What’s the difference between dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder) and schizophrenia?
Today, I am sharing a couple sites to hopefully explain the difference in a way that helps you to understand. I am going to cut back to 3 posts per week due to health issues with my kidneys. I am so thankful to all who so graciously have shown me love and support. I LOVE you all so dearly and am so grateful for you all. I will post mostly the weekends Saturday, Sunday, and either Mondays or Fridays. Without further ado hopefully, the sites I share will help you to understand just
What’s the difference between dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder) and schizophrenia? 😊❤
Sometimes, people confuse dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder, and schizophrenia. Schizophrenia does mean “split mind,” but the name was meant to describe the ‘split’ from reality that you experience during an episode of psychosis, as well as changes in thoughts, emotions, and other functions. Dissociative identity disorder, on the other hand, does cause a split or fragmented understanding of a person’s sense of themselves.
Dissociative identity disorder is really more about fragmented identities than many different personalities that develop on their own. Most people see different parts of their being as part of the whole person. For people who experience DID, identity fragments may have very different characteristics, including their own history, identity, and mannerisms. A key part of DID is dissociation—feeling detached to the world around you. People who experience DID may have many unexplainable gaps in their memory, forget information they’re already learned, or have difficulties recalling things they’ve said or done. Unlike portrayals of DID on TV or in movies, DID may not be obvious to others, and it can take a lot of time to come to the diagnosis.
Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness that causes hallucinations (sensations that aren’t real) and delusions (beliefs that can’t possibly be true, in addition to other symptoms like jumbled thoughts, jumbled speech, and difficulties expressing emotions. People who experience schizophrenia may hear or feel things that aren’t real or believe things that can’t be real, but these aren’t separate identities.
Please click on the link above and find out even more great info!
Dissociative Identity Disorder Is Marked by Profound Identity Disturbance
DID was formerly labeled Multiple Personality Disorder for a reason: the disorder is marked by identity disturbance so severe that the sufferer experiences himself not as one person, but many. Rather than the normal levels of identity confusion and identity alteration we all experience, people with Dissociative Identity Disorder live with such profound degrees of both that they appear to have multiple personalities.
In simple terms, what that means is that all the various aspects that make up a person’s identity are separated and walled off from each other in those with Dissociative Identity Disorder. Each aspect of the dissociative identity is real. The disorder isn’t that we’re perceiving the existence of people who don’t actually exist. DID isn’t a thought disorder like Schizophrenia is. It’s a dissociative disorder. In other words, what makes DID a disorder is not these pieces of identity, but how separated those pieces are.
Identity Disturbance Is Not Intrinsic to Schizophrenia
I imagine a diagnosis like Schizophrenia might provoke a certain amount of questioning, “Who am I?” Reconciling oneself to any serious mental illness is bound to involve some initial identity confusion. But this falls within the normal range of dissociation. Schizophrenia itself, as I understand it, really has nothing at all to do with identity, though I can guess at the likely source of the confusion: the name itself.
It’s easy to see how schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder got all tangled up together. A split mind sounds at first like an apt descriptor for multiple personalities. But the mind splitting that the name schizophrenia refers to really has nothing to do with personality, with identity. Instead, it references the fractures in cognitive functioning that are the essence of this thought disorder.
Dissociative Identity Disorder Is Not Schizophrenia
The clues to the differences between these two disorders are right there in their names. Dissociative Identity Disorder is characterized by a severely dissociative, or separated, identity. Schizophrenia is characterized by the splitting, or breaking, of the mind’s capacity to function. They are not even remotely the same thing. Continuing to treat them as such perpetuates gross misunderstandings that isolate people with both of these disorders.
Please click on the link above and find out even more great info!
I hope and pray that the information I shared helps you to understand the difference between schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder. Sending you all love and I will see you all again on Saturday the 6th!❤
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