Highly confused, can you help me to figure out?

In my country there is no need to diagnose anything since the health system is public.

My psychiatrist isn't really into dissociative disorders. He mainly knows about personality disorders and psychotic disorders, anxiety and depression. He works in a day hospital and treats young people with severe mental illness.

He is an excellent psychotherapist, I see him once a week.

He said he has no doubt I have CPTSD and all the rest it is a consequence of trauma, and when I say all the rest I mean psychosis, dissociation and mood changes.

I could be diagnose with schizoaffective o schizophrenia, CPTSD and a dissociative disorder.

What I don't know and he can't answer it is if it is actually DID. Or which voices are dissociatives and which ones are psychotic.

He said it is a continum between dissociative and psychotic experiences and what make them different it is if you are in contact with reality or not.

But I feel them different. I know which one would be considered psychotic hallucination and which ones have personalities, memories and so, because they talk and feel different. Even if I think the psychosis is also a manifestation of the stress caused by the severe trauma, they are different. Psychotic voices are not helpful and mostly should go away, but the dissociative ones are my alters or fragments and should be integrated to me instead of eliminated. That's something that maybe he doesn't understand.


This is why I don't have any idea if I actually have DID, OSDD or just severe dissociation that could be explained by the CPTSD.

I lose time I didn't know I lose, I was told it by my psychiatrist because there were MONTHS of things did and talked in therapy I couldn't recall.

How can I know if he is not into diagnosing?
I keep writing in a notebook to don't forget and to see if there is any difference.


I am right now integrated with N, but sometimes we separated and are co-conscious and present. The child who wants to kill the abusers, and is really agressive and over protective and doesn't like the psychiatrist it is here. I finally reached to calm him down. He doesn't know where we are and he seems to don't know we exist. The other thing it is my flight alter drive 'me' to try to kill 'myself' when I just went background, couldn't control my body and it was an automatical scape.

I think this is beyond CPTSD dissociation, but I don't feel it real. It doesn't sound like classic DID.

Machiavello wrote:In my country there is no need to diagnose anything since the health system is public.

Even in your country diagnosis is helpful because it guides treatment.

Many psychiatrists are not diagnosticians; diagnostics is actually a specialty. In some parts of the world it is a formal specialty, in others it is a matter of individual preference.

Machiavello wrote:How can I know if he is not into diagnosing?

You can consult a diagnostician, if you can find one in your country. It only needs 1 or 2 sessions. Or you can get copies of two diagnostic instruments, the DES and MID, fill them out, and score them. You can score the DES yourself; there is a thread for that here on the DID Forum. Scoring the MID is very complicated. Your psychiatrist can work directly with the author of the MID, Dr. Paul Dell, to get the MID scored. Or you can consult by mail with the Pottergate Centre in the UK.

Machiavello wrote:It doesn't sound like classic DID.

Well, to me it does sound like classic DID. But no worries; it will all get sorted out in time.

Thank you I will look at those score tools. My psychiatrist doesn't speak English so I doubt he can do something with this lol

Without knowing what language(s) your psychiatrist can read, I can recommend you begin with the Somatoform Dissociation Questionnaire. It is available now in 15 languages, mostly European but also Mandarin and Urdu, all right here:

Nijenhuis: Somatoform Dissociation Questionnaire

The Dissociative Experiences Scale is available in many languages too, but the versions are not yet gathered together anywhere on the web. To get the version you need, you may need to do some work.

Thank you, I just did this one http://counsellingresource.com/quizzes/misc-tests/des/