Chapter 1. Dissociative Disorder in the Modern Era (6)

A long list of medications that DID patients often bring into my first interview with them demonstrates a series of diagnoses or misdiagnoses that they have ever been given. Quite often dissociative patients are prescribed antipsychotic, antiepileptic, mood stabilizers, anti-anxiety meds and so on. The long list of meds reflects serious confusion of the patients’ past clinicians. They could have reached a more unifying and parsimonious diagnosis if the notion of dissociation was used as “an auxiliary line” which might have made a clear sense out of the whole symptomatic picture that these patients presented.

I will make a list of conditions that dissociative disorders are often misdiagnosed with before the final diagnosis is made.
＜Those who were misdiagnosed as BPD＞
Clinicians tend to give a diagnosis of BPD without much hesitation to those who repeat wrist cutting and other self-injurious behaviors, getting occasionally paranoid, accusing parents and significant others and so on. However, these findings are also seen among dissociative patients. Especially, if different personalities talk and behave in a different way in relatively short span of time, clinicians may tend to understand this as a sign of splitting and unstable self-image characteristic of BPD. Thus many of my DID patients have a history of being misdiagnosed as BPD.
However in reality, many DID patients do meet the criteria for BPD, indicating that these two conditions co-exist, although their pathology are quite distinct.