Cripes, lin, you got me thinking and I'm trying to remember the paper about that.... Essentially, a psychchiatrist who had researched the disorder found that LOTS of people claiming it had other disorders entirely and blamed the 'fad' for most of the problem becuase sensationalizing the disorder made it harder to find, treat and research those that really had DID.
I've known people that tried to pull off having alters. Unanimously, if they attempted actually psychiatric care, they were found to have Borderline Personality Disorder (hope I got it right, I remember the Borderline part). In essence, they were depressives that wanted attention and often had psychosomatic disorders.
I'm certain the disorder exists but, like you mention, there are so many charlatans and posers and quack doctors that don't want to face the truth because of the almighty prestige and dollar sign that it can get difficult to wade through their prolific BS.
I'm not sure if I go in for the whole hundreds-of-personalities thing. That would seem fishy to me because then the patient could make up a new one almost every session and those new ones would just be shades of the old ones.
I'd think writing a paper about people claiming to have the disorder just wouldn't be original enough for some shrinks, hunh?
Oh, and you may want to check out what Kluft said about EMDR wchich appears not long after this exerpt:
[quote]
Etiology
There is dispute over whether DID is a condition that occurs naturalistically or whether it is iatrogenic. Eminent clinicians (e.g., Merskey [20]), and laboratory scientists (e.g., Spanos [21]) as well as advocates for extreme and polarized positions (e.g., Piper[22]) have argued that DID is an artifact of the expectations and suggestive interventions of enthusiastic clinicians and that it never occurs prior to such expectations and interventions. Some experienced investigators in the dissociative disorders field have argued that one pathway to the etiology is iatrogenesis (e.g., Ross [23]), but that iatrogenic DID occurs only when there has been a very extensive amount of effort over a long period of time (i.e., the threshold for such an occurrence is very high indeed). The majority of knowledgeable clinicians remain unconvinced that the full DID condition can be created as an iatrogenic artifact, but do believe that iatrogenic factors can further complicate and/or worsen the condition. [quote]
