new feature coming: ask a multiple

As I’ve mentioned, my wife has Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder.  I like to feature information on this when I can, as well as maintaining resources for people living with someone who has DID (significant others, as they’re called).

I am about to introduce a new section of the blog dedicated to this topic.  It will be called Ask A Multiple.  My wife will give her point of view and you’re welcome to ask questions.  Do you know someone with DID/MPD?  Are you a significant other?  Are you a multiple who’d like another perspective (as if you need more input)?

I have DID resource links posted on the right, further down.   There are quite a few pages on DID.  There aren’t a lot of pages for significant others.  The Significant Others Guide to DID/MPD has been around forever, possibly the first page like it.   There’s a great support group called SOSUPPORT at Yahoogroups.  Yahoo also has support groups for multiples.  There’s a great resource called Delightfully Scattered Thoughts (also in links section).

In case you’re curious, DID is caused by severe repeated trauma (almost always sexual), somewhere before age six or so.  In spite of what you might have heard, it’s still underdiagnosed.  It was a fad diagnosis in the eighties but there’s so much of it about that it leaves me in shock.   My understanding of the numbers is that it’s nine to one, female to male.  Unfortunately it’s under-reported in men, partially due to the different ways men and women process things.  When women get angry, they tend to turn it inside (suicide, self-harm).  When men get angry, it goes outside and can look like addiction or violence.  It’s also a bit of a taboo for a man to admit the abuse took place (moreso than women, which isn’t easy for them either).

I suspect if you looked in prisons, you’d find a lot of undiagnosed DID.  There are three diagnosed cases of it in my little township.

There are a lot of medical `professionals’ who claim that DID doesn’t exist.  Sometimes it’s ignorance, sometimes there’s some sort of investment in it.  Like the people behind False Memory Syndrome.  It’s not that people can’t have false memories, it’s just that it’s very convenient to claim false memories when one is the abuser.

Interestingly enough, false memories come up in another field:  reported alien abduction incidents.  You see the same `experts’ proclaiming the same claptrap both places.   [for the hard-of-understanding, I am not taking a stand on the claims of alien abductees here]

The SOSUPPORT yahoogroup has hundreds of people subscribed.  I’m sure there are statistical formulas for figuring this out but I don’t know them.  Let’s say that there are four hundred people on the group.  That’s four hundred people who are in a relationship, friendship, or related to someone with DID.  This is not people with the disorder, this is significant others.  Four hundred SO’s in one little unadvertised corner of the web, mostly from the US but several countries are represented.  If I knew the statistical math, I’m sure I’d be shocked at what I turned up about how rampant DID is.  Estimates start at a million and go sharply up in the US by itself.

In case I’m not making myself clear (it happens way too often), this means that there are way too many people sexually abusing children.  Isn’t it enough to read what’s been in the paper the last few years without adding child sexual and satanic ritual abuse?
Stay tuned…