I swear we had to read this article at LEAST 4 times, listen to ppl talk about it thrice, & watch The Sorority’s talk for the message to FINALLY sink in: The guy who changed MPD to DID tells us himself he changed the label bc it was the next best thing to erasing MPD from the DSM https://twitter.com/housenyx/status/1282744022075756544

The message that MPD was changed to DID to more accurately reflect the disorder is so well ingrained in our brain, in our community’s culture, in research - we’ve tried to ignore it, but the guy who oversaw changing it literally tells us that that’s not why it was changed.

It’s like every braincell is fighting against what the he himself writes, but it’s so clearly there. He was the chair of the task force creating the DSM 4. He oversaw the name change. And he did it in hopes that people would take DID less seriously.

He thought MPD was a made up, fabricated diagnosis, a fad, invented by poorly trained therapists, and sought to rid it of the DSM. But he couldn’t. So he changed it to DID.

Quoting the article barely does the horror justice. “My own inclination was to wise up therapists and protect vulnerable patients by simply omitting MPD from the DSM.”

“MPD presented an insoluble conundrum for me as Chair of the DSM IV Task Force. I was convinced it was an iatrogenic... diagnosis inappropriately inflicted on vulnerable patients by the poorly trained therapists... armed with an MPD hammer that seemed to fit every patient nail.”

“Having seen hundreds of patients who claimed to house multiple personalities, I have concluded that the diagnosis is always (or at least almost always) a fake, even though the patients claiming it are usually (but not always) sincere.”

“I couldn't rid DSM IV of MPD because I had to follow my own rules and there was no compelling proof that MPD didn't exist as a meaningful clinical entity”

“The best we could do to reduce the popularity of MPD and inspire caution in its diagnosis was to fill its text description with all the cogent arguments against it.”

Here’s the article again, if you don’t want to scroll to the top. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/saving-normal/201401/multiple-personality-mental-disorder-myth-or-metaphor%3famp

Sit with it. Really just sit with it for a moment and think about the implications.

And for the past, god knows how long since we first stumbled upon this, we’ve been willfully ignorant. Ignored that it was from the guy overseeing the creation of the DSM4. Surely the change HAD to be due to DID being more accurate, not this, anything but this.

And we admit to that, and many other willful oversights in our past surrounding plural activism, and how the psychiatric complex has systematically tried to erase, separate, isolate, and deny our community out of existence.

Anyways, go watch the Sorority’s talk, it’s great - even beyond the section where they give an overview of this article.

And a big thank you for them for bringing this up once again to us, and forcing us to re-evaluate what we believed we knew
#PluralPWC