(no subject)

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

I'm occasionally weirded out severely by finding links to things like Pavilion or Astraea's page, labeled as "a personal page about the experience of MPD/DID", or "resources for those with dissociative identity disorder," or things along those lines. Sometimes I think this is a result of just not reading the pages very closely, or seeing them come up in search engines as results for MPD or DID; or just going through and linking to every page that relates to the subject of multiplicity at all (though this seems to be done less often now than it once was).

The stranger ones, to me, are the people who seem obviously to have read the page, but still insist on referring to it as "a DID page" or whatever. We've never actually run into anyone calling our page that (although it may well be out there somewhere), though we've had some requests from people wanting to link our page from their MPD/DID site. Usually our policy has been to say no, because that isn't what our website is about, although we've reconsidered that a bit in view of the fact that someone finding our site through such a page might get more use out of it than out of MPD-type pages.

I was looking for something completely unrelated last night, and found someone actually quoting Astraea's webpage while calling it "a resource for people with mild to moderate dissociative identity disorder." Astraea's page was the first multiplicity page that was NOT about DID. It says nowhere in the site that it's aimed at "people with mild DID," and this person had obviously read far enough into it to be able to quote what they said about talking to one's story characters. To call it that seems to require a rather bizarre re-interpretation of what's actually there; I, for one, do not like having outsiders "translate" my words for me and tell all the normal people what I'm "really" talking about, or present it in a form which might be more palatable to them. I can only assume here that people who state that their multiplicity isn't a disorder are being assumed to have 'a mild form of the illness.' Because of course there's something wrong in and of itself with having more than one person in your body-- all the DID bits like lack of communication and operating systems are just details. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if something doesn't cause you distress or reduce your ability to function, doesn't that mean that by definition it is not a disorder?
This rant comes to mind: http://www.bentspoons.com/Shaytar/soapbox/badlinks.shtml

Although, I'm not sure how much good it'll do to just tell people not to call it an MPD/DID page, if they seem to believe that it's their prerogative to decide whether we're talking about a disorder or not, regardless of what we say about ourselves.