This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

This makes me think of a hypothesis I've been mulling over lately: are all mental disorders just distortions or exaggerations of aspects of normal mental functioning? (I don't know if this is an active theory in real psychological research or anything, it's just a thought that passed through my mind recently when thinking about how people say they "are depressed" when they're sad or "have OCD" when they're fixated on niggling details, etc: are not the proper mental disorders just dysfunctionally severe versions of those same passing modes of normal function?)

If so, is DID perhaps an exaggeration of the normal tendency for people to behave "like different people" in different contexts, and have a feeling of conflict when multiple contexts overlap, calling for them to behave according to two contrary patterns at once? (E.g. be the "good kid" around parents, be the "cool rebel" around friends, so if visiting friends with parents, "what do?")

Also I wonder about the influence of how much of our self-identity is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves, so perhaps DID is "all a fake", but no more than anyone's usual self-identity is "a fake". The person with DID, perhaps, tells themselves that they are several separate personas sharing a body but not memories etc, and so to the extent that one's identity is all about the story one tells oneself, that fractured identity is true of them, because that is the story they tell themselves.

Combining those two things with the traumatic origins, I can see it making sense that someone who has suffered immensely and cannot function as needed because of that trauma creating a self-narrative featuring one character who had that trauma and is dysfunctional because of it (a part of themselves that's allowed to feel awful about the things that have happened to them), and also other characters who were not the subjects of that trauma but instead bystanders who witnessed it but are still capable of standing up to their abusers or fighting their way out of the situation or whatever.

Around a decade ago I had a kind of mental metaphor of myself along those lines. I felt like the person that I had been all my life prior to then had been "beaten to death" by life, but that that "zombie corpse" of my old self was propped up inside a "robot suit" that was stoic and hyper-functional, but unable to actually enjoy the life that it continued living on behalf of "old me". I was always aware that that was just a metaphor for how I felt, but I can easily see some thought process along similar lines leading to a self-narrative featuring multiple "selves", a story that one could in time convince oneself of.

I have read that many people claiming to be psychic/mediums have shown to have a non-pathological degree of DID or maybe even some schizophrenia. I wasn't sure if this indicates that they are imagining things not deliberately, or if the mind requires certain extra flexibility in the off chance that they do in fact have real abilities.

That makes me think of the psychological hypothesis of bicameralism, according to which schizophrenia is a throwback to an earlier form of human mental function wherein the left hemisphere of the brain (responsible for normal language use) perceived the equivalent part of the right hemisphere as an external voice, "a god", in place of the self-aware internal dialogue that most modern humans have, wherein we do "talk to ourselves" in our minds but we're aware that it's ourselves and not some other being outside of ourselves speaking to us.

I havve been talking about schizophrenia in my thread about truth and cultural relativism. I was on the verge of referring to Julian Jaynes, but not sure if his ideas are relevant for the present time. I think that he may have captivated an aspect of the development of consciousness, but not sure how relevant it is today for thinking about people hearing voices. I have worked in mental health care, and certainly don't think that psychiatric medication is the only solution and answer, but unsure how the idea of the bicameral mind can help us presently. Do you have any ideas about this?

Getting back to the thread title, DID is interesting, and I think that one problem is not it is not recognised, and could so easily have just labelled as psychotic illness, because many psychiatrists are even beginning to distinguish less about specifics, simply with a wish to prescribe medication, and with less attention to listening to individuals life experiences.

Sounds like a question for a psychology forum.

Would you brush a speaking in tongues question away to a religion forum?

are all mental disorders just distortions or exaggerations of aspects of normal mental functioning? — Pfhorrest

Arguably.

https://philosophybites.com/2016/01/steven-hyman-on-categorising-mental-disorders.html

But is skepticism on a spectrum, or is there a discrete categorical syndrome of anti-psychiatry?

perhaps DID is "all a fake", but no more than anyone's usual self-identity is "a fake". — Pfhorrest

To the asylum with you!

:ok:

https://youtu.be/Uzx2UWKvrM4?t=1407

Already sent it to one. Didn't get much back.

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

This makes me think of a hypothesis I've been mulling over lately: are all mental disorders just distortions or exaggerations of aspects of normal mental functioning? — Pfhorrest

I think some sexual disorders/paraphilias may not qualify.

Folks wondering if mental illness is real have obviously never encountered anyone suffering from one. — tim wood

In case it somehow came off that I was saying that, I wasn't. I wasn't saying "exaggerations" as in the person calling something an illness is exaggerating about a normal thing that everyone has, but rather, as in that they have an exaggerated (more severe, more intense, etc) version of something that everyone has a more subtle form of. Like, everyone's brains do the same basic things, but some people's brains do some of those things too much (or too little), and that is what constitutes a mental illness.

(Also to be clear, I'm not claiming that the above is the case, but wondering whether it might be the case).

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

It’s very interesting studying people with DID. They can offer many clues about consciousness.
Normally a brain creates a single thread with the conscious mind feeling as a single individual, that’s how humans evolved but it looks like the brain is capable of splitting up a thread and continue with many threads. Maybe there are areas of the brain like cores that generate new identities. These being physically connected all sorts of things happen. It seems that for example one of the cores can have more control over the body or areas if the brain. The extraordinary thing is they can communicate with each other directly through neuronal signals.