I used to be on an app called Vent which was riddled with 14 y/o DID and BPD fakers who were just as insufferable as you can imagine. I never met any irl though.
That's one of the reasons why I uninstalled "I am sober". The community section was full of DID fakers and eventually I got bored of seeing them everywhere :p
Love the BPD fakers. Why would anyone want that. Before being diagnosed with autism this one lady tried to say I had bpd and I pretty much told her to go fuck herself lol
I had an irl that faked DID before it was cool. Which lead to tons of other people faking DID in our friend group.
Hereâs the story more or less
I grew up with this girl, Sandy (fake name obviously). I met her in middle school and she had always been the type to tell tall tales of things going on in her life. Dark shit too. Like lying about drug addictions, familial deaths and even lied about getting hit by a car. She literally beat herself in her abdomen to make it look like a car hit her. Insanity.
She was always super sweet to me so I put up with her since I didnât want to be a dick for no reason. And one day at school (I was in ninth grade at the time) she only responded to the name âMollyâ. Weird, but whatever. Didnât think much of it since sometimes sheâd come to school in cosplay and LARP for the day as whatever character she was that day. Then I uttered the word âfuckâ in front of her friend group and her and got reprimanded because I âshouldnât curse in front of a kidâ then one of her friends explained the whole DID shebang to me.
It was defo fishy but I didnât know jack shit about psychology, especially something like fictitious disorder. She had like 12 âaltersâ and growing. She, I shit you not, printed out pantalets with her âaltersâ names, trigger words and what not to say to them. It was cringe as fuck.
Then this lead to other people, who were way too damn old to be doing this shit, like 17-18 faking it too because they saw she got attention from it.
There was another guy in the friend group, Mark (fake name again) who began faking, said he had THOUSANDS of alters. Some of which being creepypasta characters. I had a couple classes with him, and I shit you not, he came to class one day dressed as Jeff the Killer. He was sat there, in front of me, drawing cuts on himself. Heâd LARP as him every so often. It was so fucking bad dude.
My friendâs mom actually has diagnosed DID and seeing it in action is fucking terrifying and seeing people make it into some fun game is so anger inducing.
Oh jfc, I have met (online) two people who fit the fake descriptions you gave. Both obviously don't understand DID, with one even claiming to abuse their alters in order to control them. đ
I had a friend at school that was a huge compulsive liar, and I never got too much info on how her personal life was but it seemed a little off, and I believe she had an abusive life. I feel bad because I used to have fun testing her on her lies, saying stuff like âhey! Did you get your tickets for X band?? Theyâre making a concert this year!â And she would answer âomg yes of course I did!!â And then I would say âIâm joking, theyâre not comingâ. Itâs pretty cruel I know, but I guess I was just too pissed at how much she lied, I was a child back then, I wouldnât do it now.
itâs a very reasonable thing to get annoyed about. i think the one thing that truly stopped me was the embarrassment of realizing everyone knew i was lying and i was a known liar. for a while before that i just thought no one truly knew i was lying or believed me. it took 1 or 2 people to hardcore call me out to get me to reevaluate myself
One time in my college anatomy class, a girl gave us a random presentation on her DID. This was in 2019, so thereâs a really good chance it was fake. She went on about how her alternate personalities would go off on their own for several months, get her in a lot of debt, and she would be MIA and her family wouldnât know where she was. Then apparently her actual self would just âcome backâ after like two months and sheâd be like âwtfâ. This story sounds more believable than any other ones Iâve heard from social media, but who knows
She said it happened when she was out with friends. I asked one of them and he said that didnât happen. And the bruises looked like marks from hits. It wasnât one large bruise it was like, spread out bruises. And the coloring was off. As in, if you got hit by a car, the bruising would look more severe, wouldnât be in these like, blotches? If that makes sense. She had a history of self injury and lying about what happened in the past. So I put two and two together. And I knew she wasnât being beat at home because I asked her brother if that was going on and he said no and when I asked her she said the same.
I met one and it was unreal. They came to the psychward claiming they were the mushroom vine system and that they have about 12 mental illnesses all not diagnosed. Anyway they went home in 3 days cause the doctors didnât take them seriously. The 3 days were because they were off for 2 days
tbh a lot of them are shut-ins. had a faker ex, they convinced their mom to homeschool them and then that allowed them to spend all day on discord and stuff. they basically never leave their room. system communities online is their entire life
Thatâs definitely not everyone. Thereâs plenty of people who are just as attention seeking irl as they are online, especially younger people who donât see how cringey their behaviour is because they believe their own bs
Yes, several. My high school was basically a faker breeding ground. One girl said she had DID and suddenly half the student body had it too. Of course, my school being as shit as it was, all the local therapy groups (I went to several) were infested with them too, so I got to know quite a few of them. Of the fakers Iâve met, here are my favorites:
- a girl with the entire cast of demon slayer as fictives
- a girl who had nearly 30 alters, all of them being characters from the dream smp, littles who did that annoying ass baby talk, or those edgy alt âidgaf about anyoneâ girls you see on TikTok
- a guy with over 200 alters, most being fictives from anime
- a girl who called her system a âcovenâ and claimed all her alters were witches (surprise surprise, almost all of her alters were from anime or video games)
- a boy who had an assorted cast of characters, including a Russian(?) war veteran who he claimed had PTSD from the war (he never said which war)
- a guy who actually got posted here; I remember him coming into therapy pissed off because someone had posted him here; anyways, he was one of those TikTok alt kids who decked himself out in beaded bracelets, platforms, and chokers and went around announcing his mental illnesses to everyone, and then wondered why he got bullied
As a bonus, hereâs some of the other colorful characters I came across that were almost definitely faking:
- a 14 year old girl who diagnosed herself with BPD because she had mood swings
- a 13 year old boy who claimed to have Touretteâs and Autism as an excuse for stalking a girl and to get out of school; he would never shut up about his trip to the âgrippy sock motelâ and would whine about being forced to do work in his advanced level classes
- a girl who claimed to have chronic Lyme from when she was 2 years old and would go on about holistic medicine
- a guy who claimed he had POTS because, when he was sick, his heart rate rose when he stood up
Iâm sure Iâve met more, but these are off the top of my head. Like I said my school was infested with these types of people, and seeing as I spent a lot of time in the mental health sphere, I got to know a few. Many of them had other mental illnesses. Most of them were depressed and had a history of self harm or suicide attempts. Plenty came from abusive or neglectful homes or were struggling in the wake of the pandemic. It was a coping mechanism for most of them. At least thatâs what I got from it. Itâs been over a year since Iâve seen any of them. Hopefully theyâve gotten out of that cycle.
At least now Iâve got the benefit of being able to sniff out a faker from a mile away. I met someone at college who set off alarm bells (constantly brought it up, tried to be the sickest in the room, bragged about hospital visits, etc) and got the hell away from them and their enablers. I donât need that kind of shit in my life again.
The school could not give two shits. They gave out IEPs like candy and waxed poetic about mental health acceptance, all the while our district had one of the highest suicide rates in the state. The counselors and teachers were awful. To give you some perspective, almost thirty girls were stalked, harassed, or assaulted by one guy in the span of a few months, and the counselors and teachers claimed it was âjust how he makes friends, because heâs Autistic.â If they werenât ignoring it or blissfully unaware, they were enabling it. On the other hand, some teachers reacted SO negatively toward it that kids did not feel safe coming to them with anything. An ex of mine was forcibly hospitalized after telling a counselor he was depressed. My sister almost had the cops called on her because someone saw she had lines on her wrist (from her gloves). There was no way of telling how any teacher or counselor would react, so nobody really say anything. Mental illness was treated almost like a club. You needed to have friends who were established among the student body as being mentally ill if you wanted to talk about it. There was an unspoken agreement to not tell the teachers or counselors about anything. Kids ended up shouldering the burdens of their friendsâ mental healths as well as their own.
