One of the problems of the current diagnostic criteria of DID is that alleged disruption of the identity is rather ambiguous, and what it seems to implicate, the discontinuity of the sense of self is not altogether what people with DID appear to be experiencing. Hearing voices, or intrusive and ‘made’ experiences can be part of their symptoms and they sometimes feel that they are switching or merging into other personality without their sense of control. However, these symptoms of discontinuity may be experienced rater intermittently or episodically. In fact, individual with DID might spend their time without these problems for a quite long time. Therefore, clinicians might need to look elsewhere in order to locate the essential pathology of DID, which might be the structure and the sense of self in each personality. One of the candidates is that these identities might be partial or fragmentary, which was demonstrated by texts written by many major figures in the study of dissociation.
Russell,
J,., Cohn,
R. (eds.)(2012) Abigail and Brittany Hensel. Book on Demand Ltd.
One of the ways of looking at this issue from
a different perspective is to consider the biological basis of these
personalities. Perhaps the biological mechanism of personality formation is so
complicated that rough sketching with a broad brush is at best available. In
modern psychiatry, brain function should be understood on a neural network
approach instead of focusing on anatomically separated areas
Durstewitz, D. Koppe, G, and Meyer-Lindenberg, A (2019). In their brain
graph model, multiple neuronal networks exist in a superimposed way, allowing
multiple networks still sharing same neuron and subnetworks (Pol,
Bullmore, 2013).. One of the most hopeful candidates of the methodology
is that of neural network model proposed by Edelman and Tononi which can exist
in a superimposed way, practically providing us with the neurological basis for
the existence of multiple personality
Pol, HH, Bullmore, E (2013) Neural
networks in psychiatry. European Neuropsychopharmacology. 23.1-16
Durstewitz, D. Koppe, G, and
Meyer-Lindenberg, A (2019) Deep neural networks in psychiatry
Molecular Psychiatry (2019)
24:1583–1598.
This type of model is necessary to better
understand the mechanism of DID and dissociative pathology where a very large
mass of neural networks are the subject of dissociative phenomenon.
