What Parents Don’t Talk About.

When a child complains of pain or distress, the first thing a parent may do is ask to see where it hurts. If the child is still breathing and is not bleeding, the parent will ultimately say ‘Let me kiss the boo boo’ and let the child go along their way. When the child is much older and complains of pain, the parent disregard it as, ‘this child is just being spoiled’. What they don’t know is that the child could actually be in pain and will feel scarred if the parent doesn’t do anything about it.

A disorder that I have been researching for sometime is Multiple Personality Disorder or MPD. This disorder is now called Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID. These disorders may also be associated with lying (compulsive, impulsive and pathological).

Let’s examine this disorder:
Multiple Personality Disorder:
­- Description:
o Multiple personality disorder, now called dissociative identity disorder, is a disorder where 2 or more identities inhabit one body. The person who is affected by the disorder does not realize that their personality is being bounced around within them. Some people with MPD may contain on average 8 to 13 different personalities some, even contain more than 100. Each personality has a strong, unique, psychological separation from the next. Some may covet disguises that accompany their different personalities such as reading glasses for one personality and a wig and heels for another. Some also have different voice tones and multiple other traits that set them apart from the other. MPD/DID is almost always experienced by someone who has had childhood trauma or experiences severe depression.
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- Symptoms:
o Some symptoms of the MPD/DID may include (but are not limited to):
 Memory loss of everyday events – blacking out and not remembering the day’s events, for example going to the doctor during the day and not remembering you visited the doctor.
 Depersonalization – feeling as if you’re watching yourself do something, taking yourself out of certain events/situations which can be social, emotional or physical
 Depression
 Derealization – experiencing something and altering its events so that it seems unreal.
 Flashbacks of abuse/trauma
 Frequent panic attacks/anxiety
 Multiple mannerisms, attitudes or beliefs – feeling something one day and changing it the next, only to change back the following day.

o There are many more symptoms not listed, experiencing many signs of MPD/DID is when you should get help
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- Causes:
o As stated before, a primary cause of MPD/DID is childhood trauma or abuse. Some people use their MPD/DID as a way of taking them out of their body and placing themselves into another so that they don’t have to feel the pain, anger or extreme depression that they themselves really feel. A very high percentage of paitients diagnosed with MPD/DID have experienced sexual abuse in their early childhood which could have rendered their development and ability to cope.
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- Long-Term Effects:
o In the long run, a person who is experiencing extreme MPD/DID may go to the extremes of self-harm (cutting, suicide attempts), various paitients starve themselves, or even sometimes become addicted to drugs among other things. This disorder is not cured overnight and could take years to treat, this could make it harder on the patient and could lead to post traumatic stress disorder and make it even harder for the patient to cope with the disease.

A very good reason why these diseases never get caught in the early stages is because when a child reports an ache to the people who are supposed to protect them (the parents) the parents sometimes ignore the child as a brat or either don’t care. Sometimes the parent does know that the child needs help and the child is hurting but abuse is just something the family doesn’t talk about, the children are taught not to discuss what goes on in their home. I just advise the parents out there that if you’re not the solution, you’re your child’s problem. I know that sometimes the child may cry wolf, but if something is hurting them, it may not be but it also could be.