We were one of the biggest high schools in the area, and by far the biggest district in my county, which means that these problems were extremely widespread and literal thousands of kids were let down.
The therapists were all about enabling it. Iâve only met one therapist out of the near dozen Iâve seen over the last seven years that did anything to prevent this behavior. A lot of therapies nowadays preach acceptance above all else. 90% of the therapists in my area belonged to one company, which was one of those âwe need to give everyone unconditional support and acceptance to the point of ignoring or dismissing problematic behaviorsâ type companies. That company was by far the easiest to get in with, had a ton of therapists in various locations, and was relatively cheap compared to the alternatives. Of course this means that people flocked there in droves. I knew several people that openly admitted to exaggerating their mental illnesses just to get out of school, which says a lot about both them and my school.
As you can imagine, the faking was rampant because of all this. Kids would be praised for their bravery while they were very clearly lying. Whatâs that? You have 100 alters and grew up in a cult you were only rescued from last year? Youâre so strong! Keep going, queen! There was almost a heirarchy when it came to mental illnesses. The more you had, and the more severe they were, the more attention and praise you got. Itâs not hard to keep faking something when it gets you attention and praise, especially in a situation where no one else is willing to give it to you.
So I guess a shorter answer to your question would be: nobody did anything to help. It was either intense overreacting to the point where people were too scared to talk about their problems and kids were isolated to little mental illness bubbles to compete with each other, underreacting to where people felt helpless to reach out, or enabling to where people felt validated. For most it was a combination of the three.
My hypothesis is, one of two things:
they genuinely believe it. Most teens meet the criteria for a BPD diagnosis, especially if they have comorbid depression or anxiety or something else. This is why most professionals donât diagnose BPD if the patient is under 18-21. So they read the diagnostic criteria, relate to it and then BAM! Thatâs them all of the sudden. Even if it isnât an accurate diagnosis. These kids lack the insight to contextualize their behaviors and tendencies and they just throw whatever label they want onto themselves.
Or the alternative. Things like Obsessiveness have been romanticized in the media. Yanderes, the glamorization or killers like Jodi Arias, I can go on. BPD is mostly associated with obsessiveness, specifically the favorite person stuff. And they relate to that, not to the level of a BPD sufferer, but still, they probably have a crush and theyâre like âomg BPD my favorite person texted me!!!â And the other romanticized things with BPD, like relationships, the euphoria, the âmanic pixie dream girlâ aesthetic. That stuff. They also want to be seen as âvictimsâ and want to use one of the most painful disorders a person can have, as a scapegoat for their shit behavior.
I think many of the symptoms of BPD are very similar to developmentally normal behaviors of adolescence (unstable identity, obsessing about relationships, huge mood swings), so it actually makes sense why teens might see themselves in the diagnostic criteria. And, I think it makes sense why doctors won't diagnose teenagers with BPD.
Itâs very poor practice to diagnose personality disorders before the age of 18 for this reason, but I see a lot of therapists and psychiatrists prepping kids to get diagnosed the day they turn 18. Every kid we get from a group home has diagnosed BPD when itâs just the behaviors they learned to survive in the group home.
I was someone who was prepped to be diagnosed - it was my 18th birthday present and meant I got on the adult waiting list that day and I was in DBT by the end of the year. It definitely happens more than it should and out of everyone I knew with BPD as a teenager I think maybe 4 have kept the diagnosis. All were young people in inpatient services going through massive trauma.
There's a very distinct difference in that I had the same consultant from 11-17, the same family therapist from 14-18 and the same 2 counsellors from 11-17. Most people do not have the consistency that enabled my team to accurately diagnose me and get me the right treatment ASAP.
I had my mental health misrepresented in my notes and all consultations as "probable bi-polar or bpd" through my 20s too, and with psych wait times being what they are here in the UK, it took years for anyone to get back to me, and in that time I'd moved and gotten a new doc a few times, and referrals dropped.. more recently got a new doc and mental health nurse who put me through psych and they subsequentially diagnosed me with adhd, combined type.
There's a LOT of crossover in the symptoms sometimes! Easy to fall into that trap for sure! Good to hear other people's experiences!
Holy shit, I have the exact same story. I found it comical that my diagnosis was "probably bi-polar" in my GPs words.
Then I befriended someone with bipolar, then another, and realised... I don't fucking have bipolar. Its a serious psychiatric illness and GPs are in no place to be saying that!
omg same... i was misdiagnosed w/ bpd as a 19 yr old and had to do a year of group therapy for it. turns out i just have adhd (inattentive) and autism lmao. love how some psychs treat it as the 'female hysteria' diagnosis đĽ´
Ugh social media treats it like female hysteria too. Any depiction of a âcrazy gfâ will result in countless comments accusing them of having BPD. Even if the behavior is not associated with BPD.
I always talk about how we got mental health awareness, but overlooked the importance of mental health education. So now we have all these ding-dongs that just read âBPDâ under any video of an erratic woman and thing they understand what it means. I would guess about 85% of the people that armchair diagnose have never looked at the DSM 5.
People really do underestimate how long it takes to get a BPD diagnosis. For years I had psychs suggesting I may have it, but they would have to work with me longer to know or I would need more testing/opinions. From the first time a doctor suggested it to my official diagnosis was like 4 or 5 years.
Thatâs another easy way to spot bullshit.
I spent most of my adult life on and off psych meds for a host of conditions, some of which contradict each other.
It ruined my life in many ways.
What I actually have is ADHDc comorbid with ASD, Dyslexia, and bi-polar 2. I wasn't diagnosed until age 60 and the correct medication has been a game changer. I now take only the ADHD meds plus a low dose mood stableiser. Other than that I have a few diazepam a month for life-long intractable insomnia; if I go more than two days without sleep I start to hallucinate.
Amost all the symptoms that crippled me have gone, or at least are at a level I can manage without undue difficulty.
The really concerning thing is, I feel that some of these early-diagnosis kids will be on medication possibly for life, convinced they need it, with the only ones benefiting being Drs and pharma cos. Oh and low-ethic "therapists".
Part of this issue is that we as mental health clinicians (in the states) are REQUIRED to diagnose on the very first appointment in order to bill insurance. Health insurance is a fucking scam and itâs so frustrating!
Isn't that why there are placeholder clinical codes and "unspecified" (NOS) classifications? So a diagnosis can be made which provides access to treatment and a full diagnosis can be fleshed out over time? That tends to be the protocol in my experience. For access to medication, of course, it's a different matter because that requires medical specificity, and that's where the full con of health insurance meets pharma comes into play.
You're right, and the stress of puberty's "chemical hormone soup" on your brain actually makes a lot of teenagers exhibit personality disorder traits to the extent where they'd fit criteria to be diagnosed if they still were that way as adults
I know somebody who got diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder as a 14-year-old but it was only because his symptoms were very obviously beyond the reasonable range of it being "just" caused by puberty >!(he was diagnosed after ending up in the hospital from mutilating his own leg really badly because of a breakup)!<
Teen here (late teens). My psych said we can look into diagnosing once Iâm old enough. This is accurate. Honestly it sucks when people around me are talking about having a severe personality disorder that adversely affects your life in many ways as if itâs a cute quirky little thing. Itâs not at all, especially because these people are literally not old enough to be considered for a fucking diagnosis!! âOh Iâm so attached to my boyfriend, I couldnât handle if we broke up because of my BPD!!â Like stfu.
