Dr. Roxanne Dryden-Edwards is an adult, child, and adolescent psychiatrist. She is a former Chair of the Committee on Developmental Disabilities for the American Psychiatric Association, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, and Medical Director of the National Center for Children and Families in Bethesda, Maryland.
Melissa Conrad Stöppler, MD, is a U.S. board-certified Anatomic Pathologist with subspecialty training in the fields of Experimental and Molecular Pathology. Dr. Stöppler's educational background includes a BA with Highest Distinction from the University of Virginia and an MD from the University of North Carolina. She completed residency training in Anatomic Pathology at Georgetown University followed by subspecialty fellowship training in molecular diagnostics and experimental pathology.
Psychotherapyis generally considered to be the main component of treatment for dissociative identity disorder. In treating individuals with DID, therapists usually try to help clients improve their relationships with others and to experience feelings they have not felt comfortable being in touch with or openly expressing in the past. This is carefully paced in order to prevent the person with DID from becoming overwhelmed by anxiety, risking a figurative repetition of their traumatic past being inflicted by those very strong emotions. Mental-health professionals also often guide clients in finding a way to have each aspect of them coexist, and work together, as well as developing crisis-prevention techniques and finding ways of coping with memory lapses that occur during times of dissociation. The goal of achieving a more peaceful coexistence of the person's multiple personalities is quite different than the reintegration of all those aspects into just one identity state. While reintegration used to be the goal of psychotherapy, it has frequently been found to leave individuals with DID feeling as if the goal of the practitioner is to get rid of, or "kill," parts of them.
What is dissociative identity disorder?
Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a mental illness that involves the
sufferer experiencing at least two clear identities or personality states, also
called alters, each
of which has a fairly consistent way of viewing and relating to the world. Some
individuals with DID have been found to have personality states that have
distinctly different ways of reacting, in terms of emotions, pulse, blood
pressure, and blood flow to the brain. This
disorder was formerly called multiple personality disorder (MPD) and is often
referred to as split personality disorder. Statistics regarding this
disorder indicate that the incidence of DID is about 3% of patients in
psychiatric hospitals and is described as occurring in females nine times more
often than in males. However, this female preponderance may be due to difficulty identifying the disorder in
males. Also, disagreement among mental-health professionals about how this
illness appears clinically, and if DID even exists, adds to the difficulty of
estimating how often it occurs.
Some professionals continue to be of the opinion that DID does not exist. The
nature of this skepticism is sometimes due to questions about why many more
individuals who have endured the stress of terrible abuse as young children do
not develop the disorder, why more children are not diagnosed as having DID, and
why some DID sufferers have no history of tremendous trauma. One explanation for what some believe to be these inconsistencies is that
given the highly complex and unknown nature of the human brain and psyche, many
of those whom one would expect to develop dissociative identity disorder are
spared due to their resilience. Another concern about the diagnosis of DID
involves having to rely on the traumatic memories of those who suffer from this
disorder. That DID is significantly more often assessed in individuals in North
America compared to the rest of the world, for the most part, leads some
practitioners to believe that DID is a culture-based myth rather than a true
disorder. As with many other mental-health issues, symptoms of
the same disorder in children look very different than in adults. Studies that
verify the presence of DID using multiple resources add credibility to the
diagnosis. Research on individuals with DID that have little
to no media exposure to information on the illness lends further credibility to
the reliability of this diagnosis.
Although there was a case study of DID as early as 1906, movies about DID first became well known in the United States since the 1950s. The 1953 movie The Three Faces of Eve
tells the story of Chris Sizemore, a
real-life woman with the disorder. She was thought to develop DID in reaction to
witnessing several terrible accidents at a young age. That movie described three
personalities that were successfully merged or integrated into one within one
year. More accurately, the person depicted in that movie reportedly had to contend with 22
personalities that took more than 45 years to be able to coexist in a functional
way. A television miniseries about DID was Sybil. The character of Sybil
Dorsett portrayed the life story of Shirley Ardell Mason, who experienced severe
physical, emotional, and sexual abuse that was inflicted by her mother. She was
thought to develop 16 distinct identities. As with
the diagnosis in general, the veracity of the story of Sybil remains a
controversy, with claims that the illness in general, and Sybil specifically, is
a hoax.
Anxiety is a feeling of apprehension and fear characterized by physical symptoms. Anxiety disorders are serious medical illnesses that affect approximately 19 million American adults.
