Dissociative Identity Disorder and other oft-malingered diagnoses -

[Cope or Rope]

How do you explain schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in that case? I'm just curious as I've heard this before and I wonder how you explain the more extreme ones.

Well the more extreme ones are real but i feel ones like adhd aren't real.

 

[FatalTater]

Whatever happened to blaming your evil twin for shit? Am I the only one who still does that?

 

[Sage In All Fields]

The problem with modern focus on mental health is it fails to realize that lifestyle choices are 100x more effective in reducing symptoms than any medication will do. I remember seeing this mom talk about she noticed her son pretending to be sick to get out of school and decided to excuse him and call it a "mental health" day. Psychologists would know that giving into your child's demands would only exacerbate his anxiety, and a better solution would have been to figure out the root cause of the anxiety, and make a plan for going to school regularly and talking with his teachers. Self-care, like making a routine, eating 3 balanced meals, etc., planning ahead has now morphed into giving into your worst impulses. People also expect others to accomodate their anxieties, such as "trigger warnings." Except avoiding what makes you anxious is only going to make it worse. People with PTSD or extreme anxiety have to be slowly reintroduced to their triggers in a safe setting, not spend their whole life hiding from it.

To be fair school has basically been reduced to children's prison except you get to go home on the evenings and weekends, the fact more children don't have anxiety to that extent about it is kind of strange to me, for me I approached it from a perspective of abject hatred moreso than anxiety but either way the aversion was still there.

 

[Umbreon]

Complex PTSD is also claimed by Jude and a couple other cows, and it's not even in the DSM. The difference between "complex PTSD" (which CANNOT be officially diagnosed as of DSM 5) and normal PTSD is that the trauma had to be severe and unavoidable (think women trafficked into prostitution or children growing up in a war torn country). For the cows, the "complex trauma" is probably their parents telling them to not cutting off their dick.

Complex PTSD exists in the ICD-11, which is used worldwide, whereas the DSM is used primarily in the Americas. This guy explains the difference between the two pretty well.

The disorder is very real, at least according to the ICD. But that diagnosis is for people who grew up in cults, or as you said, people trafficked into prostitution or children in war-torn countries. The PTSD diagnosis has most often been given for people who experienced a singular traumatic event, like war, a car accident, a natural disaster, etc.

I don't really think mental illnesses exist. Depression is just a symptom of prolonged sadness, autism is a symptom of not having good social skills and so on.

Narcolepsy was considered a mental illness for a long time, until neurologists figured out how it works. The same will happen with other mental health disorders once the neurology field can pinpoint the exact part of the brain the particular mental illness affects. Mental illness is real, but it's absolutely not a science.

Also, your wording is redundant. Calling depression a "symptom" of prolonged sadness implies the existence of a disorder.

 

[GenociderSyo]

This is what the DSM-V states about how to find malingerers of DID:

Factitious disorder and malingering. Individuals who feign dissociative identity disorder do not report the subtle symptoms of intrusion characteristic of the disorder; instead they tend to overreport well-publicized symptoms of the disorder, such as dissociative amnesia, while underreporting less-publicized comorbid symptoms, such as depression. Individuals who feign dissociative identity disorder tend to be relatively undisturbed by or may even seem to enjoy "having" the disorder. In contrast, individuals with genuine dissociative identity disorder tend to be ashamed of and overwhelmed by their symptoms and to underreport their symptoms or deny their condition. Sequential observation, corroborating history, and intensive psychometric and psychological assessment may be helpful in assessment.

Individuals who malinger dissociative identity disorder usually create limited, stereotyped alternate identities, with feigned amnesia, related to the events for which gain is sought. For example, they may present an "all-good" identity and an "all-bad" identity in hopes of gaining exculpation for a crime.

Figured it be helpful to be repeated in a thread discussing malingering.