Dissociative Identity Disorder and other oft-malingered diagnoses

  • 🐕 I am attempting to get the site runnning as fast as possible. If you are experiencing slow page load times, please report it.
The problem with modern focus on mental health is it fails to realize that lifestyle choices are 100x more effective in reducing symptoms than any medication will do. I remember seeing this mom talk about she noticed her son pretending to be sick to get out of school and decided to excuse him and call it a "mental health" day. Psychologists would know that giving into your child's demands would only exacerbate his anxiety, and a better solution would have been to figure out the root cause of the anxiety, and make a plan for going to school regularly and talking with his teachers. Self-care, like making a routine, eating 3 balanced meals, etc., planning ahead has now morphed into giving into your worst impulses. People also expect others to accomodate their anxieties, such as "trigger warnings." Except avoiding what makes you anxious is only going to make it worse. People with PTSD or extreme anxiety have to be slowly reintroduced to their triggers in a safe setting, not spend their whole life hiding from it.
To be fair school has basically been reduced to children's prison except you get to go home on the evenings and weekends, the fact more children don't have anxiety to that extent about it is kind of strange to me, for me I approached it from a perspective of abject hatred moreso than anxiety but either way the aversion was still there.
 
Complex PTSD is also claimed by Jude and a couple other cows, and it's not even in the DSM. The difference between "complex PTSD" (which CANNOT be officially diagnosed as of DSM 5) and normal PTSD is that the trauma had to be severe and unavoidable (think women trafficked into prostitution or children growing up in a war torn country). For the cows, the "complex trauma" is probably their parents telling them to not cutting off their dick.
Complex PTSD exists in the ICD-11, which is used worldwide, whereas the DSM is used primarily in the Americas. This guy explains the difference between the two pretty well.

The disorder is very real, at least according to the ICD. But that diagnosis is for people who grew up in cults, or as you said, people trafficked into prostitution or children in war-torn countries. The PTSD diagnosis has most often been given for people who experienced a singular traumatic event, like war, a car accident, a natural disaster, etc.

I don't really think mental illnesses exist. Depression is just a symptom of prolonged sadness, autism is a symptom of not having good social skills and so on.

Narcolepsy was considered a mental illness for a long time, until neurologists figured out how it works. The same will happen with other mental health disorders once the neurology field can pinpoint the exact part of the brain the particular mental illness affects. Mental illness is real, but it's absolutely not a science.

Also, your wording is redundant. Calling depression a "symptom" of prolonged sadness implies the existence of a disorder.
 
This is what the DSM-V states about how to find malingerers of DID:

Factitious disorder and malingering. Individuals who feign dissociative identity disorder do not report the subtle symptoms of intrusion characteristic of the disorder; instead they tend to overreport well-publicized symptoms of the disorder, such as dissociative amnesia, while underreporting less-publicized comorbid symptoms, such as depression. Individuals who feign dissociative identity disorder tend to be relatively undisturbed by or may even seem to enjoy "having" the disorder. In contrast, individuals with genuine dissociative identity disorder tend to be ashamed of and overwhelmed by their symptoms and to underreport their symptoms or deny their condition. Sequential observation, corroborating history, and intensive psychometric and psychological assessment may be helpful in assessment.

Individuals who malinger dissociative identity disorder usually create limited, stereotyped alternate identities, with feigned amnesia, related to the events for which gain is sought. For example, they may present an "all-good" identity and an "all-bad" identity in hopes of gaining exculpation for a crime.

Figured it be helpful to be repeated in a thread discussing malingering.
 
  • Informative
Reactions: Fustrated

Here is a subreddit I came across centered on debating if DID is a real thing or not. It links several decent studies that go one way or the other. Personally, I have NEVER met someone who claims to have DID who wasn't faking it, so I still have my doubts that DID is real. There's too much evidence against it.
 
  • Like
Reactions: LoudmouthLisa

Here is a subreddit I came across centered on debating if DID is a real thing or not. It links several decent studies that go one way or the other. Personally, I have NEVER met someone who claims to have DID who wasn't faking it, so I still have my doubts that DID is real. There's too much evidence against it.
Double post much, fag?
 
