In today’s psychiatry, medication has become the de facto treatment plan. Many colleagues are no longer even pretending to do psychotherapy. They are being trained by representatives of the pharmaceutical industry to see all mental disorders as brain diseases. While there are definitely therapeutic uses for psycho-active medications, using them as the wholesale solution to all mental health issues gives modern psychiatry a false air of scientific credibility.
This is a disaster in the 21st century. There is massive early childhood trauma throughout the world. This includes violence and sexual trauma in war torn regions as well as in refugee camps, not just in so-called healthy societies. There is no treatment focused specifically on those children because of the overwhelming nature of warfare and its consequences.
Make no mistake about it, the trauma is there and will become a massive problem that will show up in a few decades for those children whether we acknowledge it now or not. This is on top of the ongoing early childhood trauma that arises in the absence of war but in the realm of our own somewhat hidden and somewhat exposed plague of abuse.
The foundations of psychiatry include Pierre Janet’s classic papers on PTSD at the end of the 19th century. It also includes Freud’s original assertion in 1895 that incest was the root cause of several of his patients’ difficulties. That initial assertion was withdrawn by him following a withering attack from the medical community of the time. They were insulted at even the idea that professionals, men of wealth and power, or that men in general, would do such a thing. Although perhaps Viennese society was not ready to look at its own dark side, that initial assertion was likely quite correct.
The early leaders in psychiatry pulled back from identifying early childhood sexual trauma for what it was. We should not do that, nor should we countenance others doing that. DID is a specific consequence of early childhood PTSD. We can be honest about that. That is the path forward. We can also use the acknowledgment of DID as a special sub-classification of PTSD to move forward the conversation and treatment of DID.
The common understanding of PTSD in soldiers was acknowledged throughout human written history. Physicians characterized it as “nostalgia” as early as the 1600s, “soldier’s heart” in the US Civil War, “shell-shock” in World War I, “battle fatigue” in World War II, and PTSD in the DSM-III. By the end of the Viet Nam War, PTSD was being seen correctly as not a failure of will or defect of personality, but a product of trauma.
It is this understanding of the wartime foundation of PTSD which is the key, in my opinion, to bringing awareness of DID to the professional community. They accept PTSD. We should use this acceptance to highlight and identify DID as the product of (early childhood) trauma which it is, just as (battlefield) trauma results in soldiers with PTSD.
If you are someone with early childhood trauma in your background, or speak with someone who does, you will know that the analogy of battlefield trauma is spot-on. Any child who is being or has been traumatized early in their life on an ongoing basis experiences life as a battlefield. They live surrounded by potentially overwhelming adversaries seeking to harm them again and again and again.
Please continue to use whatever of my books and blog posts you think will help educate your own therapists to help you on your personal journey of healing.
I continue to hope that the small contribution the books and blog posts have made to support those with DID will ultimately produce a sea change in psychiatry away from automatic pharmaceutical intervention. I hope that they lead to the return of proper psychotherapy for the benefit and protection of those that were abused as children who are trying to heal now as adults.