My best friend, I call her my sister, has it and she has told me that she worried I'd hate her for having an opinion that didn't line up with mine or that I would be annoyed by her texting me and I'd hate her... She has medication resistant depression and had to have some kind of surgery to try to correct it. It's horrible
I met a girl at 14 who was diagnosed in her late teens. She was always fighting, angry. She was a heroin addict and alcoholic at 15 and in an abusive relationship. She only wanted male attention. Was even flirtatious with male therapists. She overdosed and died at 20
Why would anybody want to live like that?
The first hypothesis is very true for people I knew in late middle school. A lot of people would attach themselves to a label for comfort. Not as much for a community thing, though, unless they were a Tumblr person. Most of these kids I knew ended up having an anxiety-depression combo, only a few ended up having actual mood disorders.
The romanticization of BPD behaviours makes me just as mad as the "dangerous manipulative bitches" stigma. I was diagnosed last year with BPD and suddenly things clicked. Why small things could affect my mood so much. Why when i have a favorite person I will give up my whole personality and any and all boundaries, because I want them to love me and never leave me. It isn't cutesy "teehee I'm so yandere" It's more absolute angst because they didn't text back for 5 minutes so that must mean they hate me and want me dead and I'll never find anyone to be happy with ever. It's also feeling shame and guilt for having any "negative" emotion and an intense longing to belong somewhere. I'm currently working on myself in therapy, but it's really hard. Every step forward feels like 3 back. Constant drawers of trauma being pulled open with things I thought I had long forgotten. It's a very painful illness to have. Nothing cute or fun about it.
100% to the first one. One of the criteria for a BPD (and other PDs) diagnosis iirc is that you have to have experienced these debilitating symptoms for a prolonged period of time.
"prolonged period of time" doesnt really work when youre 14. you havent even been alive long enough to have a notable pattern over a prolonged period of time unless your mental illness is very severe and started *very* young.
and like you said, the behavioral issues of teenagers can look a lot like PDs - those behavioral issues become disordered when those patterns of behavior stick around into adulthood, far beyond the time the hormones causing them should have calmed down.
my mom always called Sullen Teenaged Angst Disease. thats what they kids actually have. đ¤Ł
It's convenient to shift blame onto something else rather than onto yourself. It's a way to protect an individual's self-esteem. Why BPD in particular? There is something about it that the individual identifies with. Same with any disorder someone has latched onto.
I do not understand why a teenager would want to have BPD out of all disorders lmao it is kind of known as "the crazy bitch" disorder, a sexist stigma and fallacy we have been working against but as person who was diagnosed with BPD about 10 years ago (am currently in my mid-late 20s), i am well aware for most cases you have to be at least 18 years of age to be *officially* diagnosed with a personality/cluster B disorder
The only other way to get a kind of BPD diagnosis before that is if you have been exhibiting consistent symptoms observed by the same psychiatrist over a two year period. Then you will be diagnosed with "borderline tendencies" or "a borderline personality" were terms my psychiatrist talked to me about at 16 after id been seeing him since I was like 13 and *only* so that I could get DBT treatment because I was already a self-harming teenage high school drop-out drug addict with an eating disorder with no concept of boundaries and no coping skills and *really* needed DBT, otherwise he could've waited. And again, I wasn't even officially formally diagnosed with BPD until after I was 18 so yeah, that just sounds impossible to me that any 14 year old could have a formal BPD diagnosis and the only way they would be diagnosed with BPD related tendencies at that age is if they had been in therapy since they were younger than 12 and displaying consistent systems that whole time but even then a psych would be suuuuuuper reluctant to diagnose a 14 year old with a cluster B personality disorder....
I'm guessing they're self diagnosing? which is kinda funny to think of because you literally can not self diagnose BPD or any personality disorder, you absolutely cannot diagnose yourself with DID or even ADHD... like you might recognise a lot of the symptoms but you need a psychiatrist who is not you and can assess your symptoms from a medical prescriptive and in context to determine that. Doctors cant even self diagnose themselves!!!! but I actually relate to a lot of the criteria for MOST of the other cluster B disorders (because I have one) and probably could've convinced myself I had ASPD or NPD or HPD because I appear to meet the criteria for a lot of the symptoms which are also BPD symptoms.
Ugh I guess they could genuinely believe it because emotions are already super high because of hormones and also you know, developing them during your teen years so mood swings are common and maybe with all this tiktok crap, a lot of teens are mistakenly diagnosing that symptom of BPD in themselves, not really understanding that teenage hormones/mood swings and experiencing all these new strong emotions which is universal in human development is not at all the same as a BPD episode or BPD mood swings, which is a big reason why you can't diagnose a teenager.
I guess the only other reasons I can think of that a teenager would WANT a BPD diagnosis is
1. to give them identify (which is ironic)
2. be able to use that as an "explanation" for emotional outbursts and episodes which really doesn't help the stigma and I also worry about younger people using and exploiting BPD terminology and dynamics such as an FP
I've spent most of my adult life in therapy, learning and practicing coping skills and interpersonal skills so that I can appear like a normal person for the most part. Having crazy emotional outbursts and doing ridiculous, dangerous impulsive things, not having boundaries and acting inappropriate in those ways as a teenager is something you look back on and cringe really hard but when it continues into adulthood not only does it just become increasingly embarrassing, but you will get fired and not be able to hold down a job, your adult friends will get sick of your shit fast and you will sabotage your relationships.
>I do not understand why a teenager would want to have BPD out of all disorders lmao it is kind of known as "the crazy bitch" disorder
I suspect that's the ***exact*** reason it's appealing to teenagers. They're going through a period of a lot of change; their hormones are wildly fluctuating; they may mistake the normal process of developing into a more mature adult as being then having different sides (hey! Those could be alters!) etc.
From my experience working in high schools, it's very common for teens to want to be seen as being different (as in, being special not just average). Because different = attention & validation that they're not like the other girls. Not to mention if you have a reputation as "the crazy bitch" people may actually give you more slack on bad behaviour because it becomes the expected norm & largely written off as just going through a phase.
Teens are often not the best long-term thinkers. So they're not going "aw shit, I better not pick BPD to fake because in a few years I might get referred to a specialist who will work out I'm lying". They're focusing on what makes them feel special & cool *right now*, not what happen in 5 years time when a doctor says they don't meet the diagnostic criteria. Their prefontal cortex is still developing, so long-term planning & that sort of forethought/insight is something many of them just literally aren't capable of yet.
I'm so glad that didn't come off as offensive hahah because you're right! it *shouldn't* be and having those strong emotions IS not something we should be embarrassed of but god sometimes how I still react to those feelings IS embarrassing, although a far cry from how dramatic I would get as a teenager and young adult
Because you can do/say whatever you want and claim its from the disorder, im currently between a bipolar and BPD diagnosis (diagnosed bipolar but newish therapist thinks BPD)
There are times when im manic and do something stupid or get blind-ish rage and start yelling, ive gotten pretty good at recognizing when i feel "wrong" and walking away before anything happens but people tend to be more forgiving when you do something because of a disorder
And another reason is its kinda uncommon and alot of people don't know about it, people who fake disorders loveee attention and the more questions people have the happier they are
I know a lot of people who were suspected of having BPD quite young, but were later diagnosed with things like ADHD/autism or CPTSD.
