The MPD / DID controversy

Conclusions. Personal
experience. Author's comments.

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Please read the overview to MPD / DID before tackling this essay.

Conclusions:

MPD/DID seems to have gone through a 15 year cycle like many past psychological fads. It rapidly grew in acceptance among a minority of therapists during the 1980's. It reached a plateau and then started to decline in popularity. Very few therapists are still actively in the field.

One is Randi Noblitt, a psychologist who has been involved with more than 400 MPD/DID patients, has co-authored the book "Recovery from Dissociative Identity Disorder" and is a founding member of The Society for the Investigation, Treatment and Prevention of Ritual and Cult Abuse.

At a 2007 conference, he mentioned that:

"... there is a prejudice in the mental health field regarding DID (MPD) so fewer people are going into this area. This is extremely unfortunate since individuals with DID have significant needs."

One very crude way of tracking the popularity of MPD/DID diagnoses is by scanning the publishing dates and topics of books on MPD therapeutic techniques. On 2004-JUN, a search of the Amazon.com website revealed the following numbers of such books published from 1973 to the present time:

The peak year was 1994, when six books were published. Amazon.com only listed one book on the topic "Dissociative Identity Disorder;" it was published in 1997.

If MPD/DID were a valid diagnosis, one would expect this type of therapy to become gradually more popular, and would expect the number of professional books on the topic to increase. By 2009, MPD/DID appears to have been almost abandoned by the therapeutic community.

However, not included in the above are books written by persons identifying themselves as MPD/DID survivors, and describing their life experiences. They seem to be on the increase:

MPD/DID appears to be now promoted by the efforts of survivors of therapy.

Experience of an OCRT member:

(The OCRT is the organization that maintains this website.) One of our members, who I will call Brenda, volunteered during parts of the 1980s and 1990s at a local crisis intervention/suicide prevention hotline. Like most such agencies, they had many regular callers who would phone a few times a week. In the first few months after a MPD clinic opened, some of the regular callers started giving different names and ages. They displayed different voices and told different personal stories. In spite of this, the agency volunteers were able to identify which alter belonged to which "host" person.

There was a degree of confusion in the agency: Some of the leadership felt that to support alters would feed into what they felt was the caller's delusion, and thus negatively impact the callers' mental health. Most felt that the volunteers should support the needs of the individual alters; this is what the agency leaders finally decided to do.

Much later, the volunteers noted that some of the alters would rarely or never call. The callers volunteered that they had gone to the MPR/DID clinic for a while and had left for personal reasons or because their insurance had run out. It appeared that when their MPD/DID diagnosis was no longer supported in therapy, the alters gradually evaporated.

A few months after the clinic closed, most or all of the callers had resumed their normal calling patterns and the volunteers never heard from the alters again.

This was a rather striking indication that MPD/DID appears to be an iatrogenic disorder created by the interaction of therapist and client, perhaps while neither was aware of the process.

The author's personal comments: (Bias alert)

My guess during late 2000 was that by the year 2010 CE, MPD/DID will be relegated to the trash bucket of psychological fads, along with frontal lobotomy, recovered memory therapy, therapy to uncover memories of abuse in former lifetimes, and therapy related to abuse by LGM (little green men) onboard UFOs.

This prediction seems to be on track.

Remaining behind are thousands or tens of thousands of victims of MPD therapy, some of whom will continue to suffer some degree of emotional disability. Some will slash themselves, attempt suicide and sometimes die as the result of having been subjected to dangerous therapy.

Fortunately, most of the mental health practitioners who once specialized in MPD have moved on. Many are now performing Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). ₂ I feel that it is also is junk therapy, but at least it does not have the same potential for harm as MPD/DID did.

By about 2015, I predict that EMDR will also be generally recognized as worthless, and its therapists will move on to some new emerging therapy whose efficacy and safety will probably not have been tested. I can only hope that this new treatment will be as benign as EMDR.

Reference used:

The following information source was used to prepare and update the above essay. The hyperlink is not necessarily still active today.

1. "Living Day-to-Day with DID/MPD," Healthy Place, 2007-APR-18, at: http://www.healthyplace.com/
2. "EMDR," EMDR Institute, Inc., at: http://www.emdr.com/

Copyright © 1998 to 2009 by Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance
Originally written: 1998-JAN-11
Last updated on 2009-JUL-11
Author: B.A. Robinson

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