BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Sunday, March 1, 2015

Failure to make the correct diagnosis, far from being unique to psychiatry, is all too common in other medical specialties

I have repeatedly made an issue of how psychiatrists miss the diagnosis of multiple personality, and of how they overdiagnose other mental disorders, which are more vaguely defined than multiple personality.

However, to be fair to psychiatry, it must be said that misdiagnosis is a problem with medical diagnosis in general:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/misdiagnosis-is-more-common-than-drug-errors-or-wrong-site-surgery/2013/05/03/5d71a374-9af4-11e2-a941-a19bce7af755_story.html

And people with multiple personality are not the only ones who don’t tell their therapists the whole truth. It is a common problem, for a number of reasons:

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2008/02/06/10-common-reasons-to-lie-to-your-therapist/

However, there are two additional difficulties in the diagnosis of multiple personality: First, the doctor has probably never learned how to make this diagnosis. Second, the patient is not providing all pertinent information because of the host identity’s amnesia for the comings and goings of the other identities, and the alternate identity’s belief that they are another person and not an alternate identity.
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