Dissociative Identity Disorder Essays (918 words) -

Dissociative Identity Disorder Max Denis April 28, 2000 From the Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, dissociative identity disorder (DID) is recognized as the presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states that recurrently take control of the behavior. There is an inability to recall important personal information, the extent of which is too great to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness (1994). It is a kind of amnesia that repressed all the traumatic memories most of the time lived during childhood. The most frequent traumatisms that cause this disorder are the sexual abuse. The alter personalities are created to cope with intolerable abuse. They are characterized as sometimes having different age and gender. Some alters may be right-handed, others left-handed. Some alters may need different prescription glasses, have a specific food allergies, or show different responses to alcohol or medications (cited in the Wolrd of Psychology, Putnam et al.1986). The DIDSome of them could be really violent and i nflict self-mutilation. Problems sometimes occur in the diagnosis of the disorder. There are psychologists who incorrectly diagnosed the patients as depressed, epileptic or schizophrenic. These persons' therapies are not efficient so their lives continue on as before, unchanged. There are different treatments that have been created to heal the DID. The treatment used by Colin A. Ross relates a therapy which consists in current techniques that are used by many psychotherapists to cope with DID as the cognitive and the psychodynamic therapy. The therapy instored to treat the DID is divided in four stages. The first step of the theory consists on establishing rules and limits to create a specific relationship between the therapist and the client. The therapist must placed himself in a neutral position, he acts only as a consultant to avoid to become emotionaly involved in the therapy. This kind of therapy should be no longer than three hours a week, therapies that have a length than five hours a week and more are likely to be regressive and to increase dependency on the therapist. The purpose of the fist stage is also to evaluate if the client has another disorder and treat this before beginning the therapy. A client who has another disorder at the same time could be unable to progress in the treatment and succeed in his/her healing process. An example of this disorder could be a dependency to drugs or alcohol, an eating disorder or merely a depression. The second stage of the treatment is the most difficult one. The middle phase involves establishing interpersonality communication and cooperation, negotiating adaptive solutions to system problems, correcting cognitive errors, processing traumatic memories, and devising nondissociative coping strategies (Colin A. Ross, 1995). The essential of this phase consists of a rational, adult conversation. The patient has to recognize that he/she has more than one personality and what is the cause of having this disorder. It is conducted in a problem-soving mode, involving cognitive and psychodynamic techniques. Cognitive therapies assume that maladaptive behaviour can result from irrational thoughts, beliefs, and ideas, which the therapist tries to change (Wood, Wood, Wood & Desmarais, 1999). The cognitive therapy emphasises on present behaviors rather than what happened in the past as the psychodynamic therapy does. It is also based on the consciousness as opposed to the analysis of the unc onscious and repressed memories. The psychodynamic therapy is also well explained by Wood, Wood, Wood it has not been proved that any medication had a stabilizing effect. The next stage of the therapy is named the postintegration. This phase involves learning to cope with the loneliness, innability to "switch" when stress becomes