Diagnostic Labels
Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is challenging to live with and accept. Once you accept it, you are left with a sense of being different or strange. One side-effect of DID is becoming wrapped up in your diagnosis, which hinders healing.
This article will explore how the diagnostic label of dissociative identity disorder can become your identity.
Receiving a Label
People who seek professional help when they recognize something is wrong with their mental health suddenly find they meet the diagnostic criteria for a disorder like DID. Receiving a mental health diagnosis can cement in someone’s mind that they are damaged goods that need fixing or are sometimes so profoundly injured they can never recover.
The stigma surrounding dissociative identity disorder diagnosis is palpable with television programs, apps for your phone, and movies portraying people living with DID as animals to be feared.
Giving someone a diagnostic label is controversial among clients and mental health professionals because of the stigma and how the person sees themselves.
Search engines like Google make receiving a diagnostic label even worse because you can explore what your symptoms should be, and this search can lock in how you see yourself.
How Does Receiving a Diagnostic Label Impact Treatment?
During our lives, we are labeled (brother, sister, etc.), and these labels affect and reflect how others and we see ourselves. Labels are not always negative. Indeed, some labels are necessary for humans to relate to one another.
However, diagnostic labels can have drastic and tragic consequences, often affecting people who do not understand and even mental health professionals.
When you enter treatment, you expect your therapist or psychiatrist to act professionally and be proficient in dealing with your problem. Yet, people who present with specific diagnoses such as borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia, or DID are sometimes instantly either refused treatment.
People fear these diagnoses. Because the diagnoses I listed above are lifelong problems, they are seen as hopeless, broken, and untreatable.
Being given a diagnostic label opens the person given the diagnosis to being completely submerged in it, so much so that people may call you by your diagnosis instead of your name. For example, you may have called someone “she’s a schizophrenic” instead of calling them by their proper name.
Mental health professionals themselves utilize diagnostic labels in inappropriate ways. Some may even refuse to treat someone based on their label, putting everyone with a particular label into one basket.
In other words, diagnostic labels steal away our humanness.
The Medical Professional and a Mental Health Diagnoses
Sometimes having a mental health diagnostic label disrupts one’s ability to receive adequate treatment from medical doctors and nurses. These professionals harbor biases such as believing that the person who has presented to them with pain isn’t sick but making it all up.
Medical gaslighting may also occur when the patient presents with symptoms, but the doctor doesn’t treat what the person is complaining about. Instead, the doctor is either condescending or harsh with their patient because they believe they are not sick.
Having a diagnostic label is sometimes dangerous as the person with a mental health diagnosis can become extremely ill and not be believed.
How Do You See Yourself
Receiving a diagnostic label from a mental health professional affects how you see yourself and your future. If you have dissociative identity disorder and believe you are broken beyond repair, you may begin to feel like your life isn’t worth living.
Far too often, people living with DID die by suicide because they are overwhelmed by who and what they believe they are. The person may think they are a weirdo or bizarre because of the symptoms they experience and how others treat them.
These folks believe they are so broken there is no hope of ever living a happy and successful life because they have the label DID.
Then comes the self-pity and self-sabotaging behaviors where the person diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder subconsciously decides they are their label. They begin to eat, breathe, and be what they conceive as who they should be. This behavior further exacerbates the disorder’s symptoms, and round and round, they go.
Certainly, there is no way being stuck in your diagnosis will help you. You must see beyond your diagnosis and make the conscious decision to heal and live.
Some Things You Can Do To Break Free
While being stuck in and with a diagnosis such as dissociative identity disorder is traumatic, there are things you can do to help yourself.
Process Your Diagnosis. Receiving a diagnostic label can be pretty freeing. Finally, you have a label that describes all you’ve been experiencing and struggling with. However, other people may feel confused and worried when they are handed a diagnostic label. Nevertheless, having a diagnostic label can help in the processing of your symptoms and help to diminish the shame that having them can bring.
Give Your Diagnosis a Human Name. While this may seem silly at first, giving your diagnosis a human name helps separate your diagnostic label from who you are. A human name, like Susan or Tom, changes the focus of your conversation from what is wrong with you to the fact that an outside force is causing you harm.
Ask Your Therapist to Explain in Detail Your Diagnosis. Part of the problem with receiving a mental health diagnostic label is that your illness may seem like a dark and mysterious force. Asking your therapist to sit with you and explain exactly what your diagnosis is and how it is affecting you can relieve your worries and keep you from identifying with the diagnosis so much.
Concentrate on who you are as a person outside your diagnosis. You are not your diagnosis, and you must deliberately choose not to see yourself that way. Identify your titles outside of DID or any other mental health diagnosis. Are you a student? Worker? Mother or father? Sister or brother? Do you have an accomplishment you are incredibly proud of having done? Concentrate on those things and allow your DID diagnosis to become only a part of who you are because it is.
Ending Our Time Together
Diagnostic labels are vital to getting services identified and paid for by insurance. That is one of only a few good things about them. Otherwise, diagnostic labels are highly stigmatizing and can cause several problems.
If you feel stuck in your diagnosis, if you feel you wear the diagnosis of DID on your forehead, it is time to work on being a person. Not just anyone, but who you are and what you want from life.
So far as doctors who are prejudiced because you have a mental health diagnosis goes, don’t allow them to gaslight you. If you have problems with a doctor or nurse, ask them point blank if they do not believe you because you have a mental health label. Their answer lets you know whether you should find a different doctor and clinic. Even if they hem haw around, you have your answer.
You are not your diagnosis. I repeat you are not your diagnosis.
Remember, no matter what, someone out here in Internet land loves you.
You are beautiful and wonderful; you are you.
Now go out there and roar!!!
We “Liked” the song, too!!!
My diagnosis got me fired from a 25 year career because management and the company’s customers assumed that I was a serious security risk. In 1990, it was referred to as MPD (DID). My therapist did an excellent job of explaining the diagnosis to my late wife, Janice, and our two teenage children. Janice responded with – “It all makes sense.” A letter was written by a psychiatrist that confirmed the diagnosis, in 1992, that the company was privy to as well as EAP (Employee Assistance) whom I had gone to for help, which in hindsight, was a huge mistake since management was kept informed. I also was sent for treatment at a facility for 35 days, much like those with substance abuse issues except for them, they are celebrated for their recovery which I’ve seen at the company that I worked for. In fact an All Hands on Deck meeting of approximately 100 coworkers were called together to celebrate an individual who was celebrating his 1 year of sobriety with a sheet cake. I also had se years of sobriety, myself, but never made a big deal about it because it had been an Outpatient ordeal a decade before I had the MPD (DID) diagnosis.
All I can say is that STIGMA for DID still exists.