Something super weird to me is the concept of ableism being taken to defend doctors and silence discussion, usually from people who actually have those disabilities.
The religion around the structural dissociation model is, perhaps, one of the most bizarre things I've seen in internet discourse.
A hypothesis was made by three, presumably singlet, doctors based largely on their own experience treating patients. One of those doctors was later found to have abused one of his patients.
Now, to be clear, I am not opposed to the structural dissociation model. I think it works fine. It's a decent model that I think would explain a lot if it were true. And its ability to explain things is why a lot of top DID specialists have adopted it. This is not a hate post for the structural dissociation model. But for the people who treated as gospel.
Psychology is a soft science itself, and a lot of the claims made by this model are difficult to actually verify. And many would be unethical to test since they would require access to a child who was being traumatized, with the doctor not preventing the trauma. (Or they would even need to cause the trauma specifically to test hypotheses.)
And even ignoring the ethics, you still can't see into someone's brain. You can't know what they are thinking. You can't see the dissociation happening according to the model's predictions at the neurological level.
It's not perfect. It's not a hard science that can be tested in a lab and proven beyond a doubt.
So it's bizarre to me how often I see people labeling traumagenic CDD systems who disagree with this model, which was created by singlet doctors, 33% of whom had abused their patients, as being "ableist."
If you are a CDD system who doesn't feel like the model describes how they formed? You're ableist.
If you feel like the terminology used in it is dehumanizing, such as the "emotional part" and "apparently normal part" terms? Ableist.
If you point out that 33% of the people who created the model abused patients, and you feel like that puts the rest of the work into question? Ableist.
And I'm not saying that you need to agree with these points for yourself. If you want to debate on any of them, that's fine. But labeling traumagenic CDD systems as ableist for disagreeing with the model made by singlet doctors, calling those traumagenic systems ableist for feeling dehumanized and unseen by the model that's supposed to describe their experiences...
It's just incredibly backwards.
Instead of ableism being invoked to protect disabled people from prejudice, it's being used to protect people without the disability in question, the singlet doctors, from criticism of their model.
And as much as I am zeroing in on the structural dissociation model, this also goes for other things too. Systems who dislike parts language. Systems who preferred the term "multiple personality disorder" and don't like "dissociative identity disorder."
A lot of these changes that were made were made without the consent or approval or involvement of DID systems. There wasn't a panel of people with the disorder who decided what to rename it back when the name was changed. But now disagreeing with the current name is ableist? How does that work?
If the DSM-6 renames the disorder to "compartmentalized state disorder," how long until the people who continue to identify with DID are labeled ableist for not agreeing with the name chosen by the singlet doctors?
