If you have dissociative identity disorder, dissociation is your primary coping mechanism. As such, it's both adaptive and maladaptive. It allows you to continue functioning despite overwhelming stress. But dissociation is also what prevents you from recognizing that you've fallen off a cliff until you hit the ground. The idea behind taking stock of mental health warning signs is to notice your free fall a little sooner. Ideally, you'd eventually have the awareness to see the edge of the cliff from a distance and avoid it altogether. 

Living with dissociative identity disorder (DID) presents unique difficulties, whether you're the one that has it or the person who loves the one living with it. I can only imagine how frustrating, confusing, even painful it must sometimes be to have a partner with DID. I've witnessed how challenging it often is for my own partner and, if some of the comments I've received here at Dissociative Living are in any way representative, her experience is typical. But it's also largely ignored. Partners of people with DID don't get that much support or encouragement, primarily because only those who've been there can truly understand (Caregiver Stress and Compassion Fatigue).

If you have Dissociative Identity Disorder, recognizing when you're on a downward spiral may be incredibly difficult. Dissociation separates us from our thoughts, feelings, and experiences and makes maintaining awareness of our very realities a monumental challenge. My hope is that by taking stock of my mental health warning signs, I can increase my chances of noticing the next decline in functioning at its inception, rather than coming out of a dissociative fog six months in and wondering what happened to my life.

For some time now, my mental health has been declining. My partner admitted to me last night that if it were still possible to commit loved ones she would have had me hospitalized months ago. And though I didn't realize she was quite that concerned about my mental condition, she's been telling me that I'm not well for a while now. I've been unwilling to hear it, insulted by what I believed was a lack of faith in me and thoroughly annoyed at her refusal to recognize how brilliant and capable I truly am. Oh denial, my old friend, you've made me a fool once again. Sadly, I doubt it will be the last time. Because I still haven't learned to take mental health warning signs as seriously as I take my pride.

We know Dissociative Identity Disorder is a trauma disorder. In the past, many clinicians approached treatment as if it were an archeological dig, excavating for traumatic, dissociated memory. I think most people agree at this point that that's at best ineffective and at worst harmful. But the nature of dissociative memory is such that most people with DID have more questions about their histories than answers. And while I think those of us with Dissociative Identity Disorder do have to learn to tolerate some ambiguity, I also think we have more answers than we realize.

The man typed some figures and stared at the computer screen, eventually muttering, "You qualify for $440 a month in assistance. Your rent is $740. Don't know how you're going to do it." I stared at a rip in an orange, Naugahyde chair. I didn't know how I was going to do it either. It was the year I discovered what it's like to live on welfare (How to Get Disability Benefits for Mental Illness). I learned valuable lessons about poverty that I won't soon forget. And I came face-to-face with the realities of severe mental illness and invisible disability.

Understanding Dissociative Identity Disorder depends somewhat on your grasp of the terminology, at least initially. Certainly discussing DID is easier if we're all using the same glossary of terms. Following is a list of words and phrases I tend to use when writing about Dissociative Identity Disorder, along with my definitions for each. If you have anything to add, or if my definitions don't quite match up with yours, I hope you'll share in the comments section.

Recently a reader asked how to get over the feeling that her sister is faking dissociative identity disorder. If you doubt your friend or family member's diagnosis, I think it's important to identify why you're skeptical. What in particular has you questioning it? Write it down, and be specific. Now find out everything you can about each of those nagging suspicions. I'm willing to bet a healthy majority of them are based on common misconceptions about dissociative identity disorder. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong. Sometimes people who say they have DID don't have it at all. That could be because they're pretending for some perceived gain, e.g. sympathy. But I believe the discrepancy is more likely due to misdiagnosis and genuine confusion.

One of the problems I have with the mythology surrounding dissociative identity disorder is that it makes finding support and treatment difficult. DID is hard enough to contend with on its own without having to fight your way through fallacies and stereotypes just to get help. Some common misconceptions about dissociative identity disorder come from entertainment media. But DID itself, in the hands of those who don't understand it, is also a source of prevailing myths about the disorder.

Near the bottom of the HealthyPlace homepage there's an audio widget, bordered in orange with the header Share Your Mental Health Experience. If you have a spare three minutes, please play the clip titled "I Hear A Voice in My Head" and listen to one woman poignantly illustrate why I write about Dissociative Identity Disorder. This woman, like so many others, is struggling in isolation with something she doesn't understand. "People act like it's nothing," she says. No matter the condition, there will always be people who act like it's nothing. Talking about mental illness, publicly and honestly, is the only way I know to ease that kind of invalidation.