The general consensus in the wider text and image based DID community is that most of them are faking, but we don't have a way of knowing for sure or how many because of just how inconsistent the presentation of the disorder can be in real life. You'd never know I had DID if you met me in person, but I have a good friend who is disabled because she can't function on her own.

The important thing to remember about DID is that it's caused by childhood trauma, abuse, and long term patterns of neglect as simple as "crying it out" or as significant as parentifying. It's not interesting times we live it it has been this way this is often generational, psychology is just finally catching up in this regard.

I was raised (and abused) by my aunt who was only continuing the cycle of her and my mom's abuse that she faced, continued by her father who was abused because of traumas his parents faced on the Trail of Tears. They both described feeling like they had more than one person in them, that their age was not aligned with their body, and the stories of abuse they both told me align. My dad was abused by the Boston Archdiocese, his psychiatric records claimed he referred to himself in turns by John, Jack, and other names, claiming they would act on his behalf. They called it schizophrenia then because of a backlash against diagnosing DID after Sybil and other films reached mainstream.

IMHO most people flaunting their DID online, bragging about their others, claiming to be systems, are just attention seekers that are an insult to those with a real problem. The second "D" stands for disorder after all. It's like the teenagers running around claiming all sorts of odd variations on their sexuality - while being virgins. It's cool to be different, but not to falsely claim someone else's difference.

So then that got me wondering why is medicine focused on the psychological symptoms and naming their clusters, when the cause is always the same. If a person has a bacterial infection and gets a sore throat, he will get treated for the bacteria. If that same bacteria gives another person diahrrea, he will still get treated for the bacteria. And yet.... with personality disorders medicine is so focused on clusterizing the symptoms and treating those instead of going after the cause. But then again, not more than 60 years ago we still called all personality disorders hysteria and demonic possession, so I'm pretty sure we are in a similar dark age right now, we just happen to think we're more enlightened than we are (like all generations).

Where are all the schizos and self-diagnosed narcissists? Me thinks the distribution is off.

As for a narcissist awareness activist, they're not wrong, they are right, and you are an arsehole and it's all your fault!

Schizophrenia on the other hand is absolutely tragic, and it often contains disordered thinking. There is/was plenty of content on YouTube but it wasn't awareness based, rather it was paranoia based.

You're always going to get scammers and fakers, but the legitimate people who are letting others in to their lives to spread awareness is overall a good thing. I would have liked to discover I wasn't alone as a teenager with undiagnosed ADHD. Treatment at that point in my life would have changed it's trajectory significantly.

Neurodiversity isn't a diagnosis by the way, just a catch-all for a group of other disorders.

[1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/08/a-story-that-...

It's like fandom, basically, except with medical treatment and the sense of being an oppressed, abused minority.

Think of it as ranging from acting differently in front of family and in front of your boss, to being an actor in character, to having that character evolve on its own, to full blown DID with amnesia.

The fields of psychology, neuroscience, etc are sadly still in their infancy; we really have very little idea how the brain truly works. Doctors tend to like to put people in boxes, but the brain isn't digital, it's analog, and there isn't a boolean flag somewhere in your head that determines if you have a condition or not. People are different. The medical community usually concerns itself with cases where the condition impacts people's quality of life, i.e. only the more extreme ones, but that doesn't mean anything below that doesn't exist and hasn't since the dawn of humanity.

I was very confused for a while until someone asked them about it. Turns out they had purposely created a “head mate” and now insisted on being treated as multiple people.

This was twent years ago, and Dr. Godsey was the professor. He didn't have tenure, so he did landscaping during the summer. I thought his summer job was cool for a teacher. He might have been the best teacher I ever had. Never forget the first day of class, and he said the C students usually hide in the back row. The next day all the back row seats were empty.

Anyways--I do question certain people who are affected by so many psychological problems to the point they need to use abbreviations to describe themselfs. I don't blame them though. They are just repeating what a licensed professional told them.

https://pluralpedia.org/w/Traumagenic

https://pluralpedia.org/w/Endogenic

One of the core features of the disorder is the dissociative amnesia that protects us from having to deal with the consequences of the trauma we faced at all times. Systems that have lower dissociative barriers who deal with more trauma symptoms can be understandably upset when they see people seemingly functioning fine, claiming the same disorder with few of the same symptoms. I personally believe that endogenics are systems that have successfully repressed their trauma to the point that they really believe they didn't face trauma, or their trauma was more of an emotional or neglectful nature and their parents matured as they developed so it was safe to totally forget. Many endos will get mad in defense if you try to tell them they have trauma (as a mod the fighting can get unexpectedly emotional), because they have to believe they don't have trauma to survive.