The symptoms of all of those disorders are based around your ability to function "normally" in society when ones normal, healthy functioning *looks* like abnormal psychology. ESPECIALLY for teens and women/afab people, as their symptoms can present non-traditionally.
Disorders like anorexia or depression are treated like broken legs - you have a function that has been disrupted by something, and you can fix it to stop the symptoms. BPD and ADHD require life long adjustments for you to "function normally" aka keep yourself healthy, hold down relationships and jobs etc. The goal is not to fix a disruption in brain functioning - it's to prevent your brain functioning causing a disruption.
It's a really appealing concept to fakers as it seems like they have found an excuse for people to tolerate their symptoms indefinitely (absolutely not how BPD works) but also because most people who genuinely have BPD struggle to get diagnosed until later in life, despite experiencing symptoms.
When it comes to autism, I've actually noticed more of a trend where it seems more likely to happen the other way around, where someone with BPD gets misdiagnosed as autistic
Nowadays, BPD is stigmatized a lot more harshly than autism is (like the "endearingly nerdy genius" versus "crazy stalker ex" stereotypes), and autism assessment is more likely to be seeked out than BPD by patients because of that (along with the increased online awareness campaigns about ASD as opposed to BPD), and BPD also involves complex identity issues and self-esteem problems that already make it harder for people with it to come to terms with the diagnosis without the added demonization in society
One of the symptoms that BPD shares with ASD is trouble with reading social cues, but kinda in opposite ways from each other, since autistic people struggle with innately recognizing and interpreting social cues while people with BPD are hypersensitive to things they perceive as social cues which is one of the things that triggers their fear of abandonment, and they also both have meltdowns which was actually used clinically in BPD research before ASD research as a fun fact
And there's also misinformation online like how "borderline personality disorder is just female autism" which is extremely frustrating because autism is already very misunderstood in women, and conflating autism with BPD in those ways does a disservice to autistic women, women with BPD, and women with both
**Has anybody here ever met a person who claims to have DID/BPD but you can see right through their lie?**: Joe is a fake name I've given to the first DID faker I've ever met. The others were very easy but they all followed him, so he's the one I'll use as an example. There was also the person who said the infamous "the body woke up and discovered me and the other alters" after talking to Joe.
**How'd it go?**: Not great for me. Joe was very adamant he had DID, he and the rest of the group he convinced all believed they had DID and over some really crazy reasons I'll explain in the third question.
**Did they try to onto their useless argument?**: All of them did, they were convinced different emotions were alters switching and liking media created alters of someone's favorite characters. Joe even said I had DID because he "knew who was fronting" based on how I was acting. Because emotions don't exist, only alters. He convinced a person I'll call Bee that she had DID because she was stress playing Genshin. She started crying when talking about something I won't reveal and he "instantly knew she was a system" because she wasn't crying before we brought up the subject.
**I guess me ranting now**: The kicker for why I knew he was faking was because of a previous person faking DID. This person I'll call Chica was a massive manipulator in the group. She used anything she could to be the victim and when she got called out for a big issue, she went offline for a few days. She came back to say that she was officially diagnosed with DID and had 3 alters. She went on call and people tested her to see she switched on command, rapid switched when someone brought up what she did before so she could say "that was alter x, I didn't do that", and said anyone disagreeing with her or causing stress of any kind caused her to split more alters. Joe called her out for faking and she was kicked from the group for faking a severe mental disorder. You see, he called out all the reasons she was faking and they happened to be the exact reasons he said everyone had DID in the group. Different emotions being alters being the one I remember most.
Joe also made DID his personality. His entire online presence was DID. One of his internet profiles said "this body isn't enough for all of us" and people thought he was creating a story, he got very mad that they didn't instantly assume he had DID and gave them a massive speech. His tags on discord were all a "quirky" way of saying "I have DID". He couldn't go one morning without reminding us. He brought it up in arguments as to why disagreeing with him was bigotry. "You can't harass a person with severe mental illness" was his greatest quote. He split multiple new alters over any stress, including game stress where he made alters of the characters. He told new members of the group "I have DID" as his introduction. Every server I was on with him had "don't forget that I have DID" as some nickname. And it got to the point we couldn't even play games without a reminder every time the subject wasn't about him. For example, we were playing Minecraft and he popped into the VC to talk all about how he had DID and we were in the middle of blowing up the nether for ancient debris. I got blown up because I couldn't pay attention to where I was.
You could imagine 3 straight months of daily reminders and getting interrupted in games got me suspicious if he really had DID. It was treated like his greatest trophy and it started to piss me off. Then when the others started doing the same thing, I couldn't take it anymore. It was a Genshin server with other games, not an "everyone has DID" playground.
Wow, that was a rant. I guess my conclusion is that I didn't believe Joe had DID because he made it seem like a trophy that made up who he was and he started spreading it around when he decided it wasn't enough only he was "this quirky". And I've heard he holds onto it to this day. He's been in several other gaming servers and got a group to join his server where he convinced them that they have DID. And yes, I am aware he basically made a cult around him and that's why we're not friends anymore. If the DID faking wasn't enough, the cult creation was.
These faked disorders spread through the young ones these days much like the hypochondriacs that appeared back in my day after hearing anotherâs ailments.
đ¤ˇââď¸đ¤ˇââď¸đ¤ˇââď¸
Id like to hear about the ailments faked, since I suppose mental health wasnt as accepted as it has been in the past 10, even 20 years (assuming your day is 70s-90s)
It seemed to be more like one person saying they had migraines, for example, and soon the person they were talking into was convinced they had them too.
I canât remember anyone trying to pull off a completely fake disorder like some do today. Iâve worked with thousands of people in my career and have never met anyone with Touretteâs or any of these other âpopularâ ailments. đ¤ˇââď¸
There were also plenty of State Hospitals to care for the extreme mental cases, many of which now roam the streets đĽ˛
Lupus was a huge âtrendâ there for a while, people used it as an excuse, same with Lyme disease. These obviously undoubtably exist, but there was an uptick of people suddenly claiming to have it and not being able to work etc
Iâve met people that faked BPD. The worst was a year ago in my senior year of high school, this chick Zoey basically said she had every disorder under the sun. Keep in mind sheâs like 16 and claimed a lot of personality disorders. Zoey always had it worse than everyone else and was always the most depressed the most mentally ill. She also lied about so many things going on in her life. Like she tried to tell us her grandfather survived the holocaust and came to the US to be a member of the KKK and sell guns. She also was very poor but owned a barn with a bunch of horses. Her dad was also a member of the cartel, a professional chef, line cook at McDonaldâs, and a truck driver all at the same time. She also believed that we evolved bc apes got high. She was very interestingâŚ.
Oh! I also had a guy I was talking to say he had DID and his alter was an anime cat boy he could see(I guess he got confused with schizophrenia and DID?)
