How TDI Youtubers are slowly changing psychiatry in France

In mid-January, YouTuber Olympe, who suffers from dissociative identity disorder (DID), made headlines all over the press after announcing plans to resort to assisted suicide in Belgium. The 23-year-old young woman, a victim of sexual abuse and bullying in her childhood, is not entirely unknown as she has more than 260,000 subscribers on her channel “Le journal d’Olympe” and 600,000 followers on TikTok. She recounts her coexistence with the 15 “alters” who inhabit her “system,” and regularly “switch” from one to the other in front of the camera.

Like Olympe, more and more young adults, mostly young women, are documenting their condition online to help other sufferers and break down stereotypes. Because DID is a disorder that carries many fantasies. Made popular by the movie Divided, by M. Night Shyamalan, in which a man with 23 personalities ends up kidnapping three young girls, this mental illness has been listed since 1994 in the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). In France, however, his diagnosis is reported. ” One in two psychiatrists doubt that the existence of dissociative identity disorder does not exist “, explains Dr. Coraline Hingray, a psychiatrist at the University Hospital of Nancy and specialized in the treatment of psychotraumas, who conducted a survey of 900 colleagues in January. Patients then receive four to seven diagnoses before arriving at DID.. ” These can be false diagnoses or diagnoses associated with DID, highlights Coraline Hingray. Pop culture has brought the idea that it was a pathology with extreme, very visible manifestations, which does not help to recognize this chameleon-like disease. After a trauma, the brain goes into survival mode and disconnects the body from emotions. The patient is sometimes not even aware of this splitting of the self. »

Years of medical wandering

Zelliana (@zellianasystem), a 25-year-old student from Grenoble diagnosed in 2020, recounts long years of medical wanderings punctuated by depression and suicide attempts:

” As far as I can remember, I’ve always been a weird kid. I had a violent amnesia, I found myself in certain places without having the slightest idea how I got there. Around the age of 12 or 13, I became aware of an alter, Isabelle, taking over my body. I thought I was possessed, but because everyone thought I was crazy, I stopped talking about it testifies the young woman, victim of violence from her parents. ” A first psychiatrist diagnosed me with depression and complex PTSD. Then a psychologist told me I had high potential, just as it was becoming fashionable. Another psychiatrist told me that TDI was invented by American lobbies “, adds Zelliana who lives with 11 known alters. She chases : “ After a big blackout, I started learning about TDI, joining English-speaking communities on Facebook, Instagram or Reddit, because there were almost no resources in French.. »

Zelliana

Cristina Pax-Rodriguez, host of The Peculiar Club, has long struggled with recurring amnesias, anxiety attacks, and moments of ” loss of control “. She too was physically and verbally abused at home. It was in college, after several months of therapy, that a psychiatrist first told him about BPD and DID.” Then it disappeared in the wild. So I did my research and started talking about it on social media. Then I found a trained psychologist in 2021, who helps me work on communication between my alters, and find harmony in my system. ” THE ” switches unmastered has become much rarer for the 22-year-old content creator.

Hope for the future

While regretting a form of ” glamorous and sometimes caricatured representation of TDI on the Internet, which somewhat discredits this disorder in the eyes of already skeptical health professionals, Dr. Hingray sees positive effects in this online media coverage by key stakeholders. “Talking about it will inevitably lead caregivers to learn more, train and take better care of patients. Within these internet resources, I recommend the testimonies of Maïlé and Partielles, whom I appreciate for their scientific approach. »

Behind the Partielles.com site, a mine of information on DID and multiple identities, we find Epsi and Kara, two thirty-year-old Belgians diagnosed with DID, also present on social networks behind the image of avatars of small animals, to preserve their anonymity. While the blog initially highlighted their personal experiences, “ we wanted to quickly disseminate scientific studies, translate resources so that they were accessible to all, emphasizes Epsi. We try to show the immense variety of forms this disease can take “. Focus on “traumatic reminders”, dossier on sleep and multiplicity, Partielles.com has become a point of reference for the general public and for insiders. ” Today psychiatrists advise us, psychology students ask us to re-read the memoirs, it is proof that things are going in the right direction. Kara says.

Zelliana, for her part, has carried out collaborative projects with psychologists, and plans to translate her thesis as a psychiatrist in fundamental psychology into English. ” We are getting more and more people with TDI to be trained in science on the subject, and in a few years this will have an impact “, notes the one who follows a 2 international master’s degree in neuroscience and neurobiology at the University of Grenoble. Cristina Pax-Rodriguez, head of The Peculiar Club, noticed this a change in the way people look in recent years, “while in 2020 I was taken for an enlightened”.

At the end of January, during the Brain Congress 2023, the annual meeting of French-speaking psychiatry, which took stock of dissociative disorders (“Dissociative disorders: fad effect or reality?”), dr. Hingray called on his colleagues to take an interest in trade defense instruments. ” I try to convey the message that we must forget caricatures, that diagnosis is difficult and that it is not because they have never been diagnosed that this disorder does not exist. Especially since according to international studies the prevalence is enormous: about 1% of the population would be affected.. »