Anonymous wrote:Imagine the stuff she's watching on TikTok that she's not telling you about, that you'll never get to talk to her about.

+1

Anonymous wrote:This completely sickened me too. I deleted tiktok from her phone (among other issues that went alongside some of her newly learned behaviors) but dd thought DID looked cool.

DID is horrifying and only from the most extreme trauma. As if all the personalities would even want to be videotaped or participate at all, it's just awful to me that it's such a joke now on tiktok.

It is so shocking to me how much this influences kids.

Right. It’s almost as though girls could think they could become boys from watching this stuff.

Anonymous wrote:Remind your kid that Tik Tok is for entertainment purposes only and everything should be taken with a grain a salt and with the intention of being for fun only.

+1
That's exactly what I tell my kids.

I was diagnosed with this, but I never had 50 different personalities. Maybe 10. Some personalities had names and were genuine people, to me.

Now, I just get treatment for anxiety. Most places don't believe in DID. The people who diagnosed me were a bit on the quack side of things, but I think there may be some truth to it. Either that or I complied to make my therapist happy and messed myself up much more. It's hard to say.

Anonymous wrote:Is DID going to be the new “trend” according to DCUM trolls? I expect to see at least 14 troll posts this summer claiming that all the teens are identifying as having DID.

No because right-wing media won't be using DID as the newest wedge in culture wars. That is what they are doing with being trans - they are using it to drive the culture wars and scare people.

I do think there is increasing pressure on young people to have a special identity. It's the same problem teenagers and young adults have always had to define themselves, but I think the combination of social media and our current politics are making it more intense. I hate the term "identity politics" but I don't know how else to describe it.

Kids want to find their thing, and they want to be special and have meaning, and they crave attention. We are dismissive of these needs, especially the one for attention, but it's super normal and probably biologically programmed to some degree. As you move from your parents'/family's protection into adulthood, it is normal to fear getting lost in the shuffle. It's like fearing that you will cease to exist. It's very intense for teenagers, but also you adults. I remember it being particularly acute moving from high school to college, throughout college, and then post-college.

I think the focus on sexual and gender identity is part of this. I don't think kids are "faking" different gender expressions or sexuality. They are exploring and I think it is so great that there is now more openness and acceptance of non-binary and queer identities so it is easier (though by no means easy) for kids to find an identity that feels most authentic to them. It probably also results in more kids experimenting than would have in the past. I probably would have experimented with non-binary identity as a teen/young adult if I'd grown up int this environment, even though I'm a cis woman. I had a lot of issues around femininity and the degree to which I wanted to embrace feminine expression and how much of that was me and how much was responding to social pressure to look and act feminine, and being able to explore a non-binary identity I think would have helped me figure that out earlier in life.

But I agree with the PP who points out that when you are talking about psychological disorders, it's different because these are not things you can just figure out for yourself -- they are diagnosable issues. But I still understand the impulse. It's partly because we've done a good job of building awareness around disorders like ADHD, which used to be really under diagnosed in certain populations (especially young women) but now are more widely accepted. I think if I was a teenager and I had a friend who was diagnosed with ADHD and I saw how that diagnosis helped them make sense of their lives, and in particular how it helped them reframe things they'd previously struggled with in a way that is not exactly positive, but no longer evidence that they are bad people or something, that I would crave a similar kind of diagnosis. I think that's part of what you see here. Some of it might be people trying to take advantage, but some of it is I think people looking for an identity and simply wanting to feel seen and understood.

Anonymous wrote:Is DID going to be the new “trend” according to DCUM trolls? I expect to see at least 14 troll posts this summer claiming that all the teens are identifying as having DID.

I see a lot of people spewing BS about how the majority of teens and tweens who are now identifying as something other than hetero and cis are just doing it because it’s a trend. That’s obnoxious.

But DID is an actual disorder, not an identity, is incredibly rare, and it takes years to identify and diagnose. Plus people have been using the term “dissociate” to mean “distract yourself” or “forget what you’re doing” so even if these people do legitimately think they have DID, they probably don’t because they don’t know what it actually is.

I think that the key to all this isn’t dismissing these people out of hand, but education about gender, sexual orientation, and the various psychiatric disorders that are most commonly popping up on social media.

Is DID going to be the new “trend” according to DCUM trolls? I expect to see at least 14 troll posts this summer claiming that all the teens are identifying as having DID.