I must be really dissociated--I'm not allowed to watch it from my 'location'.
Yikes --Mike On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 9:30 AM, Christopher D. Green <chri...@yorku.ca>wrote: > > 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 > chri...@yorku.ca > http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ > > ========================== > > --- > To make changes to your subscription contact: > > Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu) > > --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
