A Watcher's Archive

-The 'endogenic systems are/came from a hate group" is false, here's a discussion and list of references

-The majority of 'endogenic systems are taking up CDD spaces' claims are actually referring to: endogenic systems with trauma and a CDD; and pro-endo traumagenic CDD systems. Most making this claim just don't want to be in the same community as systems with different beliefs/opinions.

-The existence of endogenic and non-traumagenic plurality isn't ableist. They are experiences in line with how mental disorders are defined (references below). There are ableist people who are also endogenic systems, just as there are ableist people who are traumagenic systems. Ableism is an overall issue, not something specific to endogenic systems.

Ableism is the discrimination of and social prejudice against people with disabilities based on the belief that typical abilities are superior. At its heart, ableism is rooted in the assumption that disabled people require ‘fixing’ and defines people by their disability.

A set of beliefs or practices that devalue and discriminate against people with physical, intellectual, or psychiatric disabilities and often rests on the assumption that disabled people need to be ‘fixed’ in one form or the other.

Discrimination or prejudice against individuals with disabilities

Discrimination and social prejudice against physically or mentally disabled people. Ableism characterizes people as they are defined by their disabilities and also classifies disabled people as being inferior to non-disabled people.

A word for unfairly favouring non-disabled people. Ableism means prioritising the needs of non-disabled people. In an ableist society, it’s assumed that the “normal” way to live is as a non-disabled person. 

-The existence of endogenic systems doesn't come under the definition of "ableism", and much of what's said against endogenic systems falls under "discrimination" and "sanism"

The act, practice, or an instance of unfairly treating a person or group differently from other people or groups on a class or categorical basis

Sanism (also called mentalism or neuro-discrimination) is prejudice plus power; anyone of any neurological condition can have/exhibit neurocognitive-based prejudice, but in North America (and globally), neurotypical people have the institutional power, therefore Sanism is a systematized discrimination, antagonism, or exclusion directed against neurodivergent people based on the belief that neurotypical cognition is superior. 

-They're experiences that are in line with how mental disorders work and are defined, not ableism:

-A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or development processes underlying mental functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress or disability in social, occupational, or other important activities. An expectable or culturally approved response to a common stressor or loss, such as the death of a loved one, is not a mental disorder. Socially deviant behavior (e.g. political, religious, or sexual) and conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are not mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict results from a dysfunction in the individual, as described above.

The DSM-5 wording indicates that mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress or impairment. The word ‘usually’ may be technically accurate, in that on rare occasions, a mental disorder is listed in DSM-5, and there is no ‘clinical criterion’. However, given that psychiatric symptoms are often on a continuum with normality, the clinical criterion is one key way of providing a relatively valid and reliable marker of underlying dysfunction, so lessening the risk of false positives and over-medicalization.

-It was apparent from visual inspection of the data that most of the MPD cases in the general population were radically different from clinical MPD patients. These people often did not report abuse histories and often reported experiencing little psychopathology. They had low DES scores (only one scored above 20). By reviewing the DDIS profile of each person positive for MPD I identified six individuals who appeared to have pathologic posttraumatic MPD, which was 1.3% of the entire sample.

These six individuals had abuse histories and substantial amounts of symptomatology. For instance, two met criteria for BPD and four had had a major depressive episode. Although they were clearly more symptomatic than the eight individuals positive for MPD who did not report childhood abuse, they were not as disturbed as clinically diagnosed MPD patients. Eight cases (1.8% of the entire sample) were possible false-positive diagnoses of MPD in individuals who did not report childhood trauma or extensive symptomatology.

Although the study yielded only a small sample of 14 individuals positive for MPD, the findings raise a number of issues. How should we think about the eight individuals who felt they had distinct personality states, but who did not appear to have clinical MPD? The first possibility is that the DDIS is not valid in nonclinical populations: These eight individuals may have DDNOS or no DD. In the absence of blind validation studies, all conclusions must be tentative.

The second possibility is that there is no problem with the DDIS, but instead with the DSM-III-R criteria: Perhaps the DDIS reflects the true prevalence of DSM-III-R MPD in the general population, but the DSM-III-R criteria yield false positives. Third, several of the eight apparently atraumatic individuals may be amnesic for abuse they experienced and unaware of their amnesia. Some of these individuals may be in a period of quiescence or remission, may have had more florid MPD in the past, or may develop overt MPD in the future if subjected to enough stress.

