Can you live a normal life with dissociative identity disorder?

Answer 1

yes! there is new treatment for dissociative disorder. first talk with a psychiatrist. i know personally firsthand what this disorder is. one of my sons have it. he takes abilify, prosaz and clonodine. this may not be right for everone--but after 10yrs of not knowing what was wrong with him, i finally found the right doctor--and the right medicine. there is hope and new medicines. don't quit. good luck sincerely; Julie

Answer 2

Good question. Psychiatry is a primitive art in it's infancy. Words used to describe extreme mental states are at best crude approximations. At worst these approximations are simply used by 'a trained expert' to find a matching category in the latest DSM manual so that whatever outrageous bill that are incurred are justifies.

A few years ago, when the chemical salvia divinorum was legal where I live, I made the fateful terrible mistake of trying it. I was under the impression that mild doses functioned as a mood elevator. Larger doses are know for there extreme dissociative, dysphoric, and hallucinogenic properties.

My life has not been the same since that one miserable puff two years ago. It triggered a major dissociative reaction: extreme amnesia, sense of inhabiting a consciousness totally split off from

my mind and body, familiar surroundings appearing the same, but also utterly alien and strange...this accompanied by extreme terror anxiety.

obviously I'm better now or I wouldn't be able to write this. How did I manage this? First of all. I stay away from ANY drug with psychoactive properties. This includes drugs that used to

help me like prescribed benzos for sleep, as they have hypnotic/amnesiac properties. As they wear off, I get a huge rebound anxiety reaction. Smoking something like pot would just about kill me it would split me so bad.

of course, salvia, I would only wish that on my worst enemies.

OK. I immerse myself in the familiar, in the mediocre. I eat junk food. I watch tv and movies.

I talk and joke with friends. I like people to compassionately make fun of me when I describe my dissociative problems because that helps me minimize and intellectualize the experience of it, transforming the Horror into sentences on paper, like what I'm doing as I type, getting a 'handle' on it.

i stay away from technical descriptions of it that only make me feel more helpless, as most writers aren't victims and can only understand the fear and strangeness second hand. and, lets face it, most doctors these days are just pushers, muscle for the FDA, and the crap , the industrial drugs they addict you to, really screw up your brain, and just make you a victim of the AMA, which is how the AMA stays in business.

I stay away from exotica. While meditation is a good thing, it can also zone you out reallly badly. One enemy of dissociation is intense concentration. Use and challenge your waking mind. Read a lot.

I have observed that the time I'm most likely to have an attack is on waking from dream-rich sleep. Sometimes the dream tone carries over very strongly to my waking consciousness and seems to impose that state, the dream state, onto the waking state.

I think that different brain states, like waking and dreaming, have accompanying neural chemical differences, Since I'm an old fart, almost 60, my tired miserable old brain just doesn't shift gears like a fresh young brain. When I was a teenage I just flew awake.

So anyway it can take a long time to get fully awake. I jump in the shower and wash my hair, scrub my head, get some circulation going, I reassure myself it'll pass and it does. Sometimes though the panic accelerates to fast to carch it. It's like a charley horse of the mind. I can feel it getting away from me. It ramps up fast when it goes out of control. I sense it, pray it won't happen, try to think of something else...but I guess its like a grande mall siezure..if it's gonna happen...then I'm going to be 'split brained' for up to 2 hours.

for me, it's like i have two brains in one head. There's the normal sense, then there'e this

other brain that sort of uses me to see the world through me, like a twilight zone perrfext replica of this earth that simply isn't this earth.

I'm sure a few of you will know what I mean. That awful drug triggered this, something I never had before....

I have self-cured though...Time, self reassurances. realizing that no matter how crazy a symptom is, it's all in my head, the whole universe inside and out, all the disparate variances, infinite, are all in my head, and I just need to accept the provinces and not fight it, let stuff run it's course, and trust the basic system design of my creation to natuarlly reassert it's structure, which it always finally does

Answer 3

Probably not. But be sure that is the disorder from a medical source like a psychiatrist. Not from someone who claims to be affected.