I just returned from a Conference on DID in Orlando Florida (January 30th to Feb 1) and posted on Facebook about how positive and supportive the conference was for all participants, DID, therapists, supporters and speakers. This was a great meeting, well organized by the group called “An Infinite Mind.” The conference is called “Healing Together.”
The Keynote speaker was Robert Oxnam, author of A Fractured Mind, who gave a most inspiring and affirming talk on the positive aspects of DID. I was honored to be one of the speakers in a breakout session in the afternoon.
This post is taken from my presentation at the conference and is drawn primarily from Volume 1 of Engaging Multiple Personalities.
In chapter 5, I discuss my patient Ruth. She was experiencing unrelenting flashbacks, and self-destructive behavior, so much so that she was hospitalized 20 times by the time she was 28. Her children were taken away by her family in preparation for adoption out. She was diagnosed with a single diagnosis of Depression, plus a personality disorder. The treatment she had received, exclusively pharmaceuticals and electro-convulsive treatment, failed to alleviate her depression.
Under the circumstances, any reasonable person should understand that her depression was a normal and appropriate response to the reality of her circumstances. With the correct diagnosis of DID and appropriate treatment, the “depression” quickly disappeared.
After 2 and half years of intense psychotherapy, she was fully recovered and fully functional, without need to have further therapy or medications. Following up19 years later, upon receiving correspondence from her, showed her to be fully recovered. The depression was both a misdiagnosis and a smoke screen. It was covering up the DID which the doctors never saw or even suspected.
Ruth had brought up her children and was living a highly functional and creative life. She is engaged in helping other survivors of traumatized individuals through running a website as well as writing and publishing a book for survivors of abuse.
What can we learn from this clinical example? Depression is too often mistaken as a stand-alone disorder, when the doctor will too quickly reach out for an antidepressant and ignore the core issue. Depression can be a normal and even healthy emotional response to life’s circumstances, or as a co-morbid condition with another psychiatric illness.
Further, the fact that she had numerous alters, over 400 even after her recovery, means that a therapist should not be obsessed in pushing for integration as the final goal. Really, so long as the alters are cooperating with each other and not fighting, there is no real problem.
While some people may scoff at anyone having so many alters, when I reviewed her old letters from my file with the card signed by an enormous number of her alters, the handwriting of each alter that signed the card matched with that alter’s handwriting 19 years earlier.
I hope this message can help therapists not be blinded by the word depression, or be obsessed with the notion of integration. The fields of past trauma and dissociation, and the DID patients in particular, are waiting for the current generation of therapists to step in to help those suffering from something that is more than depression. Groups such as An Infinite Mind and Ivory Garden (that put on another incredibly supportive conference for DID survivors, therapists and supporters on the West Coast) are doing a great job in supporting individuals with DID. Their work extends to the important task of raising the public’s awareness of the need for correct diagnosis and treatment.
I shall post something from my talk and my books on DID on this website from time to time, hoping to continue my effort to improve the well-being of those individuals with DID, for those who are supporters of DID individuals, and for therapists.