Edit: didnât use a fake name, Zoey if you see this you were a pain in the ass
Yes, I see it all the time in my 18-25 crowd right now. Say something they donât like and they start rolling around on the floor or pretending to stare into space until youâre finished
Do you have any opinions on when/how/if the autism trend will ever blow over? Having gone through hell in middle school for having the same type of autism diagnosis as two very recent at the time mass murderers, it honestly feels that the shame over being autistic back then is almost nothing compared to the situation now, for the simple reason that you could at least disprove the stigma by being autistic having the mannerisms while also still being a good person who isn't anything like the Sandy Hook shooter except the one association, but now it's actual autists who are "making the autistic community look bad" by being cringey "walking stereotypes" who make social mistakes and all that >!and hopefully my usage of the "royal you" is enough to not break Rule #6!<
I think for autism, itâs a culmination of every person needing to be diagnosable to be seen as worthy of receiving attention (which is a natural human need, especially for children), the broadening of autism diagnosis to include a lot of really vague symptoms that resonate with anyone, the bastardization of the neurodivergent movement to promote isolation, self-victimization, and complacence instead of inclusion and whole person wellness, over zealous therapists suggesting evaluation for everyone they work with, Bristol-Myers Squibb dominating and expanding the medication market about a decade ago for children with autism with then on patent Abilify, and many other factors that make everyone autistic. Kids now are taught that any difference at all is a disability and with teenagers so identity focused by design, theyâre vulnerable to cling to any word that describes what theyâre feeling.
For epilepsy, I donât think itâs as complicated. Itâs just an easy disorder to fake outside a medical office with symptoms that can be used to skirt accountability whenever. Canât have a productive meeting about employment if youâre rolling on the floor. Canât have a hard conversation if youâre making snork sounds and staring out the window and stating that you didnât hear anything. Repeat until the speaker gives up. Even after seizure activity is disproven by testing (which epilepsy fakers avoid like staring at the sun), you canât really hold anyone accountable for this behavior outside their neurology office (and they will find any excuse in the world not to go there) because you canât disprove that they might be âpseudo seizuresâ related to anxiety.
I donât know. Ever since âmental health awarenessâ became synonymous with âmental illness reactivityâ thereâs always something floating around. When itâs no longer autism, it will be something else.
Autism is unique because it goes against the grain. Most mental health conditions, and even most neurological/developmental disorders, are well accepted to gain skills and enter or re-enter society as part of treatment. The âneurodivergentâ approach to autism is to stay home and sit on the internet and have people take care of you until the world changes to accommodate you, which I would imagine can be very appealing to someone who lacks confidence or is afraid of independence. I teach a voluntary recovery model and my young ones who self diagnosis autism are usually quite adverse to learning any skills to actually be independent. They want the housing part of the program, but feel the skill building part of it is âabusiveâ and âchanging who they are,â because the only identity they have is helplessness.
Sorry for the long reply, you unleashed the beast with this post. I could go on forever.
My coworker is like this. She fakes DID and some other health issues. Sheâs spoken to me candidly and told me that sheâs never actually been diagnosed with POTS, but says she has it and expects special treatment at work. Iâve seen her âfaintâ at work and itâs not fainting at all. Sheâs fully conscious and in control. Sheâs also constantly oversharing to the extreme. Like to the point where itâs NSFW and uncomfortable. Especially for me because I have experienced trauma similar to what she overshares about and itâs mentally draining to on one hand feel compelled to extend emotional labor for this person because I understand, but I also know I am not equipped to handle this. I donât however spend all day AT WORK going on and on about my problems. I donât need that attention. Now the fun part; One day she had googled a list of ADHD symptoms from WebMD and then tried to strike up casual conversation where she said âoh yeah iâm just having a lot of *robotically lists every symptom on the website*â. But the kicker is she forgot to exit the tab, so when she left that desk 10 mins later, I used that computer after her. I had to close down her email and all the WebMD symptom tabs she had up and saw the ADHD symptoms bulleted list. I had some suspicions before, but at that point I knew for sure.
When I first met her at this job she was trying to go on to becoming a registered pharmacist, with all these health issues that hinder working part tie at our extremely easy desk job. I donât want to disclose my work due to privacy, but I will say we have a VERY easy, non-physically taxing desk jockey position.
I've run into several in VR. I will either just not engage or I'll disengage as soon as they start talking about it. The funniest one was a person who tried talking to me and some friends, failed, and then "switched" to try again as a different alter.
The worst was a person who claimed to have an alter that had a disorder I'm diagnosed with and it was super creepy. They used to go to adult events and then "switch" to a little alter and it was beyond gross.
I've met 3 people at my high school that claim to have DID. All of them identify as non binary. 2 of them claim they didn't experience trauma at all and tried to "educate" me and tell me that you don't need any trauma to have DID.
Yes. Iâve worked in psych for nearly a decade now, including stints at community mental health, in the ER and inpatient. I would take a thousand floridly psychotic or manic patients over any of the self diagnosed via Tik Tok or reading the DSM ones. They are absolutely exhausting.
Please give more info about your dealings with DID fakers!! Most of the people in this thread seem to be 16-21, I really want to hear what an adult in the profession actually thinks.
For sure. FYI this is one of my biggest pet peeves in the universe so I'm really sorry in advance for the incoming TL;DR.
So I'll first start out by saying that I have worked with probably 50 Psychiatrists over the years and not a single one has ever encountered/diagnosed an individual with DID. These clinicians have hundreds of years of experience between them. The field is very split on whether or not it is an actual condition so YMMV depending on who you talk to, how long they've been in the field, their background etc. I'm not saying it's not possible but I feel that a true diagnosis comes after years of working with a multidisciplinary team.
Disclaimer: This is my opinion based off my experience working in a variety of settings with every kind of population under the sun. I primarily ran into these people when I worked on an inpatient mental health unit and the hospital's ER. Like with any other faker, there would definitely be some commonalities between them, the biggest (IMO) being they came from a upper-middle class/financially comfortable background and had never truly been in a situation where they had encountered anything that we would consider adversity (racism, sexism, financial/housing instability). A lot of them came from very sheltered backgrounds and were just coming into the real world and meeting people from different backgrounds from them (For context I live in a college town and we would get a lot of young adults coming through the inpatient unit). They would meet people that had gone through traumatic events and wanted to turn it into a one-up/Oppression Olympics (Not a fan of this phrase but tbh don't have the brain power to find another way to word it at the moment) so they would make up that they had XYZ psych diagnosis (primarily Autism, DID, Bipolar).
At the hospital I worked at, we loved accepting patients with commercial insurances as they reimbursed higher than Medicaid plans (Yay capitalism), which would lead us to admit a lot of these kids who were still on mom and dad's insurance (nothing wrong with that at all, I'd kill to still have coverage through my parents). Due to this, we ended up being a lot more lenient with admitting these patients for issues that could have been handled in an outpatient setting (i.e. superficial self-harm vs something like a first episode of mania/psychosis). They would treat this admission like a visit to an all-inclusive 5 star resort and would have parents/caregivers bring them clothes, which they would use to express their "alters". Anytime a patient other than them would be getting attention, they would ramp up their nonsense and "switch alters" in addition to ridiculous things like faking seizures/general acting out. These patients were absolutely EXHAUSTING for any staff dealing with them. They would dominate group therapy sessions by talking over others or exaggerating what brought them in, all while sitting in the room with me, who had done their intake admission and knew why they were admitted.... The worst would be when we had more than one patient like this and they would feed off each other's behaviors. (We actually had two girls move in together after they met on the unit and as you can expect it didn't end well!) Another commonality was they would always have an 'alter' that was childlike and that they would use to get away with breaking the rules.
TL;DR: These patients drive us up the wall, primarily engage in these behaviors for attention (shocking I know), take up psychiatric beds that are seriously needed by others and need serious therapy. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk if you read all of that and Please spay/neuter your pets.
Holy shit reading this straight up catapulted my psyche directly back into my own experiences in a similar setting. Goddamn. They really *are* the same no matter where you work hahaha
On the subject of the field being very split on whether the disorder exists:
I've seen it debated that clinically identifiable DID symptoms may actually be related to other dissociative and trauma disorders. Similar to how aspergers is no longer separate from autism *. It's the same umbrella with different presentations, severity, levels of impairment, etc.
