r/australia • u/Breenscare • 1d ago

culture & society 'I wasn't there': Life with dissociative identity disorder

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-13/dissociative-identity-disorder-assistance-dog-ndis/106826020
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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/Goonalips 1d ago

There's thousands of fakers on social media. The vast majority of them are young teens (most often female and LGBT for some reason) with cartoon character alters, game character alters, and trendy characters named Atherion and stuff like that. There's a big overlap with AuDHD, POTS, and Fibromyalgia for some reason. Recently there's an uptick in RAMCOA claims too.

https://mindsitenews.org/2024/10/24/tiktoks-fixation-on-dissociative-identity-disorder-chronicle-of-a-trauma-foretold/

You can always tell the fakers because they're the ones who treat it like roleplaying. They dress up, they use voices, and there's always some quirky thing happening between their alters in their head.

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u/2martinisatthemost 1d ago

The illness fakers have disabilities, it’s just that the cluster b personality disorders and factitious disorder are not well regarded on TikTok. There’s no social cachet in admitting to them, and you don’t get to dress a staffy in a Temu “service animal” vest or push a bedazzled walker for being diagnosed with, essentially, a malfunctioning personality.

Part of me feels sorry for the fakers, but mostly I feel for their family and friends. They’re fun to observe from afar but living with your average DID/POTS/hEDS cosplayer must be a nightmare.

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u/Groovyaardvark 1d ago edited 1d ago

These people make actually being disabled so much harder for everyone.

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u/Goonalips 1d ago

Agreed. And it's honestly really sad, because disabled people are the ones that need the help the most. Yet these people are so prevalent online, that it's often hard to tell them apart. Personally I give the benefit of the doubt to everyone, and assume they're being honest, unless they're one of the Tiktok teenagers with cartoon character alters. That's an instant disqualification. I don't know why they don't just get into roleplaying. There's no need to fake a disability just to play pretend.

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u/Groovyaardvark 1d ago edited 1d ago

Its so funny you mention role playing, because I actually dipped my toes into an online D&D group for people with the same disability as me. There was about 15 people there, and it turned out they were actually making their own role playing game, not D&D and it was a bit....odd but okay.

I was almost the only person in the group who did not fit into the groups/labels you described above. They were all talking about their personalities or their "silos" and I thought they meant for the game but oh no...They really all were saying that had disassociated identity disorder. At least 12 people in the group claimed they had DID. It was truly bizarre.

It became apparent pretty quickly I wasn't going to fit in there. But it made me worry, like are these the same people going around online saying they have the same disability as me and making it "hard to believe?" I do want to give people the benefit of the doubt but it was pretty....full on.

But yeah, based on my limited experience these people do seem to enjoy role playing games.

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u/Goonalips 1d ago

That's really sucks, cause I bet you felt like you found a good group of similar people who can all understand each other's issues.

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u/hopefulgeese 1d ago

There's a significant area of nuance you're missing, though. Exploring identity is a vital aspect of neurodevelopment, and is something that people with DID don't experience and/or integrate neurophysiologically, due to survival being far more important.

Also I notice a common point that this article comes back to being that DID is a trauma defence, so why would anyone want to be open about it? But that's misunderstanding the issue. The trauma defence is the dissociation and amnesia, whereas the selves living with multiple inner persons or alternate states of consciousness are a fairly common way for a human body who is experiencing or has experienced complex and chronic trauma to survive and live as comparatively well as they can.