For everyone else in the thread talking about it like it's a curiosity or a psych fad please don't, yeah teens are picking it up and faking it, but some are actually coming to terms with it early--those are rare but they happen--most will lose interest in it after some months or years. People who fake this also aren't psychologically normal. People who claim to have created head mates are engaging in tuplamancy, which is NOT Dissociative Identity Disorder, and does not function in the same way in the slightest.

But my take is that conventionally clinical DID presenters will not be particularly public about it, because it stems from the most brutal trauma in childhood- not something to showcase to get upvotes or likes.

I don't have any perspective on non-clinical cases.

Is it really crossing over into a MPD however? Voice dialogue is a therapeutic modality where you take a 2nd person perspective on your psyche components in addition to 1st/3rd person. There's something to it but it's not MPD. The most popular example is the "inner child" complex which people often reconnect with when they empathize with their own child.

While journaling I have a random personality picker which draws from a list of subjectively helpful archetypes. From favorite actors to inner child and future self, and more. Then I interview them or converse with them intuitively, with the aim of exploring the situation or problem from a new perspective.

Related is a theory that by taking the perspective of a given personality, we essentially become that personality (not person, but personality) for however short a time period, giving ourselves access to their tools for problem-solving...

Discussed in Stephen Buhner Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm.

If you find this interesting I highly suggest looking at the "Big Mind" process that's been incorporated into western Zen Buddhism.

Interesting that it seems to be coming back in popularity.

I don't think it's anything but humans being humans.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/exmqzz/tulpamancy-internet-s...

Most systems that we know who have DID are generally A. Wonderful people with B. very hard emotional struggles and C. tend to have very painful private lives. It's generally an incredibly painful disorder, in my experience and in seeing those near me. I think the very concept of having different selves in a body... This creates all sorts of deeply painful, existential crises, as well as I think lifestyle dysphoria.

So I think there's a lot of popcorn-y debate about DID YouTubers, but I think that might be like using Logan/Jake Paul's channel as an argument for/against certain parts of California culture. I think there's parts that do line up, most are grossly exaggerated or left out due to popularity reasons, and I think there's one final piece to it. I think for me, the maturation process on this issue seems to start with confusion, followed by some level of agreement/disagreement/potentially strong emotions, and that may go on for a while.

I think I'm starting to come to the point where I can see these systems as real systems, and whether they're more plural or more singular, just being able to have compassion. If a 2-5 year old is going through the emotional/developmental phases they do, oftentimes it's not wise to mock or deride them for it. Their growth phase has little do do with my wellbeing as an individual, but I can be compassionate and caring regardless.

That, or I could move to popcorn debating the intentions of people popcorn debating the intentions of DID YouTubers. At that point, I'd probably set myself up for popcorn debate too.

I don't know, hopefully that's not too discombobulated. I can say that systems that can live well with DID have to have extraordinary leadership and diplomatic skills internally. It's like having a random greyhound bus of people picked randomly all over the world and having them function as a good, moving... I don't know, for the sake of example, performative group. One can sit and be upset about D'Je'be, who seems to be intent on harassing the female members of the crew, or Sarai, who seems to have a personal need for everyone in the crew to dote on her, and so on. All of those things can happen inside of a DID system, and they generally do.

So seeing DID YouTubers, if they are a system, this is part of their journey. It may not even be a bad thing! It's just a thing. But my deepest respect to the systems who can find a way for the D'Je'be's and Sarai's of the world to both authentically be themselves and feel cared for + have their needs emotionally met, while that's being done in a way that doesn't hurt the needs and emotional desires (+needs too, I suppose!) of others in the system.

It's certainly NP hard, and in the class of NP hard that's an NP-hard for NP-hard problems, I'd contend.

Alrighty, enough of me long-form expressing myself here! Happy to answer any questions below. <3