My daughter and I have had a difficult relationship. I am currently 41 and she is 20. She was a difficult child and when she was 18 I kicked her out to live with my mother because she was often impossible to live with. She would get so angry over what seemed small things and i had gotten to the point of being afraid of her. Since then we have at times a wonderful relationship and at other times an awful one. She is now in the army and is in Kuwait headed for Iraq. Before she left I went to see her in Mississippi and she revealled to me that she doesn't remember ever cusing at me or fighting with me and does't remember phone calls she's had with various people. When I got home I started thinking back on her growing up and the wierd things she would do but swear she didn't and so on. I am wondering now if she has DID??? I don't know what to do.

Wow, do you know if she was ever abused or severely traumatized by anyone? "missing time" and "forgetfulness" could be a sign of mearly blocking out portions of your life but since you're posted here on this board then DID has surely crossed your mind. In a nut shell, yes these are symptoms of MPD/DID, as well as the "mood swings" and other things but try to remember that "depression" and other mental disorders can mimic these exact signs. I'm afraid I haven't been of much help to you, maybe someone else will come along with more help for you. Good luck!
Candy

Be careful with self-diagnosing DID! Do a lot of reading about the hazards of this diagnosis and read about how DID has harmed many patients and how it alienated families from each other.

I think DID is a cultural fad. Trauma, if it occurred, need not lead to a dissociative illness. If you start treating her like she has a mental disorder, she may come to believe it.

Read Tana Dineen, Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry is Doing to People

Your daughter is 20 and acting like a 20 year old. She is on her way to war, why would she want to dwell or remember all the bad that happened? I would want to think of the good times I had with family. She needs family and friends and good memories of home to make her feel safe and loved in a war zone. My advise, love her. Forget the DID.

In reply to Zoe's post, I do agree with the first paragraph, you must be careful about self-diagnosis, you need to do alot of research. DID was a cultural fad at one time because the professional community that deals with mental health had no guidlines as to how to diagnose and treat MPD/DID and there are a lot of other mental conditions that do tend to mimic the symptoms that are experienced in a survivor with MPD/DID.
There have been alot of families destroyed by this diagnosis and when another survivor is diagnosed, you can probably bet your life that there will be problems in the family and yes even alienation as Zoe states.
However MPD/DID is a real and legitimate diagnosis, the problems are that therapist and psyachiatrist have not leaned how to diagnose MPD/DID. I'm sure the book that Zoe refers to is also educational, however this society is so ridden with skeptics, where what people really need to know is the truth about MPD/DID.
Yes I agree that this diagnosis has been overdone and over exagerated by many I'm sure. But from my own
experience I can tell you that MPD/DID is a very real diagnosis.
I have suffered all my life with confusion, missing time, noise in my head, vomiting, physical pain throughout my body, severe depression and many other symptoms and when I was finally diagnosed it was like my whole life was falling into place. I did not go into therapy first, My alters and memories are what took me to the doctor. I started seeing them during my mental break down and a week later I was in the office of my psychiatrist who in turn referred me to our therapist.
Fot those who do not believe that this is a legitimate diagnosis I challenge you to mentally place yourself in the home that you grew up in and imagine that your mother or dad terrorizes you not once, twice or three times a day but for hours on end every single day, while you are forced to stay quiet. Any noise that you make could and probably will set off your caregiver and make them so angry that they put you in a closet after doing physical things to you with the crayons that you were just drawing with.
If by some chance you accidentally do something like play in the car at age 3 and accidentally roll it out in the street, you're so terrified of the reprocussions that you hide and pray to God that he somehow take your life before she can find you but to no avail because she does find you and then does such horrid deads to your body that you cannot even say them in public, you tell me how your mind could survive "whole" and in one piece.
You tell me why in the world would we make up such horrible things when we know that we will loose our family (sisters and brothers) because we are telling these secrets that nobody wanted to hear.
Yes I do agree that there have been way too many mistakes made "BY DOCTORS IN THE MENTAL HEALTH FIELD" in the past who were way too eager to add another survivor of severe child hood abuse with MPD/DID to their own resume.
There were way too many mistakes made while trying to sort out what makes a survivor with "MPD/DID" legitimate, and many other questions.
Zoe if you indeed cannot comprehend the pain and damage that comes from severe childhood abuse then count yourself lucky and thank your folks for taking wonderful care of you as a child and cherish their love forever. But also remember that not every child has such loving, careing, kind parents as yours. What you do not understand, you cannot judge!!!
Candy Little Webmaster!

in any form of the military people have to take complete psychological testings of various kinds. if she had DID she would have recieved a mendical discharge after her first psychological interview and testing protocals.

Hi Katherine, it's good to have you on the boards! The odd thing about MPD/DID is that a survivor can live many many decades and not ever be diagnosed with it. These alters main purpose is to conceal any type of mental disturbances. Usually the survivor is the first to know that something isn't quite right. But diagnosing MPD/DID can be very tricky because most if not all of the sypmtoms of MPD/DID tend to mimic other mental disorders and illnesses. I've heard of so many stories of survivors who've gone through alot of testing, only to get negative results of any form.
Candy

thanks Candy. I have relatives in the military and one of them WAS discharged for being DID. The testing that th e military does is very stressful and geared for getting reactions that may point to such things as DID, schizophrenia and so on. They also vidio tape these testing sessions and have experts in the field of many mental health disorders point out any discrepancies. you would not believe how many military folks go to their manditory psychological testings trying to get OUT of the military once they have figured out that boot camp and so on is not what they expected. They are extemely thorough in the military. Boot camp is not just climbing over things. its also withstanding various types of torture because military folks have an extremely high rate for things like getting captured, kidnapped and so on by the other side and tortured into telling military stratagies, secrets ect. my relative had to go through things like having live amo shot at and over him/her, mock rape and other tortures, the military is very thourough in their training and testing both psychological and physically of their soldiers.
They know that Some of those in the military end up in areas like intellegency and foriegn affairs. They don't want someone who is going to get triggered by someone who happens to look like their abuser and start acting out abuse memories and possibly secrets that they learned in the military when they are dealing with top secret affairs. They don't want someone who is going to suddenly sit down like a 5 year old child and cry because their drill sargent yelled at them like one of their abusers did which caused them to switch into that 5 year old alter. My relative had been in therapy secretly (with out the family knowing) for years and his/her therapy professionals never diagnosed DID but the military found it simply by tying her down to a plank for a mock drowning drill (one of the popular terrorist things that military personnel go through when they are captured, kidnapped ect by the other side)and she was immediately out of there.

If this daughter in this thread has DID she would have been discharged during bootcamp "hell week".