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Comment on If a person with multiple personalities threatens suicide, is it considered a hostage situation?

AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

This is a good shower thought. Probably a good idea to call a psychiatrist rather than a cop tho

Also I want to mention that “multiple personality disorder” is now called Dissociative Identity Disorder and there’s no real consensus that truly having multiple separate identities in the same brain is even possible.

Lost time (gaps in memory) and significant changes in personality over time are a thing, but the existence of separate identities seems most likely to be societal response, as in people just acting out the fantasy that they have different identities.

Acting like you have multiple personalities, especially using that kind of fantasy to deal with trauma or life, is still a real mental illness. It’s just not really “multiple personalities” as portrayed in media or pop culture

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GraveyardOrbit@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Maybe too philosophical to be answered but I wonder if it matters if it’s real? If someone is so convinced and acts as if there were multiple identities could that ever be measured or quantified?

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- AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  While I’m a big fan of philosophical pragmatism, I don’t think it applies here because if the identities are truly separate, it seems less likely you’d be able to treat this kind of mental illness.
  
  It’s much easier to teach people better coping methods than it would be to go about trying to reunify identities since… well where would you even start?
  
  As a testable hypothesis, truly separate personalities would not share all memories but a person presenting them as facades wouldn’t be able to keep the information separate perfectly. Chances are you would be able to design an experiment to trip them up.
  
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  - Delta_V@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Its been done.
    
    Patients with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) frequently report episodes of interidentity amnesia, that is amnesia for events experienced by other identities. The goal of the present experiment was to test the implicit transfer of trauma-related information between identities in DID. We hypothesized that whereas declarative information may transfer from one identity to another, the emotional connotation of the memory may be dissociated, especially in the case of negative, trauma-related emotional valence. An evaluative conditioning procedure was combined with an affective priming procedure, both performed by different identities. In the evaluative conditioning procedure, previously neutral stimuli come to refer to a negative or positive connotation. The affective priming procedure was used to test the transfer of this acquired valence to an identity reporting interidentity amnesia. Results indicated activation of stimulus valence in the affective priming task, that is transfer of emotional material between identities. r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
    
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