Dissociation, for instance derealization or depersonalization exist. DID does not and the DSM's discernment over what counts as a real mental illness is marred by unfalsifiably circular research efforts i'm too lazy to sperg about, but I know from experience in the academic field.
Regardless, the goal of DID treatment is to integrate and get rid of alters. Stop pretending your 'therapist' wants to treat all their woes individually, you're doing a bad job at faking it. All this maintaining systems bullcrap is awfully convenient and idealistic, but absolutely contrary to real doctors' prognoses.
I've spoken to a psychiatrist about DID, and she believes DID exists, but not in the way it is portrayed by suspected malingerers or in pop culture. She believes that stories like Sybil popularized this presentation of DID, and just like Shirley Ardell Mason fabricated the whole thing, so is everyone who is a copycat of Sybil. She believes that DID is related mostly to the most dysfunctional form of a dissociative disorder, and I've consumed a ton of literature from doctors who say they have seen very few cases of legitimate DID who seem to agree with that. That 1) being aware of the states is absolutely unlikely, and 2) the states are not characters, but rather a composition of whatever memories are in that "compartment", and are truly just fragmented, not "whole personalities" as people like Chloe insist. One used the example that a fragmented state may be "you at age 8" when the abuse stopped, but that because of biology and genetics, you would be unable to infer that the fragmented state is mentally 8 years old, as personality is not only derived from the compartmentalized part of your brain. You use "shared" cognitive function, so while there may be slight alterations in voice consistent with mood shifts, you would not suddenly act like an 8 year old child. You simply would only have amnesia leading to a different, fragmented version of yourself influenced only by experiences available to that compartmentalized conscious state.
From everything I've read, it seems this was the main reason that the name and criteria was updated in 1994 in DSM-IV. Simply because they no longer believed as an academic field that there were actually multiple personalities, instead that there are dissociated identities that are really just fragments of a whole identity.
All of them vehemently deny that switching as it is portrayed by popular media and social media is real.
Also, in the video below, the doctors seem to distinguish that the difference between dissociative amnesia and dissociative identity disorder is the ongoing, highly disruptive dissociative events in which you lose time (they specifically mention that having a dissociative disorder of this nature as a surgeon would make doing that job
impossible), and that they see patients coming in thinking they have DID because they dissociate, but that when they poke for evidence of trauma, the patient cannot identify any knowledge or sense that they were abused or in a chronic traumatic situation as a child (like a war zone), and are referred on for other things. So, Chloe would be a patient that would be referred for another diagnosis, as the childhood trauma is required to make the diagnosis.
I've now gone through countless blog posts and comments and tweets about people's experience with or recommending the Pottergate Centre. I can't find a single instance of someone not being diagnosed with DID after seeing Remy. Seems like the general process is them sending you a free screening test. You send the test back and they go, "Yep. Looks like you have a dissociative disorder, but we can't say for sure unless you pay us thousands of dollars."
Funnily enough, I've seen a few people asking for experiences and describing the screening process in DID communities only to be met with other DID folks that haven't heard of the Pottergate Centre going, "That's shady. It sounds like a scam."
They diagnose 90% of people who take the test with a dissociative disorder. 90% for a class of disorders that has less than 1-3% prevalence, and individually, less estimated .1-1%. It's quite clearly a scam.
The sheer volume of people coming out of that place with a DID diagnosis is criminal. Particularly when you consider the fact that the majority self refer. Chloe really shot herself in the foot by using Pottergate to give her any amount of legitimacy. Having moved to Norwich deliberately to be closer to the centre in the hopes of getting her diagnosis I'm less inclined to believe she was duped by Aquarone and more inclined to believe she sought her diagnosis deliberately.
Why she feels the need to advertise Pottergate to her fans is beyond me. She makes a diagnosis so accessible, providing her audience have parents willing to pay.
Agree. All of her actions seem to point to the fact that she specifically sought out the diagnosis, like someone with drug-seeking behavior would do in an effort to get Vicodin.
Given that she is so celebratory of folks who get the diagnosis, and offers no insight into treatment (like EMDR, which has shown extremely effective and beneficial in trauma-based disorders), it's like she's inviting her fans into a club. She'll make videos that say "you don't want this disorder, don't sensationalize it", and then her actions are completely opposite to that.
Every legitimate doctor I've seen talking about this says that they know of
NO legitimate case that was treated with various applications of therapy that wasn't "made whole" by treatment. Their only concern is that the different types of therapies aren't well studied because of how rare the disorder is.
Well this is interesting. I wondered about the forensic psychiatrist title. Where I grew up that would have meant she would have been involved in criminal cases and it seems she was. Funny, because DID is never successfully used as a defence. If Hawes is involved in practice I'm sure she'll be getting some form of payout to make it worthwhile. Her lack of official comment on Pottergate is interesting. She doesn't want to tie her name to the place.
I could find nothing of her talking about DID specifically, no studies even. Nothing. The only mention of dissociation I can find she makes is that one paragraph I quote from the chapter of that book. She has worked mainly with personality disorders and some addiction, from what I can find. Which, when it comes to doctors who are practicing around rare cases, this is odd to me. Typically, they want to be published as a part of understanding the disorder and developing treatment.
She also seems to be suggesting that her parents paid for her treatment. The £1000 raised in the GoFundMe wasn't enough as she'd set the goal at 3000. Four hours of form filling and a few thousands to buy her false legitimacy.
One of the videos linked here she specifically says that her parents paid for her to go to Pottergate. She giggles and says she's so fortunate to have such supportive parents.
Chloe often talks about brain scans of patients with DID. She claims that when alters switch different areas of the brain 'light up' in relation to different memories. I don't think she understands the studies she quotes and I don't think I have the background to understand them either. She seems to cherry pick the things that chime with her story.
Do you have a link to these studies? This doesn't sound like any evidence of multiple personalities. Granted, I studied only a few semesters of brain physics and neural networking, not pure neuroscience or brain function, but still, it seems like even general knowledge of brain anatomy would question why this would be indicative of a "switch".
