Dissociative Identity Disorder In DSM-IV: Case Study

Most children at sometime in their lives have had at least one imaginary friend. Other individuals may not have been able to see this close friend but, to the child, this friend was real. They had personality, style, and a life of their own, which made the imaginary friend very realistic to the child. An important question to ask, though, is, “When does this harmless action turn into something that is more worrisome?” Most children grow out of this phase of imaginary friends when they reach school age. This is seen due to the fact that children can interact with others and make actual living friends. This idea makes it difficult to see the more harmful disorders, like dissociative identity disorder, that could be disguised in this innocuous

This diagnosis was exceedingly vague and resulted in the over-diagnosis of multiple personality disorder. It allowed MPD to be viewed in a wide range of cases, from young children with imaginary friends to criminals who stated that an alternate personality committed the crime causing them to have no recollection of the incident. Multiple personality disorder changed names and diagnosis to dissociative identity disorder in DSM-IV. In DSM-IV it was now necessary that in order for an individual to be diagnosed with DID they must have the inability to recall important personal information that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness (Allen & Jacono, 2001). This inability to recall important personal information can range depending on how severe the disease

This form of amnesia is when an individual has no recollection of memories, tasks, or personal information between different identities they obtain. This is now required by DSM-IV for proper diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder (Kong, Allen & Glisky, 2008). Many researchers have found that one of the specific characteristics of inter-identity amnesia is evidence of memory transfer across identities on unconscious tasks such as word-fragment completion, sequence learning, and masked-word recognition. On the contrary, they have also found that patients exhibit inter-identity amnesia on explicit memory tasks such as story recall (Kong, Allen & Glisky, 2008). This is consistent across all forms of amnesia making it a very accurate and critical way to diagnose DID. Inter-identity amnesia gave specificity in diagnosing the disease and allowed less room for a miss-diagnosis. This leads one to believe that Dissociative Identity disorder is not only a myth but also a tragic reality to many