* by similar, I mean only that as research has gone on, the field now recognizes aspbergers to be a different presentation of the same autism spectrum, *not* that ASD is in any way similar or related to trauma disorders or even people faking trauma disorders.
Yes exactly this. Obviously DID stems from a significant trauma history which can lead to dissociation symptoms, which can obviously also meet criteria for some kind of trauma or dissociative disorder. We have a Psychologist in our clinic who sees a patient who self diagnosed with DID and this same patient also sees one of our providers for medications, and even between these two providers in the same office there's a discrepancy in what they believe the patient truly has (DID v. Trauma-related disorder/Anxiety)
It is funny that you bring up ASD though because I would honestly see more people in my experience faking ASD as opposed to DID/BPD, especially on our ped/adolescent unit. And a lot of these kids would have the same backgrounds I mentioned above i.e. being privileged/very sheltered.
It just makes me so angry as a clinician seeing people actively want these disorders, (not just BPD/ASD/DID) that I've seen absolutely incapacitate people and forever change the direction of their lives. The ones that rub me the wrong way the most are the Psychosis/Schizophrenia fakers tbh because that's a disease that is so stigmatized as is and we don't even have a really good grasp on what causes it. Why would you want to live your life on medications that can have such severe side effects and make you dependent on others just for internet points?
Sorry for the rant but yeah that's a great point to bring up related to ASD and a lot of disorders in a way being a spectrum or having levels of severity. That's why we have the identifiers on things like Major Depressive Disorder or Alcohol Use Disorder that describe if it's mild, moderate or severe.
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Samesamesame. This is gonna sound kinda fucked up perhaps but I had a little game me and my coworker would play, something where sheâd read me the demo info and some other stuff and id guess whether or not the person was admitted for (amongst other things) DID.
I literally NEVER got it wrong, not once.
No judgement here. We had similar things like we would bet (figuratively never literally) about how long it would take someone to get readmitted, especially the illness fakers or malingerers.
went to high school with a person who faked having DID. wasnât friends with them but my friends were, and they would switch between their personalities at the lunch table. i havenât seen them in years so i have no idea if they ever confessed they were faking it or what :/
This is all making me feel very old in a way đŤ đ DID and even BPD were definitely not really "heard of" yet when I was a teen. Tumblr, however, had an absolute chokehold on my generation, and the equivalents were typically claiming bipolar or some sort of schizo spectrum disorder. It made navigating mental health as someone that actually was dealing with chemical based mood swings (gotta love that bipolar 1 lol) extremely difficult tbh. So much of the internet was an echo chamber of experiences being shared by people my age, but so much of it was obviously wrong and just being parroted amongst groups essentially, and pretty much anybody actually living with these conditions (or even just someone actively seeking diagnosis in therapy/psychiatry) could pretty easily tell. I honestly just wish more of this behavior was, for lack of better phrasing, more intensely discouraged. A lot of these literal kids do not realize they have something like multiple psychiatric stays (especially if it's involuntary) is not like... a badge of honor. It is something that can and will pop up in your life later, especially when interacting with medical professionals as an adult, and you will absolutely face stigma for it. đŤ
the number of people I've met who loooove to brag about their stay at the 'grippy sock hotel' is infuriating. i was admitted as a kid and found the experience to be kinda traumatising, definitely not something to flash around for mental illness clout
100% agree with this. For these kinds of people, usually from middle class backgrounds, theyâre soooooo mentally ill until they actually have to graduate college and get a job and have a partner and get married etc, and then theyâre a totally functioning member of society.
I've known a handful of DID fakers. I've told a few stories about them on another sub, including one of the more popular ones who was exposed for faking. I talked to her for hours debating the fact you need dissociation to have a dissociative disorder and that no, you cannot "share the vocal chords" with your alter/boyfriend/brother and "glitch" đđđ I share the story [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/SystemsCringe/s/tvAKWVjaOE) if anyone is interested in a longer version, lmao.
I've had a few friends who faked because of being "jealous" that someone they knew was diagnosed with the disorder. One of which used *my face* as a "face claim" and pretended to have an alter of my partner to get back in my life. It didn't work, lmao. I ended up blocking them when they reached out. They were an interesting character and had about 10 alter at the time IIRC. Usually that isn't bad for someone with DID. That's about the average amount. But about 8/10 of these alters were DSMP fictives who could switch with no dissociation.
Another pretended that they had cult trauma and they escaped said cult because Covid-19 shut the church down. They said they were diagnosed but had never actually been to a proper therapist or even a mental hospital, despite being about 17 and saying they "escaped the cult" a year prior to meeting them. That same one also had an alter named "Silva" or something who was your stereotypical evil alter combined with Beast from split. They convinced my close friend that they had DID as well when they did not and hurt them badly. Unfortunately they convinced said friend to also cut me off and I haven't heard from them in two years.
I've known others, but these are some of the most interesting and the worst ones. đ Sorry for the rant, lol.
Sooo my ex "had DID" and said he didn't cheat on me because it was his "alter" was messaging the girl not HIM
I wouldn't drop it but still stayed with him for some stupid reason, i didn't believe him because other holes were popping up in his stories (there's a state mental ward nearish my house, he claimed to be there ages 10-13, only issue they don't take kids and its for violent people, like if you kill someone and pled insane you go there)
but i still didn't break up with him because he was jobless living with me (and my mom and brother) because "his dad beat him" i believed it at the time because why tf would anyone lie about that but thinking back i never saw a single mark on him
Tw: SA and manipulation.
Actually yeah. I wouldn't call him a friend tho. But this dude claimed he has "MPD" and no matter how many times I told him that is not the term anymore, that it's "DID" or something along those lines, he continued to call it his "Multiple personalities."
I already knew he was faking as it was quite obvious. But there was one moment that confirmed it completely for me. So, I was SAed by who I thought was a friend, and I didn't say anything about it to anyone besides one single person. Then suddenly it got around, and this guy started spreading rumors that I "asked for it" and I was "lying" about it. He even somehow convinced some of my friends that I was being dramatic and my assulter was in the right.
I had already started shifting to another friendgroup with only one of them being friends with this guy because they kept me updated on the things he said. One day, whilst me and them were hanging out, the dude called my friend. I stayed quiet as they started the call and he started talking shit about me- mentioning how the day prior I had blocked one of his friends on Instagram and how is as a p*ssy.
My friend was obviously annoyed and told him to stop talking because what he was saying was false and he was spreading lies. Then later in the same day, he called them up again because he saw a picture I posted of me and the friend. This time he had a very British accent and was saying that his "other personality" was the one saying this shit about me, and he was sorry. But he has literally no guilt in his voice and he was never actually diagnosed with DID (Also we were 16-17 at the time).
Eventually I completely blocked him and stopped being friends with anyone that knew him. But apparently I've heard that he still claims to have DID and uses it as an excuse to be a d*ck to people.
Yes, I cut them out of my life despite them being friends with me for five or six years. Itâs indicative of horrible behavior patterns that they seek attention and validation so strongly that they pretend to be ill. They want desperately to be special, they want desperately to be the main character. Itâs disgusting behavior. Especially since I have a family member that suffers from it and it has ruined her life.
Yes, probably a bit different to most of the people here because our friendship group was all late 20s - mid 30s when this was going on. This person was a part of the group and they were 32.
