certain conditions.

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We were an extreme case for whom medication actually did work at a fairly young age, but they're handing it out now just to avoid having to talk to the patients. What we found was that while it seemed to make the problems go away while we were on it, the underlying issues weren't resolved-- the feelings were just kind of numbed away, and they came back when we went off the medication. While this was beneficial for us in the short term, we couldn't accept the idea of being on medication for the rest of our lives, partly because we were bothered by some of the side effects, and decided it would be better to find a way to deal with the underlying problems permanently than to keep relying on psychiatrists forever. That's what we would tell to anyone who's considering medication-- besides the fact that individual biochemistries can vary greatly, and a medicine which is okay for one person can have extremely negative effects on another.

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well, she is a pyschotherapist, but she doesn't see patients for that kind of stuff anymore. she only perscribes meds.

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ninalyn.livejournal.com

I know we ended up in a psychiatric hospital when we were 16 (body-wise), and over the course of the next two years we were on 12-15 different types of medications (mostly anti-depressants and mood-stabilizers, but there were the few anti-psychotics before they realized that those were adversely affecting us). Anyway, we were given seroquel (anti-psychotic) after a 15 minute eval from a psychiatrist when we were in the hospital. I bet it's fairly common (unfortunately).

Blech.
Marie

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Clan Revenant is classy.

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i have no idea what you just said...

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If you'd read the responses, you'd have seen that no one is trying to convince the girl that she is multiple. In fact, many have stated that there are other possible explanations for her symptoms.

As for the rest of your post. You're not multiple. You don't know what it's like. Ignoring each other and pretending that each of you individually is the only one that exists is a good way to dissolve into utter chaos. Working together and living as a group may not fit your pet theories of the way we should live but we're happy, productive, functional, and not in need of your advice.

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binkenstein.livejournal.com

The question is not "are you ok now?" but "could you/things be better?"
"Normal" is a lable, because I don't think there are any "normal" people out there.
Average sure, but not normal.

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Psychiatrics are starting to realise that there's an entire industry that's been created out of so-called dissociative disorders and a lot of crackpot shrinks and therapists who are getting very fat pockets out of it.

Sure. I would never argue with that. See for instance the book "Creating Hysteria" by Joan Acocella, about the recovered-memory and MPD/DID scandals of the 80s and 90s. While Acocella draws entirely the wrong conclusion from her research (viz., that multiplicity doesn't exist and was something invented by doctors to bilk money out of patients), the cases and counseling techniques she writes about are absolutely real.

I've done a fair bit of research myself and the documented cases of real, deep-rooted multiplicity have ALL been found in patients who had NO clue of any other personalities

Hold on a sec. What are you defining as 'real multiplicity'? Are you talking about the 'frontrunner in the dark' situation where there's a main frontrunner who doesn't know about the existence of the others and is unable to communicate with them, having no awareness of them except as periods of lost time?

While there are indeed some therapists who argue that such cases represent the only 'real' incidences of true multiplicity, I find this a questionable assumption on a philosophical level. How do we define a person? I think the majority of people would agree that personhood constitutes, at the least, a strong sense of self-identity, the capacity to reason, and a specific way of perceiving and thinking about the world around them. Is exclusivity of memory a necessary criterion for personhood? I don't see that it is, as long as the criteria listed are present. If you think it is, though, I'd be interested to hear why. (There's also the fact that in some 'frontrunner in the dark' situations, everyone EXCEPT the frontrunner was aware of and able to communicate with each other.)

Further more all these cases had been subjected to the kind of mental, physical and sexual torture above and beyond what many of us can imagine.. it takes a HELL of a lot of abuse to fully fracture someones internal personality.

Actually, the very first ones, like Mary Reynolds and Ansel Bourne, were not. I suggest "The Passion of Ansel Bourne" by Michael Kenny for some background on them. The earliest documented cases of multiplicity in American and European culture did not involve the levels of extreme sexual torture now claimed as a necessary condition for creating multiplicity. Most of them had, in fact, had experienced not openly abusive but rather oppressive childhoods, particularly religious oppression. In fact, the initial interpretation was that other personalities performed the function of expressing artistic, intellectual and sexual impulses forbidden in the person's day-to-day life. Women in particular were thought to have a tendency to split off the unacceptable parts of their personality; see for instance "The Dissociation of a Personality" by Morton Prince. This is where the myths about all multiples having the 'angry one' and the 'flirty one' got started-- they were all supposed to be personifications of behaviours it wasn't normally acceptable for women to display.

In Prince's work with "Miss Beauchamp," he concluded that a traumatic shock had been the mitigating factor which caused her to dissociate-- namely, the death of her brother when she was 18. Traumatic, yes, but hardly the kind of extreme circumstances cited in more modern works. He and others of the time thought a single trauma could cause multiplicity, but not necessarily of a sexual nature, and not necessarily in childhood. (Naturally, it was believed that women were more vulnerable to these kind of traumatic shocks.)

there are countless survivors of abuse in the world, why aren't all of them multiples if it's as easy to fracture a mind as some shrinks are claiming?