Stress occurs when forces from the outside world impinge on the individual. Stress is a normal part of life. However, over-stress, can be harmful. There is now speculation, as well as some evidence, that points to the abnormal stress responses as being involved in causing various diseases or conditions.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a psychiatric condition, can develop after any catastrophic life event. Symptoms include nightmares, flashbacks, sweating, rapid heart rate, detachment, amnesia, sleep problems, irritability, and exaggerated startle response. Treatment may involve psychotherapy, group support, and medication.
Depression is an illness that involves the body, mood, and thoughts and affects the way a person eats and sleeps, the way one feels about oneself, and the way one thinks about things. The principal types of depression are major depression, dysthymia, and bipolar disease (also called manic-depressive disease).
Suicide is the process of intentionally ending one's own life. Approximately 1 million people worldwide commit suicide each year, and 10 million to 20 million attempt suicide annually.
Schizophrenia is a disabling brain disorder that may cause hallucinations and delusions and affect a person's ability to communicate and pay attention. Symptoms of psychosis appear in men in their late teens and early 20s and in women in their mid-20s to early 30s. With treatment involving the use of antipsychotic medications and psychosocial treatment, schizophrenia patients can lead rewarding and meaningful lives.
Child abuse falls into four categories: neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and emotional abuse. There are certain risk factors that predispose a child to being abused and an adult to abusing a child. Risk factors for children are age, children with learning disabilities, adopted and foster children, children with congenital abnormalities, and a past history of abuse. Parental risk factors include young or single parents, those who suffered abuse themselves, adults with substance-abuse problems or psychiatric disease, and those who didn't graduate from high school.
Childhood depression can interfere with social activities, interests, schoolwork and family life. Symptoms and signs include anger, social withdrawal, vocal outbursts, fatigue, physical complaints, and thoughts of suicide. Treatment may involve psychotherapy and medication.
Sleepwalking is a condition in which an individual walks or does other activities while asleep. Factors associated with sleepwalking include genetic, environmental, and physiological. Episodes of sleepwalking may include quiet walking to agitated running. Conditions that may have similar symptoms of sleepwalking, but are not include night terrors, confusional arousals, and nocturnal seizures. Treatment of sleepwalking generally include preventative measures. Medication may be prescribed if necessary.
About 5 million children and adolescents in the U.S. suffer from a serious mental illness such as eating disorders, anxiety disorders, disruptive behavior disorders, pervasive development disorders, elimination disorders, learning disorders, schizophrenia, tic disorders, and mood disorders. Symptoms of mental illness include frequent outbursts of anger, hyperactivity, fear of gaining weight, excessive worrying, frequent temper tantrums, and hearing voices that aren't there. Treatment may involve medication, psychotherapy, and creative therapies.
Mental illness is any disease or condition affecting the brain that influence the way a person thinks, feels, behaves, and/or relates to others. Mental illness is caused by heredity, biology, psychological trauma and environmental stressors.
Children's health is focused on the well-being of children from conception through adolescence. There are many aspects of children's health, including growth and development, illnesses, injuries, behavior, mental illness, family health and community health.
Mental health is an optimal way of thinking, relating to others, and feeling. All of the diagnosable mental disorders fall under the umbrella of mental illness. Depression, anxiety, and substance-abuse disorders are common types of mental illness. Symptoms and signs of mental illness include irritability, moodiness, insomnia, headaches, and sadness. Treatment may involve psychotherapy and medication.
There are many forms of sexual assault, including rape, attempted rape, child molestation, sexual intercourse that you say no to, inappropriate touching, and vaginal, anal, or oral penetration. Sexual assault can also be anything that forces someone to join in unwanted sexual contact or attention, such as voyeurism, exhibitionism, incest, and sexual harassment.
Depression in the elderly is very common. That doesn't mean, though, it's normal. Treatment may involve antidepressants, psychotherapy, or electroconvulsive therapy.
During the ECT procedure, an electric current is passed through the brain to
produce controlled convulsions (seizures).
Why is electroconvulsive therapy performed?
ECT is useful for certain patients with significant depression,
particularly for those who cannot take or are not responding to antidepressants,
have severe depression, or are at a high risk for suicide. ECT often is
effective in cases where antidepressant medications do not provide sufficient
relief of symptoms.
How does electroconvulsive therapy work?
This procedure probably works by a
massive neurochemical release in the brain due to the controlled seizure. Highly
effective, ECT relieves depression within 1 to 2 weeks after beginning
treatments. After ECT, some patients will continue to have maintenance ECT,
while others will return to antidepressant medications.
