At first glance it might appear that ‘The Dissociative Society of Canada” carries some clout. In reality, it’s just Killen’s vanity project and it doesn’t really do or achieve anything at all. I’ve been through the supposed
‘board of directors’ (scroll down)- aside from Bethany’s very active handling of DSOC’s multiple social media platforms (which she frequently uses for random rants) the society has little presence. As far as I can tell, no one who is listed as a director is openly affiliated with this enterprise anywhere online, and there is no information confirming them to be the ”mental health professionals” that Bethany claims they are.
Bethany is yet another fascinating member of the D.I.D ‘community’: she has a deaf alter, alters that need glasses and others that don’t (à la Jess) and most hilariously
an ex heroin addict alter. She is obsessed with First Nations people in a way that seems borderline racist at times
(here is a tweet of a plan she made for a campus for indigenous people with dissociative disorders while on magic mushrooms).
Bethany repeatedly claims to be an academic with extensive experience and knowledge of dissociative disorders being her ‘specialty’, but these are apparently empty words as her only legitimate qualification appears to be an undergrad in social work.
Bethany is a proponent of the acceptance of ‘non-disordered plurality‘: in other words plurals who are not born out of trauma. i.e. endogenic/‘natural’ systems, even more of a bizarre concept than D.I.D as a mental illness. This is apparently a hot topic of conversation on D.I.D. Twitter and elsewhere as
Jess has chipped in about it a few times, referring to it as ‘syscourse’.
Bethany has a jealousy/hatred fuelled obsession with Chloe. She has angrily tweeted over 50 times about her. I tried archiving the full list of her Tweets containing ‘DissociaDID’ but the list is so long archive.md couldn’t handle it
so it has only captured a handful. I could go on, she is absolutely fascinating, but she’s a fringe character.
ETA:
Here’s a podcast between Bethany and some guy called Joe Messina that I can’t believe I listened to.. Now I am going to take a long break from the internet and try to forget that this woman exists and somehow is an actual social worker.
Highlights
-Bethany explains that she didn’t know she had D.I.D. until she set up a security camera in her home, which one of her alters promptly smashed with a baseball bat
-Bethany brings up the classic “did you know that fMRI’s of D.I.D. brains show that the brain behaves differently when different alters are out!!!!” (debunked in thread
here and
here)
- Bethany makes an unbelievable cancer gaffe
- Bethany describes her DSOC plan for a new, utopian model of psychiatric hospital that she will call the “Canadian model”. Patients will be able to come and go as they please, with no liberty restrictions or movement limitations, to buy cigarettes or candy or Starbucks and if you go missing they will ‘get worried about you’.
- Bethany claims the reason DSOC gets no funding is because of institutional racism as she is outspoken about various issues (e.g. she made a few tweets demanding justice for the murder of
Ejaz Choudry and she talks about decolonisation a fair bit).
That is definitely why they don’t get funding.