Simply the Split Personality Disorder is a Psychological disease that causes the person behaves as a multiple persons and the thing
happening to that person will not known to him/her.
The causes of split personality disorder are mainly
psychological factors, like child abuse, traumatic childhood experiences like
loss of a near one, intensive humiliation; neglected childhood and difficulty
adapting to change. Apart from psychological factors, tangible factors include
iatrogenesis that is the adverse effect of medical treatment, that could be
medicines or psychological treatment. The causes differ from person to person
and it is not necessary that split personality disorder develops its roots only
in childhood. In some cases, an adult may suffer from chronic stress, inability
to cope with pressures or adapt to change, and as a way out of his depressing
situation, develops a split personality which takes control of his original
self. Sometimes, people are so greatly affected or influenced by some incident
or person, that the feelings resurface as another personality and the person
lives a different life, the kind he wished for but could not given his real
situation.
Those who accept the validity of DID as a diagnosis
attribute it to extremes of stress or disorders of attachment. What may be
expressed as posttraumatic stress disorder in adults may become DID when found
in children, possibly due to their greater use of imagination as a form of
coping. A specific relationship of childhood abuse, disorganized attachment and
lack of social support are thought to be a necessary component of DID, along
with a rigid parenting style, temperament, genetic predisposition and an
inversion of the parent-child relationship. Other suggested explanations
include insufficient childhood nurturing combined with the innate ability of
children in general to dissociate memories or experiences from consciousness. A
high percentage of patients report child abuse and others report an early loss,
serious medical illness or other traumatic events.People diagnosed with DID
often report that they have experienced severe physical and sexual abuse,
especially during early to mid childhood.They also report more historical
psychological trauma than those diagnosed with any other mental illness.Several
psychiatric rating scales of DID sufferers suggested that DID is strongly
related to childhood trauma rather than to an underlying dysfunction.
In early childhood, children are still developing a
personality structure that allows integrative functioning. Trauma greatly
interferes with the development of integrative metacognitive functions and
associative pathways between naturally developing ego states, enforcing
separation instead of diffuse and inclusive functioning. Repeated activation of
trauma-related dissociative states (while the myelin in the hippocampus is
still being formed) conditions the brain to function state-dependently and form
dissociative identities.Severe sexual, physical, or psychological trauma in
childhood by a primary caregiver has been proposed as an explanation for the
development of DID. In this theory, awareness, memories and feelings of a
harmful action or event caused by the caregiver is pushed into the subconscious
and dissociation becomes a coping mechanism for the individual during times of
stress. These memories and feelings are later experienced as a separate entity,
and if this happens multiple times, multiple alters are created.
A True Story :
This is the Story Happend in u.s.a and the patient name
is karen Overhill and the Karen Overhill
seemed unusually devoid of hope on the day in 1989 she walked into the Chicago
office of Dr. Richard Baer. As weeks of therapy grew into months,
antidepressants didn't help her, at least not consistently. She was
suicidal—and the flat, emotionless way she stated her wish to die made Baer
fear that she might actually follow through. Eventually, Karen began to
volunteer stories of childhood abuse. And she mentioned odd memory lapses. She
would find herself in strange places with no awareness of how she'd gotten
there. She couldn't even remember having had sex with her husband, although she
must have, since they had two children.
Baer suspected a much deeper problem than the
depression and suicidal thoughts Karen admitted to. Still, he kept his
speculation to himself during the first four years of therapy, for fear of
planting ideas in Karen's mind. He waited for her to volunteer the information,
and in a way, she finally did. In November 1993, an envelope with Karen's
return address arrived in the mail. Inside was a single sheet of lined paper
and a letter written in a child's penciled scrawl. "My name is
Claire," it began. "I am 7 years old. I live inside Karen."
The remarkable medical journey that ensued is the
subject of Baer's new book, "Switching Time." It recounts the 17-year
course of Karen's therapy in all its painful detail and sheds new light on
multiple personality disorder (MPD), the controversial illness that afflicted
her. (Karen Overhill is a pseudonym Baer created to protect his patient and her
family.) The book describes the challenges Baer faced as more and more of
Karen's alter egos emerged—men, women and children—a total of 17, each with his
or her own character traits, mental problems and agenda. Baer had to get to
know them all, then persuade them to wipe out their individual identities by
merging into one. It was the defining case of his career—and one that may have
saved Karen's life.
But was Karen's disorder real? There have been allegations
that some purported MPD sufferers were just publicity seekers. Yet Baer doesn't
have the slightest doubt. As he points out, there are easier ways to gain
notoriety than 17 years of therapy. And how could a poseur have maintained each
alter's distinct memories, personality, voice and mannerisms for years, never
mixing them up? "Meryl Streep couldn't have done it," he says. The
alters even wrote him letters in different handwriting.
Still, it's easy to see why MPD remains controversial.
Although the condition has been observed for 200 years—and is officially
recognized by the American Psychiatric Association under the formal name
"dissociative identity disorder"—it is rare enough that most
therapists never treat a case. Some psychiatrists doubt that it exists at all,
claiming it is the product of suggestion. In some cases, they're probably
right. The 1973 best seller "Sybil" led to a wave of diagnoses by
therapists who didn't really understand the condition. One psychiatric hospital
in Maryland "had a whole ward with patients—some male, some female, some
mooing like cows or barking like dogs," says Dr. Paul McHugh, former chair
of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins and a
leading skeptic. It didn't help that both the made-for-TV movie version of
"Sybil," which starred Sally Field, and the 1957 film "The Three
Faces of Eve" gave exaggerated portrayals of radical personality shifts,
which made MPD seem more bizarre than believable—or that the disorder was later
enmeshed in the controversy over false "recovered memories" of
childhood abuse. MPD became an embarrassing diagnosis in the psychiatric
community.
But it didn't go away. Dr. Frank Putnam—who has studied
the condition extensively, first at the National Institute of Mental Health and
now at Cincinnati Children's Hospital—continues to receive calls from
psychiatrists around the country who are stunned when a patient of theirs turns
out to have the disorder. "There's nothing like seeing a patient who has
it to make you believe," he says. Today there are clearer diagnostic
criteria and a better understanding of the causes. The condition, says Dr.
Herbert Speigel, who occasionally treated Sybil during her therapist's absence,
is "real, but rare."
That's a good thing, given the way it's believed to
begin. According to psychiatrists, MPD arises primarily in children who are
subjected to severe physical, sexual and emotional abuse. Having no other
escape, they create different personalities to handle different parts of their
troubled lives—then wall the personalities off from one another with mental
barriers, so that no single persona has to handle too much. "As a child,
if Daddy is about to do bad things to you, you say, 'I'll go to my secret place
where it's not happening to me, but to some other little girl'," says
Putnam.
Psychtronics.com gives the only interesting topics of
psychology and you need not to be a professional to understand the articles in
the psychtronics. They are easy to understand to every one and it is mainly for
the college students and Psychiatrists.
Like us in FB to get Updates:
www.facebook.com/psychtronics
Follow us in twitter: www.twitter.com/psychtronics
Post a Comment