Those skeptical of DID say that humans often lie, exaggerate, and fantasize, and that it is a mistake to demand uncritical belief in stories of child abuse, recovered memories, and multiple personality. To do so is to invite misuse of the blank check given the story-tellers.
The skeptical point of view is that, if we are told we must believe the children, what are we to make of the sensational and completely unreal details disclosed in the daycare child abuse trials?
The McMartin Preschool trial
The Fell’s Acres trial
The Little Rascals trials
These trials received much publicity and are still controversial. The MacMartin trial ended without a conviction; convictions in the Fell’s Acres and Little Rascals cases have been reversed. After the children in these cases were questioned at length, they told stories of underground tunnels, secret rooms, children being thrown to sharks, trips in rocket ships, etc. Believers would say that we must believe “something happened” because children do not lie. If we are told we must believe recovered memories, what of the people who recover memories of alien abductions and satanic ritual abuse? There is no scientifically acceptable evidence for any such events. What of the people who recover memories and later disavow them?
Skeptics point to cases like the following:
Dr. Bennett Braun was a respected therapist and a founding member of the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation. In 1993 he was accused of malpractice by one of his patients, Pat Burgus. Under Braun’s treatment at a Chicago area hospital, Burgus discovered that she had 300 personalities and recovered memories of a long career as a satanic priestess presiding over cannibal feasts. Eventually she rejected Braun’s diagnosis and sued. In 1997, Braun’s insurance company settled for $10.6 million (despite Braun’s wish to take the matter to trial). He was sued by other patients and lost his medical licence for a time.
Other such material has been collected by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, founded in 1992. Critics state that the child abuse/recovered memories/ritual abuse/MPD panic bears all the signs of a mass mania, like the Salem Witch Trials or the New Delhi monkeyman hysteria. DID cannot be a real disease or it would be much more widespread. But DID is limited to a specific place (the United States and to a much lesser extent, other Western countries exposed to the U.S. media) and time (roughly, the period from 1976 through 1996). As media coverage spiked, cases climbed. There were 200 reported cases of MPD from 1880 to 1979, and 20,000 from 1980 to 1990. Per Joan Acocella, 40,000 cases were diagnosed from 1985 to 1995.
Not only is DID centered in the U.S., it is centered in a few practitioners. Many mental health professionals claim that they have never seen a patient with DID. This concentration of diagnoses seems suspicious to critics.
Critics argue that by lavishing attention and care on persons diagnosed with DID/MPD, we reward them for the supposed disease. For example, multiples often present with child selves. By enacting a childlike role, multiples can demand to be treated with the indulgence we afford to real children. This behavior is especially noticeable on the Internet, where diagnosed MPD/DID multiples who congregate in online forums express themselves using the speech patterns of their “littles”.
There is now a vast psychological literature on memory and recovered memory, as well as arguments pro and con for the usefulness of the DID diagnosis. For readable introductions to the critical point of view, see:
Creating Hysteria by Joan Acocella, 1999.
Multiple Identities and False Memories by Nicholas Spanos, 1996.
Lisa Angelettie, M.S.W., is a psychotherapist, author, and life coach. She has been helping people make smarter life choices since 1998. Get more free tips like this when you subscribe to the GirlShrink newsletter .
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