Ironically, that's also my problem with the abuse-as-sole-cause theory-- the fact that more abused children don't become plural.

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I doubt you were truly multiple; dissociative perhaps but that's not the same thing. Sometimes bipolar people will start viewing themself as separate people because there can be so much variation in personality, behavior, thoughts, ect depending on whether the person is manic, depressive, or somewhere else in between. If you were doing something along these lines or labelling sides of your personality or making up fantasies to hide from the fact that you were falling apart, then yes, I can see why you'd think you were multiple and why this pseudomultiplicity would fade with therapy/telling yourself it's not real.

We're not like that though. We're people. That means we have all the sides and aspects of our personalities, opinions, similarities, and differences just as we would had we all had our own body. It also means that if one of us were to stand up and tell the rest of us that we weren't real the rest of us would tell him or her to fuck off. Our existance is not dependant on each other. And good luck trying to figure out which one of us is supposed to be the one hiding from reality by pretending to be the rest of us.

We did the whole pretend to be single thing. We stuck someone out front until she forgot about the rest of us and no one talked to her. It sucked. It gets pretty damn miserable watching your life pass you by. It wasn't much more fun for her. She had a life but she was unhappy and she missed something she didn't even remember. Working together and living as a group is what is best for us. We're not dysfunctional. We are happy. There's no hiding from reality or pretending. We stopped pretending. We stopped hiding. This is how we truly are.

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pythia.livejournal.com

I'm sorry - this isn't directed at you personally - but I just find it impossible to believe that that is true of everyody on this community who says it is, of everybody who claims to be multiple but not dissociative. Tha's just too many people. I'm not ruling out the fact that it's possible, by any means, I just find all of this more than a little incredulous.
The other thing is that you all say you don't neec diagnosis to tell you what you are. Fair enough, but in that case you need to allow Sakura the same right. According to most of you, if someone 'knows' they are multiple then there's not really any question about it, they are. If she says she was multiple, I don't see how that's any different to any of you saying that you believe you're multiple, therefore it's true.
*shrug*

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A lot of people in this community believe that if you think that you're multiple then you are. We don't believe that. There are too many ways for someone to be convinced by other people, swayed by wishful thinking, or just get confused. That goes for DID patients as well. Lots of people have voices in their head or lose time. Those things by themself do not mean you're multiple.

We don't believe that everyone in this community is multiple either. At the same time, if someone mistakenly believes that they're multiple and it works for them, then they should be allowed to continue as they are. It's not hurting anyone and they'll eventually figure it out. There are also multiples who are just plain fakes. But then a lot of times you end up having to reserve judgement because it's hard to tell the difference between a system full of people who are full of BS and a single person who is full of BS. A lot of people here are afraid to look at other multiples and judge whether they're really multiple or not. If they doubt someone else, they feel it leaves them open to other people doubting them. We don't really care. We exist whether we believe we exist or not so why should we care whether some outside person doubts us.

The things Sakura described were dissociation. Dissociating does not mean that you're multiple. The fact that her multiplicity just went away when she stopped believing in it is a pretty good indication that she wasn't really multiple. The fact that she thinks multiplicity is a way to hide from reality and she describes it as giving names to your personalities also indicates that she's probably wasn't really multiple. The fact that she's bipolar, because of the extreme differences in moods and thought patterns that you get, also supports the idea that she was something other than multiple.

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You missed the key words: and it works for them . Thinking you were multiple didn't work for you. It didn't help anything. If thinking that your different states and dissociation were separate people had helped you to manage things, how would that have been a bad thing?

A friend of ours is bipolar and for a while he thought of himself as though he were three separate people because it helped him deal with the fact that he had completely different goals in life and views when he was manic compared to when he was normal or depressive. It did help him negotiate with himself but it stopped working because he started using it to distance his behavior from himself and not take responsibility for his own actions. If someone else does the same thing and doesn't run into the problem of using it to make excuses, don't you think that it's helping them and not hurting them? What difference does it make whether they think they're literally separate people or not?

Multiplicity, real or otherwise, is rarely the problem. Your problem was that you had no control over your bipolar episodes. You would have still dissociated and cut even if you hadn't decided that you were separate people. Our friend didn't think he was multiple but his problem wasn't treating himself as separate entities; it was using that as an excuse.

People can be multiple and still deal with their issues. They do it all the time. Not to mention that some multiples don't have any issues or have already dealt with theirs (disregarding, of course, the normal every day issues that all people have.) When multiplicity is the problem, working out cooperation will solve it. Whether you're working as a team with other people or with other sides of yourself that you're given names, as long as your working together towards a common goal then you're going to do fine.

Also, the "Well IM Manic depressive/schizophrenic/dissociative and I know cos I read this article on the net which TOTALLY described me.." people aren't fakers. They're just confused. Fakers are the people who intentionally pretend to have a mental illness/ be multiple/ be female/ whatever else they're pretending to be but know they're not.