  • Dislike
Reactions: Zurui
They're real, but extremely rare. Far rarer than the number of people claiming to have them for pity points.

You can also usually tell who is and isn't faking it by how they deal with it. People will loathe themselves and hate having such lack of control over their own bodies, often doing anything they can to be as normal as possible (exercise, diet changes, medication). Real victims of these disorders wouldn't just sit on their ass and go "woe is me, oh it's awful" and actively let these conditions get worse.

Honestly, you probably know someone who has either these or similar conditions. They just don't talk about it cause it's embarrassing and they don't want your pity
 
I can hopefully clear up some of these ideas thanks to my experiences.

Regarding myself, I'm not about to show my power level too much so I'll keep things a bit vague. First, as a kid I was diagnosed with a mild mental disorder. The exact definition of this disorder is debated, but I don't doubt this diagnosis. When I first found out, I doubted it, and hated the idea that I wasn't normal. Eventually, I learned what some of the quirks were, becoming more self aware in how it affected me and learned how to deal with it rather than try to ignore it. Now, you wouldn't even be able to tell I have it, and if it wasn't for the way I act in some cases, I would have even considered myself possibly "cured" of my behaviors. In recent years, I've considered the fact I may have a form of PTSD as well, although I keep telling myself I might be exaggerating and I'm not about to self diagnose myself with it. The reason comes from my time in the military, but not because of war or anything like that, although I was close to frontlines. It's actually just due to years stationed at a place that was physically and mentally exhausting, and that I occasionally still have nightmares of and in general just get highly stressed if I remember anything about that place. So take that experience how you will.

Regarding DID? Let me tell you right now, 99% of people claiming it are BS. I've met 2 such people before, and while the first one never claimed it directly to me, they did claim it to 2 of my friends, one who believed them and another who called BS. Granted, the friend who called BS is actually off his rocker himself, for one reason or another. But my experience with the second person solidified my conviction that the first person was lying. This second person I met through a friend over discord, and they were acting strange. Eventually, our mutual friend explained that this person had DID. I fully believed them at first, DMing and chatting with them that night in private, and learning a bit about them. I believed that I was talking to "3" different people throughout the hours, and that it was random, and the next day while at work I researched DID more so I could learn more about it. THIS is when I realized how full of shit they were, as I learned about how DID actually works, as a sort of coping mechanism, it's specifics, and how it's not like you see in TV and Movies, where there are multiple personalities in a sense controlling or sharing a body. After work, the more I talked to that person the more obvious it was they were full of shit and just pretending to have multiple people in their head. I talked with a couple friends about it and they told me that the person was certainly lying, and that their experience with someone who actually has it is very specific, like they might "change" every few days, but not into some other personality, just a version of them with different memories, and that they both had their own logins for things like discord and just learn to deal with the unusual way they can't remember stuff. Moral of this story is that if you ever meet someone who claims to have an alter ego that is like a kid or even entirely different person, they are bullshitting you.
 
Oh, it's anxiety.
One can worry themselves sick very easy, and being caught up in all this high-drama lifestyle for whatever attention high you get, well I imagine it's stressful, and I do think there are legit conditions that manifest from prolonged stress.
Anxiety is simultaneously one of the most diagnosed yet misunderstood issues, it can cause a lot of symptoms (both physical and mental) that patients could perceive as extreme or alarming and that may lead to other erroneous.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Gravy Seal
Well the more extreme ones are real but i feel ones like adhd aren't real.
I think that you should definitely look into the critical psychiatry movement. That seems to fit your vein of thought very well. Evolutionary psychiatry might also be something you'd enjoy researching too.

As for ADHD and Austim not being real, I disagree. However, they tend to be over diagnosed. Then people put their kids on legalized speed and end up doing long term damage. But there is a significant amount of support that these disorders have physical brain based causes. ADHD is actually thought to be an evolutionary adaptation in prehistoric times but is now maladaptive in today's society.
 
Many are over-diagnosed like autism, ADHD, etc. Some like DID and stuff like fibromyalgia I consider as wholly fabricated/ induced psychosomatic conditions. The diagnostic categories are scientifically meaningless beyond association to higher-order factors (In the same way that "multiple intelligences" and other such nonsense just decomposes back to g and/or the big 5).
 
Back