Conspiracy theories abound in the world of multiplicity and dissociative disorders. Everything from abusing children to intentionally create multiple personalities, satanic ritual abuse, alien abduction among others.
There was a comment made under an unrelated subject, so I’ve started this post to accommodate it. Thanks for hanging in there.
This post will be finished at a later date. JB
jeanettebartha
Jeanette Bartha
05/03/2011 at 10:57 pm
You might be able to make the assertion that ADD doesn’t exist – you would have many agreeing with you!
Jeanette Bartha
05/03/2011 at 10:56 pm
Shen, We can’t make the argument that cancer doesn’t exist because there is a hill of science to prove that statement wrong. The same cannot be said of DID. If you know of evidence other than anecdotal or that which comes from clinical observation and/or experience, please send it along.
With all respect: That’s is what differentiates the existence of cancer from the non-existence of DID for me. Again, there is science behind memory, hypnosis, and many other aspects of DID so what is said here is way more than my experiences.
Best.
Shen
05/03/2011 at 9:33 pm
When my son was seven, the teachers at his school told me he had ADD. While he has sometimes struggled to stay on task in school, I did not put him on medication. He’s in college now and doing quite well.
I guess I could now say that ADD does not exist.
Also – I’ve never had cancer. Perhaps it also doesn’t exist and I can point to those who claim they are suffering and say “Well, you looked fine before you went to see those doctors.”
I still find it absurd that you are making this claim the very name of your blog simply because it is not true of you.
Jeanette Bartha
04/29/2011 at 9:35 pm
Thank you, V for your insights. Again, since we are drifting off topic – which is too easy to do, I will move your post under the My Mom has Multiple Personalities.
V
04/29/2011 at 2:02 pm
Wow that is incredible. I am amazed you managed to get out after all that.
I think this is one place I was very lucky and maybe where my mother’s fake-DID differed from other types of fake-DID. I believe that my mother shut the doctors down on the satanic stuff.
I can’t imagine what it must have been like for people who came to believe these sorts of things. I think that my mother only believed things she wanted to believe and was predisposed to believe. The same was true for me in a way.
I *wanted* very very much to believe in DID, because I was unable, unwilling, or just too immature to face the possibility that my mother was making these things up.
I had no sources of information on DID other than my parents, but there were still definitely moments when I knew or strongly suspected that something wasn’t real. My mother was no great actress and couldn’t keep her personalities straight, and she often switched personalities at suspicously convenient times.
Whenever I had suspicions, I always chose to push them out of my mind. Each and every time I was confronted with reality, I deliberately turned away from it, in order to avoid emotional pain. The ironic thing is that the lies I told myself came back to bite me and made my situation worse in the long run. I suffered serious consequences for ignoring reality.
My mother was the same — it is part of her personality or mental illness or whatever to see herself as a pure and innocent victim of circumstance, with little or no agency. She feels quite persecuted by life. When the doctors told her nothing was her fault and every problem she had was because of something someone else said, she was very very eager to accept that. At first DID was great for my mom, she had a great time causing drama and running amok and pointing fingers. It was later that she started to have serious consequences and became suicidal and self-harming, etc.
I don’t mean this to sound like I am blaming my mother too much — she is a very mentally ill person and it was totally irresponsible of those doctors to play up to her illness like that. When you have a person whose grip on reality is not strong, the job of a doctor should be to help being them back to reality, not push them further into madness. However, as long as the doctors told my mother what she wanted to hear, she kept coming back and the governement kept paying them.
At any rate, when the satanic stuff came up, and with the Drs report I found, my mother rebelled. She dumped several therapists and left one dissociative disorders clinic. She was not having any of that — she was the victim always, never a perpetrator.
This characteristic of hers made my life quite difficult at times but I think it probably saved me. My siblings and I never saw psychiatrists, and I assume that was because my mother could not accept that we might ever be anything other than perfectly happy, because that would then mean that she was a bad mother, and she would never have allowed anything like that to even be hinted about. We were perfectly happy at all times, in her mind.
