PSA: Plurality is not inherently disordered
PSA: Plurality is not inherently disordered
Cat: So, for clarity, I'm one of thirteen people co-habitating in this brain. There's a lot of stigma associated with anything but a monolithic consciousness, but it's really undeserved. Just having someone else along for the ride doesn't mean you're going to lose your grip on reality or anything of the sort.
Cat: Heck, it doesn't even take trauma to pluralize; I'm a mental construct that Just made on purpose out of loneliness. And subsequently fell in love with.
Just: incandescent blush
Cat: There are some mental disorders involving plurality, with DID being the archetypal example. However, in those cases the actual problems aren't the extra people; memory barriers, troublesome internal communications, and involuntary switches are far more problematic, most of the time.
Cat: As for persecutors? The interpersonal conflicts with them can be resolved, one way or another. A lot of the time they're just hurting and don't know healthy ways to deal with it.
Cat: So... yeah I don't really have any good ideas for how to end this post.
Cat: The downvotes only prove my point about undeserved stigma.
I'm a trauma-informed therapist and a moderator here and generally agree with your position. In fact the more I've studied how to help people who are traumatized the more I have recognized that plurality or fragmentation of the self is present in most people and gets more intense/exaggerated when someone has experienced trauma. DID (dissociative identity disorder) is at a far end of the dimension of structural dissociation but most of the folks that I work with experience some degree of it, often taking the form of unresolved ambivalence, mood swings, numbness or a constricted relationship with one's emotions, etc. Where I do disagree a bit perhaps is that it is most often the case that there is a relationship between the exaggerated presence of "extra people" or "parts of self" in a person's system and the incidence of those troubling symptoms eg., amnesic barriers, troubling internal communication, involuntary switches. It's theoretically possible to separate these things but in practice they tend to co-occur. I do agree that the symptoms are the problem and not the plurality though.
Edit: I think implicit in what you're describing is that people who recognize their plurality are not necessarily psychotic (as in having symptoms consistent with schizophrenia eg., hallucinations and delusions), which I very much agree with. I have met DID folk who had psychotic parts (delusions of grandeur and god-like powers) but that was just a part of them; not who they were as a system.
Cat: Er... we've got a whole internal polycule, with easy communications and stuff.
Lucifer: VubDapple, I think you might be over-generalizing stuff from traumagenic systems to plurality as a whole. With regards to plurality tending to co-incide with the disordered stuff.
Cat: Er... remember that whole situation last spring that we helped one of our friend systems with?
Lucifer: Ugh that was an absolute mess. Still, the edgy bastard was dealt with permanently in the end. And they never really had comms trouble, even during that.
Serrice: Yeah, plurality isn't inherently disordered.
Anywhere you have plural or dissociative people having a discussion about current research there's going to be someone hell-bent on denying their existence with 40 year old info.
So a couple of notes from the clinical end regarding split-personality / MPD, etc.
Firstly, the current (DSM V) diagnosis is Disassociative Identity Disorder based on the controversial notion that all the individuals within a single mind are part of a whole. As with prior interpretations, this remains controversial but is the bleeding edge of psychological theory so far.
Secondly, modern medical-model psychology depends on the standard of dysfunction to decide if a mental illness necessitates treatment. I think (not sure) its related to a study of patients who hear voices compared to patients who hear God (whether it's actually God is irrelevant.) The latter group was happy to have that voice, and found it comforting while most of the former group were happy for medications that quieted or silenced the voices.
That said, the psychiatric sector in the US (and I think the developed world) is required by law to get a patient's consent for treatment or assess they are a danger to themselves or others by a psychiatrist (in the case of involuntary committal) Yes, this is a power that is sometimes abused, say when billionaires want their gay son to be less gay.
Kids in the US have fewer rights and protections, largely because a parental signature can bypass direct consent, which is a problem when parents are not fully interested in the child's autonomy and well-being, or is just credulous of medical professionals.
But it means for the rest of us grownups, if you like the demons that possess your mind (or at least have come to terms with them), you don't have to accept treatment to get them exorcised. Also, there are plenty of treatment-resistant diagnoses (👋major depression over here) that cannot be cured by normal psycho therapy, and the best we can hope for is management, so coming to terms with our personal demons.