DID and schizoaffective?

Thanks for all the feed back guys. I see both my psychs Tommorow so I'll keep you all updated on what happens

well they still havnt made an official diagnosis. fr the time being i am taking paxil, clonodine, and seroquil.

jeg57 wrote:well they still havnt made an official diagnosis. fr the time being i am taking paxil, clonodine, and seroquil.

Sounds like they are shooting in the dark. Have you been evaluated for a dissociative disorder?

I meantioned that and they said it was unlikely

They started me on 100mg of the syroquil. Is that a high dose to start with?

jeg57 wrote:I meantioned that and they said it was unlikely

Oh dear.

Have you scored yourself on the DES?

DID Forum: Dissociative Experiences Scale

I got a 44

A 44 on the DES is good reason to suspect a major dissociative disorder rather than any psychotic disorder. Would you like to share which 5 or so questions you gave the highest scores on? And maybe describe some of the experiences you are having, that seem to relate to those questions?

This is an important question because if your symptoms are dissociative, not psychotic, a trial of medication may not help. This trial will take weeks or months. And unfortunately, if medications don't help, often the physicians prescribing the medications try further trials of more and/or other medications.

Ah, I see you already described some of your hallucinations in the Schizophrenia Forum. Here is an extract:

I have been hallucinating on and off since my early teen years.

i started having visual/auditory hallucinations as well as feeling like im being touched

I have hallucinations and hear voices. The hallucinations include random object, colors floating the air, silver dots everywhere, a girl with a blue dress, white stockings, black shoes, blond hair, blue eyes and a red bow in her hair. There's also a man that when I wke up he looks at my puts his finger to his lips as if the make the "shhhhh" sound and jumps out the window. The voices include my own telling me what to do. Voices of friends and family, random music that isn't playing, high pitched screech that nobody but me can hear, and once while waiting for my boss at work I caught myself talking to a cowboy, gangster, a foreigner, and average person that weren't actually there. Sometimes It tells me what to do like cut myself or Hurt other people but I won't do that.

As someone said who responded to you there, if you were psychotic this would be pretty severe. But for DID these same experiences would be (a) not psychotic and (b) well within normal limits and (c) easily controlled once correctly diagnosed.

Most of your other symptoms are non-specific. Non-specific means they occur in many people who are experiencing severe stress; their presence does not help to diagnose any one disorder, just shows that you are suffering. Thinking you are going insane, not sleeping, not eating, not getting exercise, the absolute terror about the bizarre experiences you are having and despair because no one else takes you seriously, et cetera counts as a severe stress. That is enough to bring on even more symptoms, and the result is a snowball effect. It just gets worse and worse. Those of us who are recovering from DID know it as the "DID crisis"; this is when we tend to have the most florid and frightening hallucinations and other symptoms.

I just took the test again and scored a 60. My 5 highest scores were 19,20,21,22, and 28

Such a high score absolutely merits a formal assessment for dissociative disorders. Please find someone to do a SCID-D assessment. It would be time and effort well spent. Your current team is not qualified to do a SCID-D assessment (or they would have done it already).

Given such a high score, I would expect your anxiety is very, very high right now. Severe anxiety can make dissociative symptoms a lot worse. In a 3-phase trauma therapy phase 1 work helps to lower anxiety. This can be done with or without medications. The work teaches skills that you can use at any time in the future if anxiety becomes an issue again.

Many health care professionals unfortunately were trained that depersonalization / derealization and dissociative amnesia are merely symptoms of anxiety and the Schneiderian first rank symptoms (hearing voices, visual hallucinations etc) are always symptoms of psychosis. That is incorrect. In recent years specialists in diagnosing schizophrenia have begun to de-emphasize the Schneiderian first rank symptoms because those have been shown to be more typical of the major dissociative disorders than of the psychotic disorders.