Past parallels? A bit weird, maybe delete?

[Treaclewell]

Yesterday a thought struck me out of the blue, while contemplating someone's husband swanning around in a negligee, and I don't think I have seen anyone raise the similarity. In the past, there were a number of cases reported and documentaries about multiple personalities - I don't remember if any of them were cross gendered, and I don't think any of them adopted daft names. But why, when a man reported feeling trans, didn't anyone suggest multiple personality and treat it as such? Philip Bunce would be an obvioius candidate for such an interpretation.
I used to think, back in the day, that those accounts were rather like much older stories of demon possession. I don't believe in demons, but according to exorcists on YouTube it still goes on, and the effects of the men who claim to be women are such as demons would enjoy, causing ill feeling and distress.
I don't think there's anything to be gained by praying over the predators, and it's probably too late to have them identified as suffering from a mental illness, but a comparison of the causes of multiple personality and transing might cast light on what is going on.
If you think this is daft - delete it!

Multiple personality disorder has been debunked for years (not that thats stopped the rise of self diagnosed DID as they now referred to it on the Internet)

@Treaclewell, have you read Mia Hughes’ WPATH Files report? She talks about a number of historical parallels to the trans movement. Link from this page:

https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/wpath-files

I should add: I’m not sure all of the parallels she’s made are in the report, but in interviews she talks about the “satanic panic” of the 80s, and about lobotomies, as well as psychiatric epidemics and social contagion.

Thanks

There was even a mental health epidemic among the well-off in Europe in the 15th-17th century in which people thought they were made of glass and were terrified of being shattered.

When it comes to the human psyche, it would appear there's nothing new under the sun 😬

I thought DID existed but was rare? And the different personalities are unaware of what happens to the others, so very different from trans, which in adult men at least is essentially a change in personal presentation.

Nope it was shown to be complete bs but it was jumped on by TV writers and the "medical" fringe in much the same way as past life regression, recovered memories and the MMR causing ASD did.
Unfortunately DID much like the MMR autism crap its found a home online. Now you get teens and early 20s attention seekers posting videos about their "alters" and how special they are due to their DID. You see the same with the tourettes social contagion.
Its really quiet sad that so many children have been exposed to all of this to such an extent that they believe that they have non extent conditions and/or others that they don't have

Oh that’s awful! And I feel a fool for having fallen for it. Excellent plot device, to be fair!

I don't understand why people are so quick to deny the possibility that social contagion could be an element in the recent explosion of trans identification.

Social contagion isn't unusual at all: it's normal and endemic in society. It's how language changes over time, and fashions, customs, and beliefs.

A small example: for most of my life the place where you caught a train was a "railway station". More recently, I keep hearing (and reading) "train station". It's very unlikely that large numbers of people have independently and spontaneously thought of changing what they call the place to catch a train - and what's more, all changing it to the same thing.
It's not a "necessary" change (like coining a new word to describe a new invention), and it's not the kind of thing that would be driven by social disapproval (like no longer using words that are now considered to be offensive), so clearly something else is going on. Another example: until the last few years I had never heard the expression "a perfect storm", yet suddenly every other person being interviewed by a journalist seemed to be using it. Where did that come from?

Just as fashions in language spread, so do beliefs and explanations. Anyone can know that they have a pain inside them, and describe how it feels - who better? - but you can only try to explain the pain with "and I think it must be kidney stones" if you have actually heard of kidney stones at all. If you haven't, you might think instead of cancer, or appendicitis.

In that case, there should be physical evidence to find and a popular explanation could be checked and either confirmed or ruled out. But if it's the sort of belief that can't be proven or disproven, it's the beliefs that are floating around in their society ( or at least in the parts of society that they care about) that people will reach for.

erm, DID which is the modern name for multiple personality disorder is very much a thing and is listed in the DSM which is the bible of mental health diagnoses.

i’m not sure how it is possible to “debunk” an offical MH diagnosis?

https://did-research.org/did/basics/dsm-5/

DID exists, it's a dissociative disorder. I just don't think it exists as it's portrayed in films and TV series.

But then I may be biased. I have an official diagnosis of DID, due to an extremely abusive childhood, and I dissociate in times of immense stress, and it's nothing like you see on the tele.

There was an intresting Radio 4 programme
Sideways 83. Dangerous Ideas
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002s4hd
where they talked about how easily the mind can get disrupted when you start to think too much about something that is normally taken for granted.

It is not about transgender identity as such at all. But I was thinking how easy it is to find your own body to be strange once you think of it.

