It used to be called multiple-personality. And that was imo an accurate but too-terrifying label. I believe the shrinks changed the name mainly to obscure that, cowardice on their part. The motion picture Sybil, with Sally Field, gives a fair glimpse of the reality of multiple personality disorder.

Apparently one person at a time uses the body, although more than one may be "alert" at the time. And someone prioritizes who's "up" at any time. Which is to say there are persons imprisoned in a mind - just one aspect of the terrible nature of the disorder. Another is becoming present without a clue as to where you are or why you're there. And no doubt the details of this differ from patient to patient.

And some mental health professionals think it's all a fake. But that is just their failure to deal with, comprehend, and cope with the completely blurred boundaries of reality that some mental illnesses impose, for which failure they ought to find another line of work. For example, an individual with excellent vision may have a blind alter - and that alter does not see. Blind? Not blind?

The usual account of the cause of multiple personality is protracted abuse and neglect as a child, and PTSD goes along with it. Which means already that the alter(s) you're likely to meet have both a skewed sense of reality and what is appropriate, on the basis of their abuse, on top of the problems of being one in a many. Which makes them among the most dangerous of people. Not because they will do you any harm deliberately - although they might - but simply because yours and their reality and understandings will never, ever, coincide. And if you try to reconcile them in your own mind, the resultant torque will bend yours. Because way inside of anyone with multiple personality is an utterly fierce survivor. Similar to the idea that inside every 500 pound obese person is a 250 pound person of immense physical strength.

It's an axiom of mine that many illnesses cannot be handled by any individual or group of individuals, and trying harms everyone. Such people need a corporate level of care, at the center of which is a team of professionals. Of course very few get that. For the most part, such people are in pain all the time, and uniquely handicapped in dealing with it, seemingly beyond hope. It is very, very sad.

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.

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

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).

In one of the posts above is a link to a William F. Buckley Firing Line with Thomas Szasz. I consider WFB an entertainer who is a master of form, though not necessarily of substance. Enlivening if not always enlightening. And to be sure he did occasionally have on members of the tin-hat brigade. And while Szasz is not quite that, he did appear with two "co-defendants"; their position, near as I could tell from a sampling, being that there is no such thing as a mental illness. I recommend watching it only if you have a strong stomach for stupidity.

MPD (I prefer that to DID), I've read, is a form of extreme neurosis, not thereby psychosis. The point then was that while neuroses were felt to be mainly mild disorders, MPD and some other disorders were as or more severe than any psychosis. But I think even those terms, "neurosis" and "psychosis," are out of favour these days. In any case, Buckley and Szasz, et al, are sixty years astern, too long a time for their substance to be relevant today, unless on current merit.

And yours a good question, that I understand in these terms, whether mental illness falls on a continuum - is connected with somehow - with mental health, or represents a break or kind of discontinuity from mental health. (I do not know if Szasz rejected mental health as well as mental illness - he appears to equate it all with behaving properly!) But it seems to me the question is both perhaps philosophical in nature and a little too removed from the realities, like asking if a broken leg is still a leg.

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.