"DID can only develop before ages 6-9″ is a myth, and here’s why
Oh, and the idea that it only develops through repeated childhood trauma is also a myth, and we’ll address that too.
So we should clarify - there are plenty of studies that point to the idea that DID often develops in young children who have experienced repeated childhood trauma. That is not what we’re disputing - many DID systems form this way and is likely to be the most common way DID is formed. However, it’s not the only way.
Firstly, we have an epistemological objection to this commonly circulated myth. The problem with studying DID (and any psychiatric disorder, really) is that you cannot do scientific studies in the same way that you can in other fields. In most scientific studies, your goal is to have something that’s observable, testable, and most important replicable and repeatable. This is simply not an option in psychiatry. You cannot repeat or replicate a study into the development of a child’s brain, because that person will only be a child once. You cannot go back in time to do it over again. You also cannot keep human beings in an environment in which you could study their day to day lives 24/7. And hopefully it goes without saying you cannot run unethical experiments or tests on them.
So when trying to study the development of DID, there’s no way you can run [traditional] scientific studies to determine beyond a reasonable doubt how and when DID forms. The absolute best you can do is a hypothesis or model that is supported by a large amount of evidence. The way the information is often obtained in psychiatric studies is by listening to the experiences of others. You must record experiences that are not provable, that are not something that can be observed or repeated. Experiences are highly subjective! What might be traumatic for one person might not be for another, and what might be traumatic “enough” to form DID in one person might not be for another, etc.
And most importantly, above anything else? No two human brains are the same. Brains are highly complex and individual. There are many things we simply don’t understand about how it works or why it does the things that it does. At best you can make generalizations, but even then there will always be exceptions.
So all of that being said, here’s some relevant sources.
>> An interview with Dr. Mike Lloyd, a DID consultant clinical psychologist - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzxqLt0kheY&ab_channel=MultiplicityAndMe
When asked about the cut-off age of DID, he says: “We don’t yet know enough… We don’t have a critical window for the development of identity… That does not exist within the human being. We don’t have that cut-off point to say, the identity is completely and utterly certain, by the age of [blank]. It’s just not there, because there’s so many infinite probabilities for how identity can be formed.” <<
>> Dissociative disorders (including “multiple personalities” in this study) being observed in a 32-year old man following a traumatic brain injury: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10230523/ <<
>> “Multiple personality disorder” found in Vietnam veterans, most likely to be associated with trauma experienced during war, rather than during childhood: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00946278 <<
>> This study which dives in-depth to the experiences of systems, some of which account their experiences of multiplicity during the “pre-trauma period” indicating the development of multiplicity before trauma: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S246874991730090X?via%3Dihub <<
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