Ciccarelli: Psychology_5 (5th Edition)
Ciccarelli: Psychology_5 (5th Edition)
5th Edition
ISBN: 9780134477961
Author: Saundra K. Ciccarelli, J. Noland White
Publisher: PEARSON
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valid points on why dissociative identity disorder is real.

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Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) was previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder. Individuals with DID are often victims to physical, mental or emotional abuse during childhood. They include rape victims, children who had unpredictable parents, who physically and emotionally abused them throughout their childhood. Such individuals learn to cope up with their abuse by disassociating themselves from their real body and mind. They disassociate to believe that they never went though it at all in the first place. Disassociating is their way to forget and cope up with the experiences which made them miserable. 

Dissociative Identity Disorder is indeed real because it often gets misdiagnosed as schizophrenia because when they hear their alter personality speak to them, other people assume them to be hallucinating. Hallucination and incoherent speech are symptoms of schizophrenia. Drugs and therapy used as an intervention for schizophrenia never work on individuals with dissociative personality disorder. Secondly, all individuals with DID have been through some form of abuse during childhood, mental, physical or emotional. They all are victims of abuse. Sometimes they also get misdiagnosed for bipolar. However, individuals with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia are not necessarily victims of abuse in childhood.

Rape victims are often seen disassociating themselves from their body. They feel like they are floating above their body and when they look down upon their body they feel sorry for the person beneath. The experience or trauma from the abuse is unbearable and so painful that they just want to escape or shut themselves or disassociate themselves from situations which could be a possible trigger.

Individuals with Dissociative identity disorder indulge in deliberate forgetfulness by disassociating themselves as they do not want to remember anything from the gory incident from the past. This results in a disconnect in an individual's sense of identity, memory and consciousness.  

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