I think part of this is the statistics that 90-something percent of DID cases are "covert," and it takes the average patient who gets diagnosed around 7 years in therapy to get diagnosed. (For us, it was 12 years, and we had to figure it out ourselves first. No therapist we saw had any clue. We've also seen multiple pretty clear cases of DID, in retrospect, that we had no idea what we were looking at when we saw them.)
"Overt"/"florid" DID is rare, and in our experience usually manifests once the system is relatively physically safe (which is less likely to happen to a system experiencing severe systematic oppression). Or else "overt" DID manifests during a crisis as dissociative psychosis (paper written by Turkish doctors), which is easy to misdiagnose as a primary psychotic disorder. This happened to our brother, on our watch, and we're now kicking ourselves for letting it happen. We had no idea what was going on then.
There's a lot of evidence that trauma -> dissociation -> multiplicity is not a culture-bound syndrome; but the way it manifests, if it manifests "overtly," is very culturally influenced.
no subject
"Overt"/"florid" DID is rare, and in our experience usually manifests once the system is relatively physically safe (which is less likely to happen to a system experiencing severe systematic oppression). Or else "overt" DID manifests during a crisis as dissociative psychosis (paper written by Turkish doctors), which is easy to misdiagnose as a primary psychotic disorder. This happened to our brother, on our watch, and we're now kicking ourselves for letting it happen. We had no idea what was going on then.
There's a lot of evidence that trauma -> dissociation -> multiplicity is not a culture-bound syndrome; but the way it manifests, if it manifests "overtly," is very culturally influenced.