DID & Auto-immune Disease

Talk about anything related to having DID and a physical illness/auto-immune disease (ie, fibro).  Do you think there’s a relationship between the two?

1 thought on “DID & Auto-immune Disease

  1. JigsawAnalogy-ellis

    i’ve thought for years that the relationship is that both dissociation and fibro (or other autoimmune diseases) have a component that is caused by trauma. so if they’re both caused by trauma, then there will be a greater overlap in people who have both than the number of people in the general population who have either.

    i think that trauma actually changes the way our bodies work, and not just how our minds work.

    but it kind of makes me cranky when doctors talk about “somatization disorder” because a lot of doctors seem to dismiss anything they can’t easily diagnose as “all in their head” or “because they experienced trauma” and act like they don’t then actually have to treat what’s going on.

    but maybe this is because i’ve had doctors who dismissed things as “psychosomatic” when it turned out, they just hadn’t had a good angle with the x-ray machine. (i mean, it really *was* a broken foot, they just didn’t see the break until they sent me in for a bone scan when i kept insisting there was something wrong!!)

    so i guess the thing is, *i* think that trauma or other emotional stuff can result in *real* illness in our bodies, and not something that’s “all in our heads.”

    mostly because for me, emotional stuff really comes out clearly in my body. at times when i didn’t have the freedom to speak the way i needed to, i really truly got strep throat; at times when i kept hearing things i couldn’t handle hearing, i got real ear infections. just because they were tied to my emotional state didn’t mean they weren’t also real illnesses.

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