TDI: what does it really mean to dissociate? – 10/20/2023 – Balance

Have you ever disconnected?

Maybe you’ve already experienced highway hypnosis, without remembering driving from point A to point B. Or maybe you have no memory of what you just read.

These are mild forms of dissociation, which is the ability to disconnect from thoughts, feelings, environment, or actions.

Dissociation can even help athletes perform their roles, for example, because it “allows people to focus on the most relevant or life-preserving aspects of a given situation” without mental interference, says Janina Fisher, a psychologist who treats disorders. dissociative for decades.

But sometimes people experience a severe form of dissociation, particularly after overwhelming trauma. In this case, dissociative symptoms become more extreme and frequent.

Public fascination with dissociation and its disorders has endured for many years — examples include the books “Sybil” and “The Three Faces of Eve,” both adapted into blockbuster films, each about a woman with “multiple personalities.”

Now people are recording their experiences with dissociation and sharing them on social media. TikTok videos with the hashtag #dissociativeidentitydisorder, or DID, have been viewed more than 1.7 billion times and #dissociation has received more than 775 million views.

Some show what dissociation is like, or use visual effects to explain the eerie feeling of living outside your own body. In others, people describe their different identities, also called alter egos or parts.

Celebrities like “Saturday Night Live” cast member Bowen Yang have also openly described their struggles with dissociative disorders, as conversations about mental health continue to move into public forums.

But research suggests that much of this content is not providing reliable information. We asked several mental health professionals to explain more about dissociation.

What are dissociative disorders?

Instead of fighting or fleeing in a stressful or threatening situation, some people “freeze,” says Frank Putnam, a professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and an expert on dissociative disorders. “That’s the dissociative state where you shut down and kind of disappear.”

While dissociation can help a person mentally escape during a threat, it can interfere with everyday life when people continue to dissociate in benign situations. Some people may find themselves in a new place without knowing how they got there, for example.

Frequent experiences like this make dissociation pathological, Putnam said. It becomes a disorder when you become distracted and “waste time” long enough to significantly interfere with your life, she added.

The three most common and well-known dissociative disorders are: dissociative identity disorder, depersonalization/derealization disorder and dissociative amnesia.

The common thread in each of them is a disruption of identity.

The most serious is dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder. Those who experience DID report having two or more identities. Studies indicate that about 1% to 1.5% of the population has DID. But some say the prevalence may be higher.

“I think it’s very underdiagnosed,” says Judith Herman, a psychiatrist and pioneer in the field of trauma studies. This is largely due to the fact that “you still hear people in my field saying they don’t ‘believe in TDI’.”

Despite the inclusion of DDI in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition, known as DSM-5, the American Psychiatric Association’s official manual for mental disorders, some psychiatrists and psychologists think that patients with symptoms of DID actually have the disorder. borderline personality. Others think it’s a fad or that it can be induced by a professional.

Experiencing severe childhood trauma, such as sexual abuse, is a predictor for developing DID, several experts said.

Fisher acknowledged that “it’s a diagnosis that’s hard to believe unless you’ve seen it.” Patients show changes in body language, facial expression and cognitive ability, she added. “It’s something dramatic and almost fantastic.”

The prevalence of dissociative amnesia is not well established. It occurs in response to a variety of different types of trauma and involves having periods of time where you lose your identity and cannot remember important information about your life, such as your own name.

Both dissociative amnesia and depersonalization/derealization symptoms often accompany DID.

Why are dissociative disorders getting so much attention?

“I thought the internet and the app-based world would bring us closer together. And it’s had exactly the opposite effect,” says David Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University who has worked with DID patients for about 50 years. “It fragmented us.”

What he means is that many of us have isolated ourselves in our own online echo chambers. Some people actually have DID, but others may be mislabeling themselves because they are stuck in a cycle of information about DID — whether by choice or through an aggressive social media algorithm.

The idea of ​​having alternate realities or different identities is something that can especially resonate during adolescence, experts say, a time when many teens struggle with the question “Who am I?”

David Rettew, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and medical director at Lane County Behavioral Health in Eugene, Oregon, has worked with many teenagers who have learned about dissociative disorders on social media and are questioning whether they have these disorders.

Rettew encouraged anyone curious about a specific disorder to talk to a caring and thoughtful health care provider, especially someone who understands trauma, to find out what might be going on.

“Almost everything in mental health is dimensional. It exists on a spectrum,” he said. “And that doesn’t make our conditions any less real, but it does make them more complicated.”