I am so very very grateful that my siblings and I were not pulled into DID therapy or anything like that. I have read about children of DID patients being treated themselves and I am so grateful it didn’t happen to me. That would have broken me.
I pretty much told adults whatever they wanted to hear when I was a kid — after all I played along with my mother’s personalities over and over — and if a therapist wanted me to admit to being in a cult, or to accuse a teacher of molestation or pretend to have alters or whatever, I would have done it. I could not have lived with myself if I had accused someone wrongly, but there is no doubt in my mind that I would have, had a doctor asked me.
So I am very lucky I think. The suffering from DID therapy can seem infinite to me. I can’t believe what people have had to go through, it still blows my mind.
Jeanette Bartha
04/29/2011 at 1:37 pm
Yes, I really believed I suffered from SRA as did the other multiples I knew. Remember, I was so brainwashed by the time that Dr. Stratford* introduced SRA that I could have believed I was an alien satanic princess come to earth to save all abused women.
Which reminds me. Why do many women who believe they were in a satanic cult allege that they were a priestess? Or, a high-priestess? How can one organization have so many leaders of distinction? Where are the common people? Where are the ones who stayed behind after a ceremony and cleaned up all the carnage, blood & guts, and hid the bones and fetuses so well that United States officials could not find it after looking for 10 years? (see Kenneth Lanning also on this site) Where are the men?
During therapy I was determined to get better and to recover from DID & SRA so I could go on to write books and talk about it. Little did I know how that aspiration would turn upside down and I would come to denounce its legitimacy.
*pseudonym
V
04/28/2011 at 10:08 pm
Wow, I can’t wait to read your book. That is such a crazy thing.
The SRA thing did not touch me directly except for that report. I guess that is one good thing.
And it is odd how logic flies out the window. An elite athlete teen girl committing mass murder — with no one the wiser.
I am pretty amazed you managed to recover from that level of crazy. Did you really believe you had done those things?
My mother very much saw herself as a victim and admitted no wrongdoing in life. I think she dumped therapists who got into the satanic stuff, for that reason. I don’t know this for sure, but I strongly suspect she got away from some therapists because they were making her out to be a bad guy. My mother was willing to point the finger but not have it pointed at her — that is part of her real mental illness and character, independent of DID. It makes her difficult but I think it might have been helpful in certain circumstances, like when satanic conspiracies were suggested.
And, yeah, I can’t believe these therapists didn’t check their facts or question such absurd assertions. There must be a level of insanity, mixed in with egomania.
Jeanette Bartha
04/28/2011 at 9:34 pm
My former shrink had me entrenched in the SRA conspiracy theories. There is a chapter in my book on it so I won’t go into it right now.
A few points and questions. If someone knows of murders occurring, don’t they have a duty to report that to the authorities? I doubt that information could come under the client/therapist privilege. The entire idea of circles of child murders and infant-eating psychiatric patients defies reason. Groups of people wondering America leaving no trace? Impossible. Participants don’t talk about it? Impossible.
During investigations for my law suit, my lawyer hired an investigator to go to my hometown to see what he could find about multiple murders and dozens of missing children in the area where I was raised. What did the investigator find? Right. No murders, no abductions, no missing children.
What the investigator did find were articles about my athletic achievements. If someone can think that a teen-athlete can spend all night in the woods eating fetuses and being tied to trees being gang raped and otherwise being mutilated by satanists and then go to school the next day is irrational thinking. I never had marks on my body, was always able to perform academically & excel athletically. I spent a lot of time in locker rooms – someone would have noticed scars, bruises and other unexplained injuries – nothing.
V
04/28/2011 at 6:42 pm
I am hoping my post was on topic, because I think maybe that report was part of the doctors believing in the conspiracy where DID patients were part of a killer cult. Or at least it’s probably the same sort of thinking that got those doctors to “killer cult”
Also, I want to add that no psychiatrist or anyone ever interviewed me about my maybe witnessing a murder. You would think if you were making murder allegations you might want to check some facts. As far as I know that was never done, but apparently the psychiatrist was sure my mother had killer alters.
