James K. Denson wrote: > > > One of my students asked me a question about the following DID video > from the popular Showtime series The United States of Tara. If you > follow the below link, the video states that possibly 5 out of 100 > people may have DID. Is this an accurate statistic? Do you think > this is accurate information to show the students? >
Ha! Yes, I think you should show it to them, but at the same time you should also show them that it is a standard statistical trick of advocacy groups to expand the definition of a condition to include a largish proportion of the population, but then to use as examples fairly extreme "core" cases so that readers falsely think this is typical of the broader definition. One sees this frequently with the def'n of "mental illness," in which almost drug use gets tacitly included, and thus one can claim that 10%, 20% or more of the population suffers from "mental illness." With DID in particular, there was a "dissociation" questionnaire developed in the early 1990s (I think) that included such banal items as "I sometimes drift off and lose track of time." If you include people who experience this in the broad def'n of DID, then it looks like a lot of people suffer from (a form of) it. Almost any condition that has recently been reworked to include "spectrum" in the name (fetal alcohol, autism) is almost certainly playing this game. Chris -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-2100 ex. 66164 [email protected] http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ ========================== --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
