Dissociative Identity Disorder (cont.)
What are the treatments for dissociative identity disorder?
Psychotherapy is 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. The goal of achieving a
more peaceful coexistence of each part of the person's sense of self 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.
Hypnosis is sometimes used to help increase the information that the person with
DID has about their symptoms/identity states, thereby increasing the control
they have over those states when they change from one personality state to
another. That is said to occur by enhancing the communication that each aspect
of the person's identity has with the others. In this age of insurance companies
regulating the health care that most Americans receive, having time-limited,
multiple periods of psychotherapy rather than intensive long-term care provides
what may be another effective treatment option for people with DID.
Medications are often used to address the many other mental-health conditions
that individuals with DID tend to have, like depression, severe anxiety, anger,
and impulse-control problems. However, particular caution is appropriate when
treating people with DID with medications because any effects they may
experience, good or bad, may cause the sufferer of DID to feel like they are
being controlled, and therefore traumatized yet again. As DID is often
associated with episodes of severe depression, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)
can be a viable treatment when the combination of psychotherapy and medication
does not result in adequate relief of symptoms.
Next: What happens if dissociative identity disorder is not treated? »
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- Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) -
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