The Truth About Amnesia and DID: Seeking the Truth about Amnesia for Parts in DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder)
Link if you'd prefer to watch!
I will likely not be "transcribing" another video. I technically used a free service to help but it just gave me a base to mold. It made lots of grammar mistakes and put weird spacing in and idk. It doesn't really matter. This video matters. I've heard time and time again "you can only have DID if you have amnesia between parts." According to this man (who is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist) that is simply not true and excludes those who might otherwise get a diagnosis. Please read, watch, listen. Whatever you like.
Hi, welcome to another video from the CTAD Clinic. My name is Dr. Mike Lloyd. In the video today, I'm going to be answering a question that I see get asked quite a lot. And it was a recent question that was asked when I was I was looking for these kind of questions. And the question goes like this. "Why do so many sources claim that blackout amnesia /inter-identity amnesia or amnesia for recent events is required for DID when there doesn't seem to be anything in the DSM5 that says that's a requirement?"
And that's- it's like I said it's a very very common question and this issue of how how amnesia sits within DID which is dissociative identity disorder is a little bit of a an interesting one and there's some really simple answers to it and there's a little bit more of a complex answer to it. In the DSM5, the categorization for DID is talking about very very specific things and it's effectively just this really that DID:
has to have a disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states recurrent gaps in recall of everyday events or important personal information clinically significant distress not a normal part of a broadly accepted culture or religious practice and not due to sort of the the physiological effects of any particular substance. Those are the five criteria we're looking at. So you can see the second criteria in there is there has to be a degree of substantial problems with recall. That's the amnesia section.
So when we're diagnosing DID we are looking for amnesia, and the bit and that's been taken as read. So that is an established part of it and realistically I'd say it's only recently where that's started changing a little bit and I think that's attributable to many factors that have got nothing to do with DID
but generally speaking across the board amnesia has been a necessary component to the classification and diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder DID.
That's taken as read and that is the established norm across the board for diagnosis. What the question is asking is this stuff about intra identity amnesia amnesia between parts and that's where it gets a little bit tricky I guess because I think personally this is attributable to social media
I think this is where forums and communities and people have got together and they are looking in huge detail at the various nuances of DID and trying to work out who's got worse, who's got better, who's got different, who's just different to everybody else, and is what I've got DID? because it's this, this, this is, and this. And it's going into this like incredible amount of detail. And it's just going down the rabbit hole of these diagnostic norms.
And they're not even there. This is not a part of the diagnostic classification of DID, whether the identities that have to be present for DID have any amnesia for each other or not. That's the simple answer to this. So I see this argument taking place and people get quite distressed by it because they're told by whatever sources and I think this is massive amount of misinformation.
They're told by whatever these sources "You can't have DID if your parts have no amnesia for each other." It's simply not true. The DID classification does not require parts to either have amnesia for each other or not. It's just not there. And I can prove it. And it's using this.
It's the Structured Clinical Interview for the assessment of Diagnostic Disorders using both ICD1 characteristics and DSM5 characteristics. And this is the gold standard for the work that we do in diagnosing DID. And there's a whole section in here which is [flipping through pages] I'm just going to go to it here. [clears throat] Amnesia.
And when we look at the amnesia and I go through page after page after page of this and I'm sort of just going through it and I'm looking and it's asking all the questions that are standard for understanding what this is all about and looking through all of these kind of things and it's not talking about altars or parts at all. Just not mentioning it. There's a ton of questions in here about the type of amnesia the person might have. There's nothing in here about whether parts are present or not at all.
And then when we go into the section that is kind of more interested, I suppose in the identity alteration aspect, which is the part that we're looking at alters and we're trying to understand exactly what the layout of that is.
And there's pages and pages of stuff here asking about past and current symptoms of identity alteration.
All the associated features of identity disturbance, the identity confusion, all of these aspects of the diagnostic criteria. It doesn't mention amnesia. It's just not there. So using this structure clinical interview in the amnesia section, it's not asking about parts or alters or others. And in the section which is asking about parts and identities and others, it's not talking about amnesia. It does not matter. And this is a variable construct within the DID classification.
Some people have DID where their parts are completely aware of everything that's going on between them. Some people have DID where the parts have no sense of each other or don't know that there's a host or don't know that they're parts and they're completely compartmentalized and have amnesic barriers between all of them. And some people have a mix of those two types of extreme, and none of it is anything to do with the diagnosis of DID.
So I really hope that when people are seeing on the forums are saying
"You can't have DID because your parts aren't amnesic of each other." You're able to go back to them and say that's simply incorrect that's not how it works and you're showing that you don't know how it works by making those kind of statements. So I think this is the misinformation that sits across the internet in many sources. There are people out there that claim to know about DID and dissociation and complex trauma and all this sort of stuff and yet when they start going through their knowledge, you look at it and go, "That's not correct."
When the knowledge is questioned,it doesn't hold up
So either they're making it up because it's generating something or they want something to be true and it isn't or they've just been told something that's incorrect and they've believed it and they're passing that message on. All of it is just misinformation. It's just the degree to which that is intentful or not is up for grabs. I don't know, and I'm not really all that bothered by that. What matters is that the correct information is put out there so that when we're diagnosing DID – the people that are diagnosing it, the therapists that should be trained and experienced in doing the diagnosis of stuff like DID are doing it correctly.
Because what really worries me is that a person has true DID and then the- all of the alters and all of their system sort of knows all about each other because they've been there for like 30 years and they've worked a lot of stuff out and they might be being told it's not did because there's no amnesia between parts and that would be a mistake. That would be called a false negative diagnosis.
That can mean that that person and that system does not then move into therapy, does not then move into recovery and help and may stay quite distressed and quite disrupted for years and years and years or feel an intense amount of shame about what they've got because they've been told that's not what it is when it is.
And that degree of false negative is potentially very very harmful indeed. I really hope that people that are watching this have that understanding and can grasp this information. Amnesia is for memory. It's about the past and it's about the present and it's about factors that take place within memory. That's what we assess for. That's what we look for and that needs to be present for DID. Whether the alters within the system are aware of each other or not does not matter.
It matters hugely for therapy
just not for the diagnosis. So, I really hope that this video answers that question once and for all. And if you've got people that are talking about this sort of stuff and and debating whether it's DID or not on the basis of this specific type of amnesia between the alters, between the parts, you can show them this video and say this is the truth because it is. This is the established norm across the board for everybody who's trained and experienced in working with DID.
That variation is just present or not. The diagnosis is on a different level to this altogether. So, I hope that answers the question. I hope that done does it in a way that really helps people understand exactly what we're talking about. And the proof sits within the diagnostic frameworks that are based on both sets of criteria that are based on years and years and years — decades of detailed and systematic research across the board looking at so many people with these conditions, measuring them against other people, and it is deciding on this. And that's what we are going with because it demonstrates itself to be correct time after time after time. I have worked with people clinically with DID where there is loads of amnesia between parts, where there is no amnesia between parts, and where there is some amnesia between parts, it's all still DID.
There we have it then. Please leave any comments at the end of the video as always and do all the like, sharing, and subscribing as we always hope you do. Thanks ever so much for that. And between now and the next video oh B's just walked in. Please do take great care.
I've been following Mike for a little while. Really for his videos on autism. He made a video months ago about what it's like being a neurotypical because he realized that would be more beneficial for autistic people to hear about. It was! I wasn't expecting to see content about DID on his channel. I hadn't really looked that hard it seems 🫡
