As described in the book Psychology and Your Life, "A person with dissociative identity disorder (DID) exhibits characteristics of two or more personalities , identity or fragments of personality.” Many people are fascinated by this strange psychological disorder, but they question its reality. The media has latched onto this fascination with DID and made it popular with films like Split and I, Myself and Irene. These films, while entertaining, do not fully show the background and spectrum of this disorder. Dissociative identity disorder is a complicated problem, the subject of ongoing research to learn more about the many associated symptoms and related causes. to trauma. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Dissociative identity disorder, called multiple personality disorder until 1994, has been reported for the first time about 4 centuries ago. However, it was only accepted as a psychological disorder by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980. According to the American Journal of Psychotherapy, only 200 cases had been reported up to that point, but the number skyrocketed once diagnostic criteria were added. third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) (Piper, 1994). The prevalence of DID is now thought to be “approximately 1% among women in the general population and 6% in psychiatric outpatients.” No one can be sure that these numbers are accurate, as the diagnostic criteria are vague and can be interpreted differently. The entire field of dissociative identity disorder has grown along with the number of patients diagnosed with it. National conferences, new research, and hospital marketing efforts have been conducted to spread awareness about this obscure and booming disorder (Piper, 1994). Not much was known about this disorder at first, but the growth of the field has helped both experts and the public understand it better. As more information about DID has been learned over the years, its description has become more detailed. With each new edition of the DSM, new facts about the disorder and a clearer way to diagnose it are released. The more recent DSM-5 adds to its previous descriptions of DID by stating that it is characterized by “identity disruption characterized by two or more distinct personality states, with marked discontinuity in sense of self. . .accompanied by related alterations in affect, behavior, consciousness, memory, perception, cognition, and/or sensorimotor functioning.” This much more complete description makes it easier to accurately diagnose people with this disorder. Not only has more information been found about the outward physical effects, but more is also known about the personality of each individual patient. The aforementioned book Psychology and Your Life notes how each personality is fully developed with its own opinions and reactions to situations. Personalities can also be very different in gender, age, handwriting and values. The Journal of Genetic Psychology describes how DID patients often suffer from amnesia due to the personalities not having full contact with each other (Murray, 1994). For the most part, each personality only has memories of what happened when they were the dominant personality at the time. This new information about dissociative identity disorder has made it easier to diagnose affected individuals, but it is still very difficult to help them consider the many characteristics associated with this disorder. DID is already an anomaly in itself, but it mustadd the fact that most people who suffer from it also have many other interconnected disorders. Doctors unfamiliar with this disorder may misdiagnose patients as schizophrenic because many of the symptoms are the same (Murray, 1994). One of these similar symptoms between the two are depression and suicide attempts. A study discussed in the American Journal of Psychotherapy showed that outpatients with DID were 15 times more likely to have a history of suicide attempts than any other psychosis, including alcohol abuse and post-stress disorder. -traumatic. However, in DID the characteristic of depression may only occur in some personalities, while other personalities do not recall suicide attempts. However, suicide is not the only problem associated with dissociative identity disorder. According to the medical journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, DID is actually considered a form of post-traumatic stress disorder developed at an early age. Both occurring after trauma, these disorders affect the brain in similar ways; the only exception is that DID patients dissociate from themselves to cope with the situation. DID is also related to many other dissociative and personality disorders, the main one being borderline personality disorder. Once again discussed in the American Journal of Psychotherapy, it was found that “any practitioner treating a patient population with BPD will predictably encounter a substantial minority of patients who also suffer from DID.” These numerous symptoms and disorders associated with DID make it extremely difficult to treat, especially when there is also a background of trauma in the patient. The cause of dissociative identity disorder is known to be childhood trauma, commonly in the form of abuse. Often, abused children create different characters, such as imaginary friends, that they may develop into their personalities to escape the reality of their lives (Murray, 1994). Each created personality is a part of the whole individual, but has its own memories and traumas attached. An example of this is a sexually abused child dissociating to create a personality that has no memory of being abused, so he can function properly sexually. However, not all abused children develop DID, and the trauma must occur during a specific developmental stage of the individual for this disorder to have a chance to develop. Traumatic experiences of abuse that occur early in the ego and identity formation phase will more likely cause the development of Borderline Personality Disorder, while those that occur later will cause Dissociative Identity Disorder (Murray, 1994 ). This is probably due to the fact that younger children are not able to understand what is happening, unlike older children who understand and want to forget. Although trauma has been known to cause DID since it was considered a psychological disorder, until recently it was not known how the trauma affected the patient mentally. A study published in the journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica in 2018 was the first to compare the relationship between trauma and brain anatomy of DID patients. To do this, the researchers performed MRI scans of 32 DID women (29 of whom had comorbid PTSD from childhood trauma) and 43 women without psychological disorders. They used advanced technology to measure each patient's cortical volume (CV), cortical thickness (CT), and surface area (SA); all three of these are brain structures with distinct developmental pathways thatappear similar in healthy controls. After studying the results, it was found that “women with DID showed significant and extensive volumetric reductions in regional gray matter in the insula, cingulate cortex, dorsolateral, superior, medial, and orbitofrontal prefrontal cortices, and in the superior temporal lobe and inferior". ”. The areas of the brain that are different in women with DID are the regions responsible for processing and regulating emotions. These findings are important to demonstrate that environmental factors, particularly early trauma, significantly influence the neurological development of the brain. Trauma and abuse can put so much stress on the brain's emotion regulators that they physically go out of whack on their developmental path and make it more likely for the individual to develop Dissociative Identity Disorder. This insight goes a long way toward understanding the mental effects of DID, but it provides no insight into how to properly treat this intricate problem. Since its discovery, many different types of psychotherapy have been used to attempt to cure DID patients, to no avail. The boom in dissociative identity disorder after its diagnostic criteria were added to the DSM-III has left psychologists scrambling to find a treatment for it. However, all attempts did not work because there was no effective standard psychotherapy that took into account all the supporters of DID, from managing different personalities in each session to comorbidity. Many therapies tested on patients with this disorder have also been unsuccessful because they would have caused stress to the patient, which would have induced a change and prevented them from actually obtaining valuable information. It also didn't help that until recently it was believed that the correct "treatment" for Dissociative Identity Disorder was to merge all identities into one. Obviously this was very difficult and often the fusion would not have been maintained if it had occurred, since each identity is still a part of the whole individual. This method was time consuming and not convenient at all. A study described in the American Journal of Psychotherapy shows that fusion therapy doesn't work as 123 patients participated in the treatment, but only 33 remained stably fused for 27 months and most didn't last much longer. Fortunately, new treatment guidelines developed by the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation have helped eliminate fusion treatment (Foote & Van Orden, 2016). After many studies, they have found that a stepwise approach to treating DID is the most beneficial in treating all symptoms. Since it was suggested that treating DID in stages works most effectively, many studies have been conducted to find out what specific type of psychotherapy should be used. Brad Foote, M.D., and Kim Van Orden, Ph.D., state in the American Journal of Psychotherapy that dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), commonly used to treat borderline personality disorder, is the best option (Foote and Van Orden, 2016). Because DID and BPD are very similar and often comorbid with each other, an effective therapy for BPD should theoretically be easy to adapt to treat DID. In this article, the authors state that heavy reliance would be placed on phase one, which addresses dangerous behavior, and phase two, which works on trauma, of dialectical behavior therapy (Foote and Van Orden, 2016). This way you will decrease the chances of suicide and focus on the root cause of dissociative identity disorder: trauma. In this.12839