Another possibility is that multiplicity exists in a nonpathologic endogenous form in the general population. About 2% of people may be natural multiples who do not have dysfunctional posttraumatic MPD, They may simply have a highly dissociative psychic organization. If subjected to child abuse, these individuals would have developed clinical MPD with all its symptoms, self-destructiveness, and dysfunctional amnesia. The threshold for development of pathologic MPD in response to trauma is presumably low in such individuals, if they exist.

DSM-III-R criteria function well in clinical populations to differentiate MPD from other diagnostic groups, however it appears that more complex criteria are required to differentiate pathologic MPD with numerous personality states, complicated amnesia barriers, and severe trauma histories from individuals with nonpathologic atraumatic multiplicity.

The existence of mild, nonpathologic variants of MPD in the general population is consistent with the findings for all other forms of mental disorder. Simply having distinct personality states that feel subjectively like separate people may not in itself be a mental illness. This may be true even if the personality states have separate names and converse out loud with each other inside the person’s head. The DSM-II-R criteria for MPD do not make this distinction between psychiatric disorder and normal psychic organization. It is likely that the 14 individuals positive for MPD in the study have provided preliminary information about a heterogeneous group of people, some with disorders of varying etiology, and some with no psychiatric disorder.

-Normal-pathological is another polarity. While most agree that there is both normal and pathological dissociation, there is disagreement about whether the boundary between them is sharp or blurred, and whether the boundary is merely quantitative—a matter of degree—or qualitative—a question as to what kinds of dissociation fall to the normal or pathological side. These competing hypotheses have again invited and undergone empirical test, though, as in most other complex scientific fields, empirical results generally raise as many further questions as they answer.

Distinct from the normal-pathological axis, dissociation connotes two distinct sets of phenomena whose relationship remains uncertain—faculty dissociation and multiplicity—and which commonly co-occur. Faculty dissociation implies a disruption in the normal integration of the psychological faculties or functioning of a given consciousness with a sense of self. Multiplicity implies the presence of more than one centre of consciousness, more than one self. Autohypnotic analgesia-anesthesia and focused attention during the execution of a complex task illustrate normal faculty dissociation. Depersonalization and dissociative amnesia illustrate pathological faculty dissociation. The presence of ego states in an otherwise healthy individual, or culturally-sanctioned psychogenic altered states of consciousness, illustrate normal multiplicity. Dissociative Identity Disorder, DDNOS-1 and DDNOS-4 (Dissociative Trance Disorder) illustrate pathological multiplicity. The two-by-two grid generated by normal/pathological and faculty/multiplicity is not controversial, while the question as to whether to apply the word dissociation to all four boxes, or just to some, remains hotly debated.

Dissociative multiplicity, by contrast, implies more than one consciousness. Van der Hart and Dorahy (2009) opt for restricting the term dissociation to a structural division of the mind, implying some degree of multiplicity, and recommend withholding the term entirely from functional dissociation in a single consciousness. Again, the question as to whether there is a sharp or blurred boundary between normal and pathological multiplicity is an ongoing debate. If one regards dissociative multiplicity as primary, then any apparent dissociation of mental faculties is viewed as epiphenomenal to the alternating or simultaneous presence of oneself and another (i.e., another self, or another of one’s selves).

Today, increased attention is being paid to the normal multiplicity of states of consciousness. This is evoking a conceptual shift toward a view of the mind as a configuration of discontinuous, shifting states of consciousness.

These states are understood to have varying degrees of access to perception and cognition because many domains of dissociated self-experience have only weak or nonexistent links to the experience of “I” as a communicable entity. It should be noted, by the way, that this is true not only of patients with a history of massive traumatization. Before these hypnoidally inaccessible self-states can be taken as objects of cognitive reflection, they must first become “thinkable” by becoming linguistically communicable through enactment in the therapeutic relationship.

Until this happens, neither repression nor even the experience of intrapsychic conflict can take place because each state of consciousness holds its own experientially encapsulated “truth,” which is repetitively enacted. The difficulty for psychoanalysts is that they have lacked a strong theoretical model that could deal with the implications of this.

