Hi Jenifer,
I just added a massive post to the other thread mentioned above, so I think I answered some of the questions in there, but...
Jenifer said:
In a case where the disorder manifested very late in life due to extreme stress, what kind of outward signs would typically be seen? Or not so typically?
DID is actually a childhood thing that happens when personality is still forming, and before the child develops adequate coping mechanisms to deal with sadistic trauma (if anyone ever really develops adequate coping mechanisms for that); if your character develops a new personality later in life, typically what you'd be looking at is a dissociative fugue. Problem is, a person typically doesn't move in and out of an "alter" personality with a fugue.
There is a workaround here, though...if your character was traumatized as a child and developed DID then, the alter/s could go "inside" when they weren't needed anymore and essentially be "asleep" inside until something triggers them to start coming out. Now, if that's feasible, you've got a perfect setup for what you're describing.
I'd like to work in things like tics and emotionally triggering words in addition to recurring headaches. Oh, and I'd also like to see the frequency of these things escalate as the activities of the alter do.
This makes sense. Headaches, migraines usually, are extremely common in people with DID, especially when the alters start vying for who's going to be out. (And this can happen even when the alters aren't aware of one another.)
As Jenan Mac said, losing time would be huge -- it's really the cardinal symptom of an alter having been out.
giusti said:
As far as symptoms go, many who suffer from Dissociative exhibit symptoms of schizophrenia. They carry completely different causes, but besides the memory loss, the two are very similar in symptoms. Those suffering from DID are often paranoid, fatigued, confused, depressed, and of course bipolar (bipolar within a single identity, as well as, of course, across identities).
This is actually a very common mistake, and when you read the list of symptoms, yes, they sound alike. That's why they make us go through years of training to work with these things...so we know how different they really are when they're not on paper!
Schizophrenia and bipolar mania have some overlap in what they look like, particularly because both are caused by an excess of certain brain chemicals; the same brain chemicals can be dysregulated in people with DID because they've been so traumatized, but the disorders all look quite different from one another if you know what to look for. (Plus -- strep throat and throat cancer share some symptoms, but to the doctor, who knows what to look for, there's a biiiiig difference. So you've got to be careful about saying two things "look alike" when the looking alike is superficial like this.) For example, people with bipolar disorder tend to have a good sense of humor and "get" jokes easily; people who have schizophrenia are very "concrete" and take everything literally, which makes humor not funny. People with DID don't have a biochemical imbalance (aside from any PTSD or comorbid disorders, which are diagnosed on their own) -- they have dissociative splits in their experience of "I."
I wrote in a lot more detail about how the three are different in that other post. I thought this remark had been in that thread, but I see it was here.
With symptoms, Jenifer, are you needing a yea or nay on whether tics and headaches will work? They both will. The headaches, like I said, are extremely common with DID; tics can show up in anyone who's stressed, so they make total sense -- having an alter you didn't know about coming out and doing things with your life (and losing time while they were doing them) would be very stressful!
Are there other types of symptoms you're needing details on? Like what standard DID symptoms are, for example? The formal criteria for DID is available in Behavenet Capsules (
http://www.behavenet.com/capsules/disorders/did.htm but you'll see that it really breaks down to only two: there are two or more delineated personality states in control of the body at different times, and there's amnesia for the other's activities (before therapy, anyhow -- during therapy most personalities learn to become "co-conscious" and work together). I posted a link to a couple of articles and a little video on DID in the other thread (
http://archetypewriting.com/real/real_disorders.htm#dissociative), but if you have other questions on symptoms, lay 'em on us!