DID and the Intimacy of Faceless Electronic Communication

Sometimes I feel like I’ve been around forever.  I’m not really all that old but I’ve been through the electronic communication wars for what feels like forever.  I seem to know more about it than a lot of the people around me.  Yeah, ok, I’m a geek too, so I have to know.

As many who read this blog are aware, I’m very interested in multiple personality disorder (dissociative identity disorder), largely because my wife has it.  Not that it isn’t fascinating enough on its own, of course….

Because I write about MPD/DID here and elsewhere, I tend to receive more than my share of private email on the topic.  In fact, if you search on DID, I may have some of the longest-lived info on the web.  It’s a weird feeling, especially as I can remember first putting some of it online.  Most of the information centers around being related to/married to someone with DID.  It wasn’t like there was a ton of information available on DID, no less on being in a relationship with someone who has it.  Now that we’re in the Internet Age, everybody just Googles a topic and comes up with thousands of sites that are related (or want to sell you V**gra).

Even back in the early days, I was always astounded by the kind of information people would give out to total strangers.  It eventually made the news because people were meeting and falling in love online.  Fortunately I never experienced that but I sure got my share of very personal emails on many topics from people I barely knew.  To be honest, I made a lot of friends online and shared some personal information too.  To this day, some of these folks are considered family or closer (meaning I actually like them).

Along those lines, I get a lot of email, as I mentioned earlier.  Taken as a whole, it has made a great impression on me and revealed some serious weaknesses in the medical system worldwide (we’re not Amero-centric anymore, kids).

First and foremost, there is no haven for people with DID.  There is no one country where it’s treated well and with the seriousness it deserves.  There are, however, many countries that are still in the dark ages, as far as DID is concerned.  Most of them, in fact.  Mine among them, although we do have a few bright spots here and there.

Because I have a blog that touches on DID, I get a frightening amount of email on the topic.  Not a week goes by in which I don’t get an email or two from someone whose significant other has just been diagnosed or is about to be diagnosed or is suspected of having DID.

I also get a few emails here and there from people with DID.  I’m never really sure what to do with these.  I am not a therapist.  I am not a social worker.  I am not a psychiatrist (I’m not crazy enough to be one).  I’m not even in the medical field.  I can’t counsel people.  I have no business giving out free advice (that’s worth what people pay for it).  Even if I know what’s coming down the pike for the author of the email, I can potentially do more harm than good by telling them.  I can also potentially get myself into a real nightmare of caretaking, if I really try.

Why do I have this dilemma?  Because the psych systems across the world suck.  They’re so horrid that people email some guy they’ve never met, sometimes in another part of the world entirely, and reveal all sorts of horrible details.  Because they have nowhere else to go. Broken healthcare systems abound - it’s not limited to any one country.  Psych services are second-tier at best, sometimes totally nonexistent.

Let’s face it, folks…. things are not getting any better.  Obama is making all sorts of noise about socialized medicine (while socializing everything else too).  If you pay attention to the countries that currently have socialized medicine, they’re not doing too well as it is.  In spite of our broken system, it’s still easier to cross the border into the US to get better healthcare because it’s rationed in socialized systems.  And this is what Obama and Congress want for us???

I guess that if I stopped to read my own blog, I’d safely be able to predict that the volume of email I receive about DID is going to go nowhere but up.  I’ll get to read even more deeply personal emails from people I don’t know who are reaching out for any kind of help at all and don’t know where to go.

It’s bleedin’ SAD.

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Another by-product of being in the DID community is becoming aware of the prevalence of DID across the globe.  It’s something I think about because I always have to know how things work.  There’s a Yahoogroup called SOSUPPORT, for people who have a relationship with someone who has DID.  There are always between three hundred and five hundred people subscribed to the group, largely from the US but not exclusively.

I’m not really good with numbers and never studied statistics so please excuse the extreme lack of accuracy in my conclusions.  Think about it… if there are three to five hundred people in one small, unpublished online niche group, that means that we can start our count at three to five hundred people with DID, largely in the US.  But given the non-visibility of the support group and that it’s for significant others, I’d have to guess that there are quite a few more DID’s than three to five hundred.

At one point, nine out of ten people with DID were female.  What this really means is that nine out of ten women are more likely to seek treatment and get an accurate diagnosis than men.  DID goes largely undiagnosed in men.  I have long heard it said that if you want to find all sorts of cases of men with DID, go to a prison.  There will be lots of undiagnosed cases there, as men are less likely to seek treatment.

Then there are the places where the `professionals’ don’t believe in DID, so you can’t get an accurate diagnosis no matter how hard you try.

DID results from repeated, extreme sexual trauma in childhood.  Today it is caused two ways: garden variety incest/rape, and ritual abuse.  Don’t think you have heard about this?  Think again.  Look at the sex scandal in the Catholic church.  If the priests get them young enough, they can produce multiples.  If not, they can produce substance abusers, self-abusers, and people who can never get on their way in life.

Also in the ritual category is governmental experimentation/abuse.  I wrote earlier about this, on  Project Paperclip, where the CIA brought over Nazi scientists after World War II, who continued their gruesome work on American and Canadian children.  There are literally thousands of victims of this torture who were dumped on the streets.  It’s all a matter of public record.

Satanic ritual abuse and similar groups are still producing lots of multiples to this day.  It hasn’t stopped at all.  They’re just a little further underground (sometimes literally).

Take all of this information and add it to the three to five-hundred multiples whose significant others are in the support group and you have some staggering numbers.  I don’t know what they are, but they’re staggering.