And, when I think about this now, these psychiatrists dischared my mother with her killer and child molestor alters right back into a home with 3 kids age ~9-13ish. WTF?
The whole thing is so crazy it almost makes me into a conspiracy theorist.
V
04/28/2011 at 6:35 pm
I remember that my mother had this psychiatrist’s report that went on and on about incest, and then said that she had something like 36 personalities, including various child molestors and sereal killers.
I really wish I still had that report. I remember it saying stuff about my mother’s personalities including killers and child molestors. I can’t be 100% sure though because I read it a long time ago. I also remember it being signed by a psychiatrist and seeming very official. I remember that the report frightened me.
I found that report when I was ~13. It upset me terribly but I put it out of my mind and pretended I never saw it. My parents would not have discsused such things with me so I didn’t have options. I really wish I had it today if only for humor value.
There was a lot wrong with my mom, but those doctors were delusional if they think she was killing anyone. She was barely conscious and basically never left the couch. She had no energy and did nothing, for the most part.
My mother was the type of woman who would circle a parking lot for 45 minutes — or even drive home — if there wasn’t a parking spot right up close.
And, with DID therapy she was basically incompetent in all areas of life, her thoughts were totally disorganized, etc.
Those doctors seriously believed that such a woman was able to plan a murder, get off the couch an exert herself to commit it, and then cover it up. Ludicrous!
I wish I had thought of these things back when I was 13. I remember not knowing what to think of that “medical” report and being frightened. As a grown up I know that it’s laughable.
I cannot believe the flights of fancy these psychiatrists were capable of. Had they been science fiction authors, it would have been great. As doctors they were a great big FAIL.
Jeanette Bartha
04/28/2011 at 5:08 pm
Exactly, I am interested in educating the public. If and when they know the facts and the ridiculous theories these “doctors” of medicine come up with I think a few heads will spin.
Jeanette Bartha
04/28/2011 at 5:05 pm
Agreed about Kluft.
I know Jellybean – I’ll have to include conspiracy theories. No choice. Yet another reality check for readers and believers of DID who often don’t want to be associated with those groups any more than they do with the history of MPD.
And, I am naturally skeptical about any conspiracy theory that does not involve tin foil
Jellybean
04/28/2011 at 4:10 pm
I was referring to the later survey, submitted in 2001.
Go to Fmsfonline.org, and you can read Harold Lief and Paul McHugh’s analysis of the data on the “About” link.
Jellybean
04/28/2011 at 2:25 pm
Reference for stats explained above. Sorry, should have included it in the first place, I was just trying to be succinct.
The stats were only given to sort of highlight the demographics involved in the controversy – not to claim those stats as the ultimate numbers for all to worship as the perfect sample.
I don’t think the general demographics themselves are much in debate by either side in the controversy anyway. Each side just has its own theory as to WHY they are what they are.
The DID doctors explain them by grand conspiracies – which was my ultimate point. Again, not a point the major players on either side of the debate would disagree with – but one that many outside of the debate may not be aware.
Jellybean
04/28/2011 at 1:31 pm
I understand wanting to stay away from conspiracy theories, but I don’t see how you can. They can’t be untangled from the DID diagnosis. The doctors who write the papers and run the seminars to teach the world all believe in the grand conspiracy.
Renee Fredrickson did offer an alternative explanation for the alien abductions though. In her book, “A Journey to Discovery”. She says that abusers sometimes dress up like extraterrestrials to confuse the victim. So, maybe if you think you were raped by a martian, it was actually your father wearing some antennea and bug-eyed goggles. (For some reason, I always imagine Jim Belushi in that giant bee costume).
Kluft is probably afraid his theories make him sound nuts… and I’m betting he’s absolutely correct about that.
Jeanette Bartha
04/28/2011 at 12:09 pm
I find it intriguing that people in many non-white groups around the world do not make wide sweeping allegations of childhood abuse remembered after being buried for decades nor am I reading about them backing wild conspiracy theories like I do in the US. Funny little fact.
