Blacknad:
Do you know any persons with multiple personality disorder? Do you understand what causes it?


- Amaranth, good question and by what I wrote, obviously not. I just recycled stuff I thought I knew about it, without checking my facts.

I worked at a residential home in '93 - '94 where a girl had three distinct personalities - she had suffered extreme abuse, and this anecdotal evidence coupled with things I have read or heard in the past lead to my statement.

Obviously spending a little time 'netting' it, I can see that my comments were quite ignorant. There are many proposed reasons for dissociative identity from the wild and wacky to the idea of a purely different physical brain structure.

One of the things that would lead me to think that it is a fragmenting of a previously existing coherent personality is the following:

'Lack of MPD among children: If MPD is created by intolerable levels of child abuse during childhood, then one would expect to find MPD symptoms among many children. But MPD seems to be found almost exclusively among adults. In the years prior to 1979, only one case of MPD in a child was reported. By 1988, only 8 new cases had been found. By 1990, 9 additional cases were reported. This represents a minuscule percentage of the total MPD diagnoses.'

So a reaction to trauma may be out of the window, but it seems to be something that people develop - I am not sure that people are born with it. However, I'm not in a position to rule it out.

It's interesting and I'll read more - but that'll teach me to write without thinking.

Regards,

Blacknad.


Demons! I'm telling you, these are demons.