Wow, multiple personality? Your psychologist was clueless. I mean, taking base rates into consideration, that diagnosis is bordering on absurd.
It sounds like you are having dissociative episodes; it could be depersonalization disorder, but it doesn’t seem to be causing “significant distress or difficulties”, which is one of the DSM IV criteria.
DSM-IV-TR criteria
Longstanding or recurring feelings of being detached from one’s mental processes or body, as if one is observing them from the outside or in a dream.
Reality testing is unimpaired during depersonalization
Depersonalization causes significant difficulties or distress at work, or social and other important areas of life functioning.
Depersonalization does not only occur while the individual is experiencing another mental disorder, and is not associated with substance use or a medical illness.
The DSM-IV-TR specifically recognizes three possible additional features of depersonalization disorder:
Derealization, experiencing the external world as strange or unreal.
Macropsia or micropsia, an alteration in the perception of object size or shape.
A sense that other people seem unfamiliar or mechanical.
Of the criteria and features you listed, only this one seems apt:
Derealization, experiencing the external world as strange or unreal.
Since you apparently know something about this, what do you think of the hypothesis that dissociative episodes are the result of transiently handing the reins to the revolutionary? I make this connection because it always seem to happen when I’m seeking a paradigm shift in the way I’m thinking about something.
(And yeah, it seemed my psychologist was a nutcase himself. My impression was that he was new and was looking for something really exciting to find and write about.)
You know, that’s really interesting. The “revolutionary” mental model would offer a way of explaining all sorts of dissociative phenomena, like dissociative fugue, and dissociative identity. Basically, the brain would be triggering the “revolutionary” to escape from a traumatic reality, not to escape from a false belief. In the case of dissociative fugue, it seems the revolutionary removes your old memory and identity and lets the “apologist” defend your new identity.
It would be interesting to know if dissociative anesthetics can trigger the same kind mind changes as the revolutionary. From what I can tell, it sounds like they can.
Wow, multiple personality? Your psychologist was clueless. I mean, taking base rates into consideration, that diagnosis is bordering on absurd.
It sounds like you are having dissociative episodes; it could be depersonalization disorder, but it doesn’t seem to be causing “significant distress or difficulties”, which is one of the DSM IV criteria.
DSM-IV-TR criteria
Longstanding or recurring feelings of being detached from one’s mental processes or body, as if one is observing them from the outside or in a dream.
Reality testing is unimpaired during depersonalization
Depersonalization causes significant difficulties or distress at work, or social and other important areas of life functioning.
Depersonalization does not only occur while the individual is experiencing another mental disorder, and is not associated with substance use or a medical illness.
The DSM-IV-TR specifically recognizes three possible additional features of depersonalization disorder:
Derealization, experiencing the external world as strange or unreal.
Macropsia or micropsia, an alteration in the perception of object size or shape.
A sense that other people seem unfamiliar or mechanical.
[edit] Etiology
Of the criteria and features you listed, only this one seems apt:
Since you apparently know something about this, what do you think of the hypothesis that dissociative episodes are the result of transiently handing the reins to the revolutionary? I make this connection because it always seem to happen when I’m seeking a paradigm shift in the way I’m thinking about something.
(And yeah, it seemed my psychologist was a nutcase himself. My impression was that he was new and was looking for something really exciting to find and write about.)
You know, that’s really interesting. The “revolutionary” mental model would offer a way of explaining all sorts of dissociative phenomena, like dissociative fugue, and dissociative identity. Basically, the brain would be triggering the “revolutionary” to escape from a traumatic reality, not to escape from a false belief. In the case of dissociative fugue, it seems the revolutionary removes your old memory and identity and lets the “apologist” defend your new identity.
It would be interesting to know if dissociative anesthetics can trigger the same kind mind changes as the revolutionary. From what I can tell, it sounds like they can.