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el-gremmo.livejournal.com

And it works for them

Interesting, that one who feels they are a society unto themselves should ignore the detrimental effects that such a disorder - faked, imagined or real - has on the people around them.

- Gremlyn
I'd have thought you'd be much more community minded...

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How are we hurting people around us?

Most people don't know we're multiple. The people who do know are fine with it. It doesn't bother them. It's not like they're having to babysit us when the kids are out or cleaning up messes we've made.

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el-gremmo.livejournal.com - Date: 2004-10-24 09:48 pm (UTC) - Expand

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"pretend to be female."

ooo. ouch. sorry, had to say something. i'm a big queer rights activist and it's proven that those people who say they are female/male on the inside, just not on the outside aren't lying. just because of what they have between their legs doesn't make them male or female. there's a glad in the brain that is the real male/female part of you, and if you have a female gland, but man parts, you are essentially a woman.

please, continue. this has been the most helpful part of my post.

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Read more carefully.

Fakers are the people who intentionally pretend to have a mental illness/ be multiple/ be female/ whatever else they're pretending to be but know they're not.

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nayashi.livejournal.com - Date: 2004-10-24 03:21 pm (UTC) - Expand

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pythia.livejournal.com - Date: 2004-10-24 09:59 pm (UTC) - Expand

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I have to point out that there is no gland which has been conclusively agreed upon as being the seat of gender identity. There have been several structures in the brain which have been variously claimed to be different in males and females, and some scientists have come forth with studies which they say prove transsexuals have the brain of the opposite sex. The problem is small sample sizes and statistical overlap in many categories-- transgenderism is definitely real, I'm male in a female body, but I'm not sure if they're looking in the right place for it. For one, it wouldn't explain those who feel they are androgynous or non-gendered, or why people in here have different gender identities-- does that mean our brain structures magically convert from male to female depending upon who's out?

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beyli.livejournal.com

How would a person know if they were just deluding themselves or had just been convinced by someone. This whole issue has been giving me a lot of angst for the past few months and I'd like some way to actually know what is up in my mind.

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Don't be afraid to question yourself.

Are there any indications that you're creating the other people? Do the things they say every surprise you? Are each of you capable of acting out of character? Is there any difference between you pretending to be the person and them being themself? How important to you is it that you're multiple? Would it change anything if one of you stopped believing in everyone else? When you worry that you might be making everything up are you more worried that it might not be real or that you might offend the other people in your body by calling them fake? Do you ever feel like you're just role playing? Is it accurate to say that you're Bob when you're happy and you're Bill when you're sad or does Bob and Bill have happy and sad moods of their own that have nothing to do with yours? Do the people in your system do things that you wish you could do but for whatever reason can't? Do you have a lot of multiple friends or friendships that are dependant on you being multiple? Can you look at the people and say they're your ____ side or they represent _____ part of yourself? If you vanished, would the other people be fully capable of living a life of their own? Do you spend more time convincing yourself that they're not real or convincing yourself that they're real?

In determining if you were convinced by other people, look at what made you identify as multiple in the first place. What is the evidence for it? What is the evidence against it? How much did you get from other people? Were they confirming something you suspected or did it come as a surprise? Did other people have a big impact on whether you thought you were multiple or not? Did you see a lot of changes, ie. becoming more multiple-like, after other people confirmed/suggested/commented on your multiplicity? Did you automatically accept everything you were told or did you question it? Do the people who were in a position to convince you that you were multiple get anything out of you being multiple?

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beyli.livejournal.com

Indications, eh? Mostly of the memory gap type. I don't have much communication or even know who all is there if anyone. The one I do know is mainly more bitter than me but can apparently display a full range of feelings. As to importance, I'd really like to be unity and despite occasional certainty I'm more afraid that I am than wanthing to be multiple. Both the fear that I am just deluded ad the fear of offending everyone else are real. I also fear what position I could be put in by them as I have the nagging suspicion that I've only been the main front for a couple of years with a spotty record of presence before that. Whenever I'm haqppy or sad I'm happy or sad.
Marigold does seem to be more of an angry side, and I feel kinda proud on the occasions that I get angry myself without her being the one in control because it reassures me that I'm real. I don't try to convince myself of her reality or no or anyone else's but my own. The thought of being just an alter scares me to death.

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whispersong.livejournal.com

The thought of being just an alter scares me to death.

That precisely defines what I am in this system: an alter. But why should it scare you? Because it makes you "less real" or something else along those lines? I am who I am. I am no more or less than any other person here but that said I am also of a different culture, lifestyle, My morals & ethics are not as "universally accepted" (that wording doesn't suit what I want to convey & I refer only to the north american society I live in now b/c I have no experience of other cultures as yet outside), I am of a species in this system that was both feared & reviled for years. Yet through it all, I am still "just an alter" to quote you. I still feel I am just as good/important/needed as My systems core or the slider we harbour whos life was so shattered she dared not touch anyone for months after we found her.

Consider yourself fortunate & lucky in a sense if you are an alter as we have unique advantages others do not. IE we can choose not to age if that is possible in your system. :)

Tatiana

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