Jeanette Bartha
04/28/2011 at 12:02 pm
Got it, Thanks for stopping by Doug!
Jeanette Bartha
04/28/2011 at 12:02 pm
Man, I’m getting smashed on missing Jellybean’s point! LOL That’ll teach me to read when I’m tired.
Agreed, when the MPD theories exploded and victims were flowing out the woodwork, their parents were typically in a long standing marriage. Excellent point about an aspect of familial backgrounds that has changed with the next generation.
Jeanette Bartha
04/28/2011 at 11:58 am
Why thank you, Jellybean. I must have misread the spirit of your post. I get too serious sometimes and miss the good points… I actually wasn’t sure if you believed what you were writing or not!
I appreciate you coming back to qualify some of your statements. If the survey you are referring to is the original one done by the FMSF around 1993, then I am familiar with it. I could have participated in it but I declined – however, I would have fit the conclusions just the same.
Yes, I’d love to read a survey conducted by believers in DID too. While many come here to argue that I am wrong about such things as the proliferation of it and how secret and underground the lifestyle is – I suspect a survey would support me.
I try like hell to Not link believers to alien abductions & conspiracy theories, et al, but it is getting harder and harder to stay away from those subjects because they Are linked. Doug Mesner does an excellent job of exposing nonsense like alien abductions, conspiracy theories, satanic cults and the like. However, I will need to address these issues here as well.
In addition to reading Hammond, they should also read Colin Ross and visit his website. A researcher who recently attended a conference where Richard Kluft spoke told me that he handed out a paper listing some of his theories, I believe it was, but he told the attendees that the handout needed to be turned in and they were not to take it with them – or nonsense similar to it. Why would he find the need to do such a sophomoric act? Is he protecting precious information that only he knows until he can publish it? Why the secrecy?
Jellybean
04/28/2011 at 11:42 am
Not at all – I’m actually surprised that you find it upsetting.
I don’t believe that those who claim DID are faking. I think they are experiencing something in all earnestness. They are taught to role play and self-hypnotize by the RM literature and therapists to the point that they have difficulty stopping, and it begins to take over their lives. Through this process of purposely indulging in dissociative exercises, they create and embrace an entirely new persona for themselves – one in which they were a victim of horrific abuses. As they are torn between completely embracing this new identity, and the nagging thoughts that it’s all a bunch of BS, they buy into the idea that they are housing two distinct personalities. It continues from there.
My understanding was that this is in large part the reason for changing the name from MPD to DID. We don’t all agree that a person ACTUALLY HAS separate personalities. We don’t all agree that childhood abuse causes dissociative amnesia. But, we CAN all agree that somewhere along the line, the person has completely lost a grip on his/her real identity.
The difference is only that one side says DID is a naturally occurring disorder, created through childhood sexual abuse – While the other side says that DID is an iatrogenic disorder, created by practicing the techniques espoused in the repressed memory literature.
Jellybean
04/28/2011 at 10:43 am
Sorry, just saw your request:
I extrapolated the time span (1960 to 1975) from the mean ages and dates of accusations provided by the FMSF family survey stats in 2001.
Here’s the data from the survey, you can determine for yourself if my point was valid or not:
(Base upon 1734 resondents)
99% of both accused and accusers are white.
87% of the accused were professional or white collar occupations.
Father’s are the primary accused 82% of the time, but an additional 10% are secondary accused.
Stepfathers were accused only 0.87% of the time.
The mean age for the accuser at time of accusation is 32.
The alleged abuses start with victims at a mean age of 4 and ends at 13.
The peak years for the “memories” to be recovered, were between 1990 and 1993.
This survey included all accusations in which a claim of repeated sexual/and or ritual abuse is alleged, with a significant period of complete amnesia in which the abuse was not remembered. The accusers do not all believe they stored the memories in separate personalities (MPD/DID). Some believe they stored the memories in body cells outside of the brain, or in some dormant corner of the brain. I made an assumption that the stats would be similar throughout those subcategories.
