as small as a world and as large as alone

2:46am May 17, 2013

amorpha-system:

thelazyaesthetic:

spanglypants-mcfuckyou:

solipsistful:

“There’s no evidence that shows that multiplicity exists.”

Folks always drop this as if it’s a perfectly rational and self-evident claim but it always gets me frustrated as hell. What are you expecting? I’m words on a screen to you all. What evidence is there to convince you that these words are coming from Person A rather than Person B? Even not online, you could always argue that I’m acting/faking.

If anybody knows of a convincing piece of evidence I could present, go right on ahead! I’d love to hear it!

I know the burden of proof is on me (for audaciously claiming that I exist), but from my position, it’s either ask for a little bit of credulity, or just not exist to other people.

- Thomas

Pretty much.

This is a psychological condition we’re talking about, here. You can’t expect someone to “prove” they’re multiple any more than you can expect them to “prove” they’re angry. The mere fact that people claim (apparently genuinely) to experience it is enough to classify at as “a thing that happens.” Precisely what manner of thing is happening is an interesting question, and a difficult one to answer because it is in no small part philosophical. Any debate about whether multiplicity is “real” (however the fuck you choose to define that) necessarily starts with the question “What the hell is ‘a person’, anyway?”

I’m also continually amazed at the number of self-declared “experts” who actually don’t seem to know that real psychs are actually supposed to weigh the factor of whether a subjective experience causes distress to a person, when deciding whether to diagnose them with a mental illness or not.  That you’re not just supposed to go “Your identity is obviously silly, so I’m going to label it with a diagnosis that can have potentially serious negative consequences for you.”

I say “in theory” because there are many circumstances in which, unfortunately, this doesn’t happen when it should.  Not going to compromise anyone’s privacy here (and that’s one of the big problems when collecting anecdata on this stuff: some people just don’t feel safe disclosing, for a huge variety of totally valid reasons), but we’ve heard quite a few “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG” stories about doctors and therapists from various plural systems we’ve known over the years.  Like (real example here) “You say there are five people in your head? That’s psychotic!” (Actually they wouldn’t even have qualified for the technical definition of psychosis at the time, as ambiguous as it is anyway.  But there are a disturbing number of psychs who will just slap the label of “psychotic” on any belief or identity they decide is “too weird.”) And even a lot of professionals who throw around these words don’t seem to realize that slapping that term on people can have serious and potentially very harmful repercussions. (Let alone Internet flamers who seem to think “psychotic” is just a garden-variety synonym for “any identity I think is weird or stupid,” not a medical term with potential legal repercussions.)

But yeah, in theory you are supposed to evaluate whether a patient’s subjective experiences cause them distress, or how much distress it causes them if they are distressed by it, when deciding what to diagnose them with. (Assuming that they aren’t violent, etc, etc, which the vast majority of people with mental illness diagnoses really aren’t— they’re far more likely to be the victims of crime.  It’s not uncommon for people to write off reports of sexual assault in psych hospitals, for instance, by declaring that the victims who reported it were just delusional and it never really happened.) We personally know several plural systems— even some trauma-split ones— who have dodged a diagnosis of MPD or DID by finding a therapist who’s aware that these labels can do more harm than good for some multiples, even trauma-split systems, and has worked with enough of them to know that integration is not the best answer in every case.

(Which has been the case for decades, actually, another thing that most Internet Experts don’t seem to know either.  ”Dr. David Caul, a psychiatrist at the Athens Mental Health Center in Ohio, puts it this way: ‘It seems to me that after treatment you want to end up with a functional unit, be it a corporation, a partnership or a one-owner business.’” —from  ”Inside the Divided Mind” by Ellen Hale, New York Times Magazine, April 17, 1983.  Dr. David Caul, btw, was one of the doctors who worked with Billy Milligan’s system, from “The Minds of Billy Milligan.”  This was in the late 70s, so it’s been covert common knowledge among a certain number of doctors and therapists for at least three decades that integration is not always the desired end goal, even if a system does want to be in therapy for trauma-related reasons.)

-Tamsin

I tried to reply to all this stuff earlier, before you said this, but tumblr client wouldn’t let me and I gave up because I was trying to do something else and didn’t have the energy to add all the HTML necessary to reply from the web interface. And looks like I’ll have to use the damn web interface because tumblr really doesn’t want me replying to this through their iPad app.

But basically I don’t understand all this crap about “needing evidence” that plurality exists.

Plurality is an experience that happens INSIDE PEOPLE’S HEADS.

How the hell do you prove or disprove that there is one identity or thousands?

So why not just believe what people say about themselves? Seems simple enough.

(Not plural myself. People once convinced me that I was, during the heyday when everyone and their dog who was traumatized in any way was getting diagnosed, and I went along with it for awhile because I didn’t know what else to do and I was super passive back then. But I wasn’t. But I have several plural systems among my fairly close friends, they’re clearly more than one person, like if you know them it’s plain as day, and why the hell doubt people? It’s hell to say you’re a real person and have everyone disbelieve you and try to scrunch you in with several other people as one identity just because they can’t handle it and you’re all in one head so you must all be the same.)

Of course a lot of this is BS stemming from the idea that plurality is all one thing, that it’s exactly like psychiatry says it is, for the reasons psychiatry says it is, etc., therefore if research shows it’s different than psychiatry, then it must not exist at all. When for some people it is, for some people it isn’t, and most plural systems differ from psychiatry on important parts because the psychiatric idea is a caricature of a fairly small number of people as interpreted through therapists. So yeah most plurals won’t be how psychiatry makes it sound, but that’s because psychiatry doesn’t know much about being plural. They’ve always been more interested in listening to themselves talk and forcing people to conform to their theories, than listening to actual plurals.

Anyway I just have no patience for a “prove it” sign stamped on top of something that’s a matter of internal identity. Because internal identity is internal identity, you can’t prove it’s not there just because it’s not what you expected. And just… gah it seems so pointless for people to still be arguing about this.

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