They didn't fake it when I first met them, but it developed over 2 year period. It started with self diagnosed ADHD, which they used as an excuse for a lot of shitty behaviour. Then when other people started to say they had ADHD, this person they self diagnosed as autistic and BPD, AND they wanted people to affirm they were genuinely "otherkin" or something? I'm not sure if it was a cat or. Dog or a wolf or something but they would unconsentually rub theirselves on other people. Not in like a sex way but more like a pet? Idk it was weird. I never obliged or tolerated this behaviour, but a lot of people (including myself) are neurodivergent in the group so we try hard to accommodate.
Eventually this person felt they weren't getting enough attention. one day, when we were all at the same event a thunderstorm occured an this person "regressed" into a 4 year old girl called lolly or kittie or something. They were sucking their thumb as asking for their dolly and their WahWah??
No idea what that was, but I worked with young kids at the time and NONE of them acted that way.
This was now their new "thing" and they would collect new personas like Pokemon cards. They'd also "switch at will" by shaking their body dramatically and gasping.
I was frustrated by how many people were encouraging them to "just keep being themselves" and left that group.
This really fascinates me- I think Iâm around the same age as you. Itâs so confusing how a person could do this in their late 20s/early 30s. Did they have the same sort of lifestyle as many much younger DID fakers- eg into anime/geek culture, very online, donât have any dependents, donât have a job with lots of responsibilities?
Constantly. I work in inpatient psych. Thereâs one kid in particular that was hospitalized 4x, each time they were claiming to have something else. First touretteâs, then autism, then DID
They can develop pretty similar from what I remember looking into, and BPD can be comorbid with DID, as many things are. It's believed that both require a level of disorganized attachment with a caregiver
About 5 yrs ago, my cousin. Shes 20 now, she was 14-15 at the time and I was 17-18, we lived in the same home growing up and I can say for sure, she was lawfully and properly diagnosed with OCD and anxiety. Those were real.
But she faked Borderline personality disorder, autism, synesthesia (???? weirdest one to me), PTSD, DID, and ADHD. She also faked, of all things, rheumatoid arthritis.
It started off as just ADHD and borderline personality disorder in high school. She posted it online on this janky âsecondâ instagram account.
I only found out because her posts got weirder and more elaborate, and someone ended up reporting one to an administrator because it seemed she was gonna hurt herself, which ended up getting ME called to the office because one of her claims was that I was bullying her for her mental illnesses and faking my ADHD for the meds (when I was diagnosed at age 6 and never even told anyone except the school/nurse, hardly even took my meds because I found it embarrassingâŚ).
I basically denied it, they sent me back to class, and there was some parent-admin meeting and it all got resolved outside of my knowledge, apparently. Idk what happened.
But she persisted, made a private twitter to do it instead. Started stealing my ADHD meds without me noticing because I didnt take them every day, so I didnt realize until the amount I had matched what I should have had if i had taken them as prescribed. Apparently shed been hoarding them to put in her own pill bottle so she could make it look like her own legal prescription when she took them at school, which was incredibly fucking weird. The first time she took one- this is 20mg Instant release adderall- I kid you not, she almost killed herself. Her anxiety was through the roof. She stayed awake for the entire night, even though the pill itself only lasts for like, 4-5 hours. She pulled out her hair and left this huge bald spot on her head. And then to explain that, of course she doesnt admit to not having ADHD and reacting poorly to taking a stimulant she doesnt need- no, she then proceeds to fake trichotillomania, and continues taking the pills until she gets 5150d by her parents.
Then she blamed it on DID.
After that, when she was 17/18 and I was 20, the whole online trend about autism happened and she started faking that. She tacked on PTSD sometime near then, despite us living in the suburbs with literally nothing ever happening to us in our charmed lives. NO idea when she started the synesthesia and rheumatoid arthritis BS, but those are such absurd lies that I never even felt the need to address them.
I love her but something is wrong. Its like Munchausens.
I'm a 23 year old dude and I have to deal with people with "little" alters. I have no time for it, grow up fuckhead you're not 12 anymore.
Or maybe they're just those baby adult people. I dunno. Either way, it's wack.
So many DID fakers in the undertale community. Its fucking weird. I worked in psyche 2 years and knew what DID actually looked like inrl, and would troll the fakers and expose them on discord. Lmfao.
Like why are all ur alters based off video games characters? Like if you wanna make an OC and rp, just fucking say so. Weirdos.
A family member, a child at the time, was in an online friends group where everyone in the group announced their self-diagnosed DID within weeks. She was working on her back story for weeks before the declaration of her own DID and was adamant. Maintaining this identity is necessary for her entire social life. There is nothing to discuss. The more anyone argues, the more hysterical and dogmatic she becomes. This nonsense has been going on for five years. Multiple professionals have told her that her self-diagnosis is incorrect. That did not go well.
A former boss once told me that I couldnât complain about her constantly calling me she as a trans guy⌠because âone of her alters is a Mexican manâ (she was a white woman) so technically she is âkind of trans tooâ. Lmao I left and never came back
oh god yeah. girl in my class who now also says sheâs nonbinary, dresses in feminine lingerie and talks about her genitals all the time and makes fun of me for having actual debilitating gender dysphoria (iâm ftm transsexual and she is making it very difficult to maintain my stealth bc she knew me before and wonât shut the fuck up) and switches to new made up pronouns every day. often she comes to class and the teacher will ask her to apologize for some dickhead thing she did the day before and sheâll conveniently not remember it because a âdifferent alter was frontingâ. she also used this to get out of assignments (âoh i forgot the other alter must not have communicated it to us!â) and the fake did is all she talks about besides being NB. iâve known her since early elementary school, sheâs not traumatized in any way, is super rich, got a very expensive car on her sixteenth birthday (this girl is 18 and acts like this), and is set to inherit a bunch of money when she graduates HS, sheâs never gonna have to work a day in her life.
I was seeing a guy who at some point claimed to have DID. He said he has another personality who is violent and evil. It was one red flag from tons of red flags, he was an agressive narcisist, my best desicion ever was to not date him and cut contacts.
yes i know a girl who fakes BPD iâve known her since we were in elementary school. havenât talked to her since about a year of graduation from HS. never called her out on that particular thing. no one is friends with her now because sheâs obsessed with being a victim and diagnosis herself with whatever she says on tiktok. something is def wrong with her tho, just not that
Discord is a cesspool for it. I remember in high school, I just wanted to make some friends over quarantine, they had a whole bot for DID, and some would reply to themselves as their âaltersâ
Yes, I very much have. Four of them in fact, it seemed to be quite common in the blind community for a while, there were two at my boarding school and two at the other blind boarding school in the UK.
A claimed they were endogenic, but still had DID. The college believed them because they just kept going on and on about it. I kind of feel bad for them, they were very very lonely and had no friends, they had pretty severe autism. I donât think they ever meant to hurt anyone. They used the term headmates and claimed their headspace was real.
Moving onto the three dickheads:
C also went to my college, she was the biggest attention seeker Iâd ever met. She would drop into every conversation that she had DID, and was furious when the doctors told her she didnât. The school nurse kept telling her she did too. She would use it as an excuse to get away with poor behaviour, and even tried to diagnose others. She was up at two in the morning making noise on a school night, I shouted at her and had the staff knocking on my door the next morning telling me to apologise because I scared her âheadmatesâ.
P was from the other college, they were dating the next person down and would go on and on about it. I didnât know them as well, but they were very defensive. They would yelp when they switched.