Beahrs (1982) writes that “state of consciousness, schema, mood, role, system, ego state and alter personality all refer to some level of ... mental unit. Separated by a boundary from others, each unit has characteristic features defining its identity and finite persistence over an extended period of time. Dissociation, then, is the process of forming and maintaining the boundary of said unit” (pp. 61–62, original italics). I believe that this definition would be considered by most researchers and clinicians to be empirically useful. The term dissociation, “first coined in psychology by William James, was developed to explain various phenomena of altered consciousness, such as somnambulism, fugue states, and conditions of double consciousness. Personality was considered a plurality of states ranging from pathological to transcendent, with waking consciousness being only one possible state among many”

-There is no reason why this should not apply to the dissociative spectrum - some people will not develop DID no matter how much trauma they experience - while others will do so with less trauma. It is logical that here are some people who are more organized in terms of separate parts as part of their endowment - in the absence of severe trauma they may have a few parts but no severe internal conflict or amnesia. I don't think it's productive to debate whether the parts in non-traumagenic multiples should be called parts, alters, or something else.

It can be boiled down to several categories. 1. DID and OSDD as defined by DSM-5 - which require distress and dysfunction. Neither of these require trauma by DSM-5 rules but there virtually always is trauma. 2. Other DSM-5 dissociative disorders. 3. People with parts and trauma but no distress or dysfunction. 4. People with parts but no trauma, and no distress or dysfunction. - Like everything in DSM-5 there are mild versions that don't meet full criteria and don't have distress or dysfunction. One of the problems in the discussion is that people often have fixed ideas and rules about 'how it has to be' - unfortunately for them, the real world doesn't always follow those rules.

-The insistence of staying Plural even as at the end of therapy is something I've encountered throughout my career. More conservative leaders in my field insist that there's only one cure to DID and that's complete fusion and integration. The fact of the matter is that it's up to the client to decide how they want to be and how they define themselves. From my perspective, and that is in line with the DSM principles, one can have all the phenomenological manifestations of the DID, but if there’s a sense of well-being, internal communication, cooperation, awareness, exchange of information, and external functioning is intact, then it's just a different way of being. It's not a disorder.

It's when they are unable to meet their obligations in real life and are unable to advance their goals in life, when they are experiencing internal strife and conflict and are paralyzed and unable to conduct their lives effectively [that it’s a disorder]. That's in the functioning domain. That's one criteria, a very important criteria. Scholastic, academic, work, family relations, functioning and all that, if it's not impaired, then there's no problem. That's the objective criteria. And then the subjective criteria is distress. So if you're not bothered by multiplicity in the sense that you don't feel that you're being taken over against your will, if you're not losing time, if there's no depression and anxiety associated with this disorder, if some parts are sort of leaking distress to other parts. That subjective criteria is another important indication that one needs help. But in other situations where these two criteria are not met, a person can be completely dissociative in the sense that they are functioning as a system and still not meet even the DSM criteria. Because in the DSM, for almost each and every diagnostic entity there is a condition that it must impair functioning or create distress. And unless this condition is met, then there is no diagnosis.

There's a great need out there to identify those who have multiple worlds and identities to identify the other forms of multiplicity and dissociation out there, and to label and understand better the variance ranging from normal and adaptive to excessive and abnormal and distress producing, and develop ways to help those who need help and want help. That's where we're at now.

-Many, many system-related terms aren't exclusive to CDDs, and were never intended to be.

-'Fictive' and 'factive' originated from outside the system community

-'Parts' has existed in many areas for a very long time

-'System' stands for personality system, which is why medical literature also uses it for non-traumagenic systems

-'Alter' may depend on where it originated ('alternate state of consciousness' doesn't even require dissociation; 'alter-ego' and 'alternate self' technically comes from ancient Roman philosopy but the modern version came from hypnosis; etc.) but most endogenics don't use the term anyway, instead using 'headmates', which originated as a non-medical alternative, although med literature uses 'alter' for non-traumagenic systems

-'Multiple/multiplicity' is commonly used in med literature for both traumagenic and non-traumagenic systems

-'Plural/plurality' originated as a non-medical identity

Think we covered everything mentioned - feel free to say if you want any links/references/sources, or ask any questions :)