I did go away and read up on it, as I was sure there is some basis in fact. The sources I found tended to talk about dissociative disorders, and outline the whole alters potential, in a less sensationalist way.

@Heggettypeg
Another example: until the last few years I had never heard the expression "a perfect storm", yet suddenly every other person being interviewed by a journalist seemed to be using it. Where did that come from?

George Clooney as Captain Billy in the film A Perfect Storm (2000). A good film actually, even better because he was in it

Sorry, carry on everyone.

I think DID is at its core a maladaptive coping mechanism. I think it is the brains way of protecting itself, and when it first happens is probably a survival mechanism. Then over time if the stressful situation that triggered it originally continues then it happens more and more to the point where eventually any sort of stress can trigger it as the brain has decided it's a normal response to just switch off and go away in your head.

With regards the 'alters' thing, I'm fairly sure that during the time I've dissociated I have deployed a version of myself that is best equipped to deal with whatever is happening. So in a meeting it would be a confident knows what I'm doing version of me. In an unsafe situation probably more an appeasing, don't want to rock the boat version of me. Basically what we all do which is using whatever version or ourselves / bits of our personality is best suited to a situation.

In order to explain, and make it make sense as to why it was happening, to myself, and later medical personnel I did assign different names to the different versions of me that would have been present when I wasn't.

But I don't disassociate and introduce myself as a six year old boy called Wayne who wants to be a cowboy when he grows up or Gwendolyn the punk with a lisp and a french accent.

I don't, and never have, think I'm multiple personalities/people trapped in one body. I just have a maladaptive coping system in stressful situations.

Split is good film about this, James McAvoy plays over 10 characters that are all him. It's a bit of a b movie, but he's brilliant in it. However I don't think it's an accurate depiction of DID, which does sound more like identifying out of trauma for a bit.

The problem with contagion theory is it supposes there's no internal/organic trait motivation for replicating others behaviour. It rules out other possible reasons such as safety in numbers coming out & identity recognition in mirrored behaviour.

Whilst no doubt social media is correlated with increased trans visibility its a huge leap to say something being popular is the direct cause of why its adopted particularly when it is something with as serious consequences as gender identity. This isn't as inconsequential as a fashion choice.

You just can't rule out other personal inclinations that make the connection with an identification. Its as silly as saying some one became gay because they watched gay porn. There's a 'connecting' missing link there & its called personality traits.

I thought at the beginning of the thread that DID meant Demon Identity Disorder, sad to find it doesn't.

Railway station/train station is a UK/US English thing. The latter is the US term. US terms are often picked up. They can then be reinforced through copy guidelines and style guides for written content.

My DD has about 15 alters who all have their own personalities and tastes.
its odd to me that all the alters have the same friends and none of the alters want a tidy bedroom or want to get up and go outside.
yes I’m being sarcastic

Social contagion has plenty of historical precedence which includes the use of authority to legitimise it through a failure to ask appropriate questions and just blindly believe people of a certain social status over people who are usually of lower social status.

No one talks about this though.

We have witch finding through to the modern satanic panic on this as examples.

Also perfect storm was a phrase that's been around since I was a child. I don't think it's remotely new. It may have been popularised by the film of the same name which came out 26 years ago, but I think that's a very bad example of language change tbh precisely because the film was named that because of the time being in common usage already by 2000.

It's not an expression I ever came across, so maybe it was more prevalent in some areas than others? I didn't know about the film.

I started noticing it on the news around the time of COVID, I think, so perhaps that was what gave it a boost, when lots of people were facing radical disruptions to their lives from all directions and needed something to describe that.
But I still think that there's an element of linguistic "contagion" in it, i.e. using what you've already heard other people use rather than all spontaneously reaching for the same metaphor unprompted. That does seem to happen.

Yes. Those denying social contagion is a thing are today's flat earthers.
Everyone who works with vulnerable adolescents know that there can be a "contagion" in peer groups for children (especially girls) with eating disorders and self harm. Suicidal ideation has major issues wih social contagion for both sexes, often with clusters of suicides in different areas, peer groups etc.

It's frankly wicked to dismiss this as a factor when we look at vulnerable children, often with a multitude of co morbidities, being groomed and gaslit by all the bad faith actors specifically targeting the young.

Edited to add sorry if that's a bit uncompromising, but it's a deliberate tactic of transactivists who use the young to promote their own personal ideology. When I look at all the young casualties of this, it enrages me.