It’s obviously not a perfect sampling – would be wonderful to compare to stats by a Dissociative Disorders clinic – but, it gives enough of an overview, that it becomes clear WHY believers suspect a far-reaching conspiracy.
If any readers would need confirmation that the believers DO suspect a far-reaching conspiracy, I would suggest they start with Corydon Hammond’s Greenbaum speech for a quick overview of what’s being alleged.
(More info on the 2001 family survey can be found on the FMSF website – which you already link to on the right.)
V
04/28/2011 at 8:28 am
I also think that Jellybean is trying to point out the absurdity of some DID-related conspiracy theories, and also how the DID patients’ demographics don’t match those of the average sex abuse victim.
I do agree it’s better to get a source for statistics.
I also think there might be a generational effect in the fathers vs. stepfathers. The parents of the “DID generation” did not divorce as often as people today and so stepfathers rarely were around.
doug mesner
04/27/2011 at 10:41 pm
I think jelly bean might be getting a bad rap here. I don’t think ‘bean is defending the conspiracy notions, but elaborating upon the degenerative thought cycles that lead the DID faithful to subscribe to them.
Jeanette Bartha
04/27/2011 at 7:43 pm
The statement that the only debate is about when personalities popped out? Really?
I can’t help but think that your comment is intended to incite an argument, emotions, or whatever.
I question whether or not you actually believe what you wrote, or if your statements are just a means to yank reader’s chains.
Jeanette Bartha
04/27/2011 at 7:35 pm
Jelly Bean,
Please site the statistics you made. Readers of my blog, and mental health care consumers, have a right to know where you got that information.
I have no tolerance for unsubstantiated statistics, claims, or science. I will not allow readers to be mislead by statements that may or may not have scientific backing. I will appreciate the citations within the next few days, otherwise I will assume they are made up to back an argument. Thank you.
Jelly Bean
04/27/2011 at 7:33 pm
Obscurebridges – There’s really no debate as to whether DID exists. The debate is about whether it exists before therapy, or is created in therapy. The people best able to make that determination are the families and friends of the multiple. When did the person suddenly start talking like a 5 year old or calling herself Hank? Did she always do that sort of thing? Or did it first start after she began seeing a new therapist?
As far as the underground promoting it – of course there’s an underground promoting it. If the DID believers are correct, then there was an explosion of white professional men raping their biological daughters between the years of 1960 and 1975, and they had some mechanism for making the girls forget for decades. One of the most telling statistics is that when DID is diagnosed, a father is accused of being a perp in 92% of all cases. A step-father is accused in LESS than 1% of cases Obviously, those stats do NOT match those of other sexual abuse victims.
From Jeanette Bartha: Mental Health Care Consumer Alert. This blogger is qualifying the information stated by “Jellybean” in the above paragraph until such time as the source of the statistics is supplied as requested and readers have the opportunity to examine and rebut it. As I said in my reply to “Jellybean”, I will not allow misinformation or disinformation to be made on this blog. The statistics offered are unsubstantiated and, therefore, are misleading and serve only to sway the thoughts of readers in support of the writer’s opinion or agenda. This post, however, can serve as an excellent example of how claims lacking evidence, in this case a statistical analysis, can be interpreted by readers as professional & scientifically derived conclusions, when they may not be because we do not know where they come from.
So, the DID diagnosis is inextricably tied to major conspiracy theory. The theory is that a league of satanists are trying to take over the world by creating easliy-led automatons. They use mind-control on the fathers, getting them to sexually abuse their kids, which causes the kids to become Multiples and their various personalities can then be used for the Illuminati’s purposes.
That’s about as “underground” as you can get.
When the concept of DID is sold to a mainstream audience, they usually try to leave out those important parts of the theory.
That’s why I have to give Cory Hammond a tip of my hat – he just blurted it all out in his Greenbaum speech so the whole world could say “WTH?”. God Bless him.