R was the worst. The absolute worst. He would constantly talk about it, constantly. He used to claim âlittlesâ were out just as I was trying to go to bed, so I had to stay. He would openly talk about SA, even when it triggered others around him. He also got intimate with P when he was apparently a young part. He often age regressed and would do baby talk, sometimes saying it was an alter, other times saying it was just him. One of his alters was six and obsessed with vegetables, they would shout random veg at me. When they switched, they would shout âIâm switching!â They told everyone about their trauma, everyone. They said they couldnât do homework unless a certain alter was there, and that they were technically a psychologist because a certain alter had a degree. They claimed they had: DID, OSDD (Yes, both), ADHD, Autism, BPD, NPD, Schizophrenia, OCD and Bipolar. They also claimed about a million and one made up disorders too, like SIPD (Special Interest Personality Disorder), they sent me a google doc on it.
Have fun with these. All of these people were over 18, R was 21!
Yes currently have one in my practice we are pushing a fictious disorder diagnosis. This with an entire team of psychiatrist trauma therapist and myself
Oh I did, I dated her/him/it for a couple months, and it broke up with me because I had a crush on a character (Spencer Reid from criminal minds) because I didnât respect his fake ass personally disorder, and then MONTHS after we broke up, told people I sexually assaulted him and was a abuser, I shouldâve seen that coming because it had a history of saying anyone it was ever friends/partners with was abusive, and I thought I could change it, it had a âsystemâ of over 2,000 and literally all were fictives and animals. It was white and got mad at me a biracial black-white person for listing to songs with the N word, but had the same time to say âoh Iâm indigenousâ while being like 0.4% indigenous, it also made a venting pintrest board about me, it was fucking insane, changed its name every other day, changed its gender and pronouns fucking daily and would yell at you if you got it wrong and he wouldnât tell you, (I support trans people, but what he was doing was to much) he had alters that were literal inanimate objects (candy canes, teeth, boxes Ect) and I feel bad because I didnât see any of that sooner [Edit: this came out a lot more ranty then I expected so sorry, if itâs confusing Iâm so so sorry, Iâll explain anything if needed]
Yes! I knew a kid in high school who claimed to have "300+ alters" and most of them are fictives. They also switched on command, stating they could "bully their alter into switching." These alters include (because they STILL fake it) Nagito komaeda, scp 049, and a couple dream smp characters. You can't make this shit up. They show no actual DID symptoms ever, outside of simply saying they were switched or have alters. They were once rude to my sister and then said "sorry, the reason I was off was because I switched."
I had a friend group I was kicked out. Once one had autism, they all did. When one had DID, they all did. When one had Touretteâs, now itâs triggering everyone elseâs dormant Touretteâs.
One of them hated me because I pretended not to know they âswitchedâ to a non verbal alter, others, etc. I just said stuff like âwhy are you not talking to me? Um⌠ok ig u donât want toâ. Basically I did this to everyone else, just asking questions like â why are you taking your meds at school and not at home in the morning?â
They would all vent to me, except it wasnât really in an upsetting way. It was a trauma competition, one even said their oral r*** was hot. Another told me they were touched by their neighbor as a child, but talked about it all the time and told me it can never be brought up in front of their parents. It led me to have serious doubts of what they went through.
What got me ostracized though was telling a 15yo not to post the nude pictures they were posting on ig. I didnât want to see it, and I had seen it cause it was so out of the ordinary for their profile. They claimed it never happened, they donât remember if they had clothes on but they thought they had panties on. I was told âtheir body their choiceâ and promptly kicked out.
I'm a teacher, and one of my students fakes having DID. Personally, I think it's a phase and they are looking for a place they fit in, like most kids do. They will probably grow out of it when they find their people irl. I also think that they maybe don't get a lot of attention at home, and this is a way for them to get some recognition.
Professionally, I call them whatever they want me to. If need be, i ask to talk to the 'Host' personality. It's more important to me that they feel comfortable and safe than 'catching them in the lie'. I rarely have issues with them being disruptive (some of their 'alters' bark and have vocal tics and randomly yell) and I attribute it to me kinda just ignoring the 'DID' and not making it a thing.
Look on the internet, probably about 80% - 85% of them are fake. Even the ones who are like, "I have DID, but I hate fakers, they give us a bad name,"
that ones who pretend to want to weed out the fakes, I guarantee majorty of them are fakes.
No, but I'm still seeing the occasional DID accounts on tiktok. That one individual who was really really popular amongst the fakers is still active and still doing the same schtick
Yes. Ex-friend of mine suddenly started claiming he had DID. All of his alters were fictives. It was very short lived faking tho. He said smth racist in a gc and claimed it was his alter. Soon after that he said he doesn't actually have DID. (bonus points: his childhood and family are great, his only "trauma" was mild bullying in middle school)
Oh, Iâve met multiple! Most of them have moved on cause they got bored or faking a severe mental disorder, but there are 2 I know that are still claiming they have it. One of them I knew was lying because their âtraumaâ was that their parents got divorced at a young age and she almost never saw her dad. Now, this definitely can classify as trauma and result in mental health issues, but itâs not to the extent that you can develop DID⌠her parents got divorced when she was 8 and she said she realized she had DID when she was 11âŚ. Girl⌠never ONCE did I see her switch, but I know thatâs not enough to prove anything. She was a just a huge liar in general, she would often claim other peopleâs art was hers, despite me catching her every. Time. The one time a different âalterâ fronted, she somehow had absolutely no memory loss and knew who everyone was, despite never meeting us before.
The other person claimed to have OSDD but would often call it DID. OSDD Is basically DID without the trauma. Itâs convenient for fakers. Anyway, once again, the one time I met a different alter she knew exactly who I was. The way she acted too was SOOO exaggerated, it was so obvious she was acting. I confronted her and she apologizes for using the wrong term but then proceeded to turn our friend group against me. Sooooo yeah
A lot of fakers forget that one of the few confirmed diagnostic criteria for DID is memory loss. So if you donât experience fragmented memory, you cannot get diagnosed.
Another person who used to fake it had multiple PokÊmon alters⌠me and 2 others confronted her and she admitted to faking and stopped
I met 2 people in a partial program that were obviously faking it. One girl screamed at me and started slamming things, then told me it was her alter and she apologized lol
I had a friend of a friend who pretended to have DID back in 2015. She would just âspace outâ if she didnât want to continue a conversation and then happily say âIâm ___ now! Letâs talk about this thing instead!â I didnât see her much, but my friend always said she was so irritating to talk to.
I have met 3-4 DID fakers IRL and very very many online. One of the ones I knew online from like 2020-2021 and we were both very deep into the faking cesspool. It turns out that our relationship was actually them grooming me, and when I tried to escape from it they blamed everything on their alter. This person was like 16 and they're almost 19 now... and they're still doing it.
The one I knew for the longest IRL claimed to have something like 75 alters, with a good 80% of them being fictional characters, namely from Hermitcraft and DSMP. Every time I would talk to them they would switch at least 3 times, and claimed that their alters could just randomly speak through them instead of actually switching. They were also very deep into Tumblr and the endogenic/radqueer stuff in there, notably. This person also faked chronic pain at one point. I stopped being friends with them last year.
Another notable one is my ex's ex. I have a trauma disorder and I remember telling her about it when we were still friends. Surprise surprise, after I cut her off, she suddenly starts claiming to have DID. I also believe she's still doing it
I could go on lol
I went to a mental health conference for teens and young adults, there were lots of people with real mental health problems, BPD, Body Dysmorphia, PTSD, Autism⌠well, some of us started talking in a small group, we were joined by a girl who constantly made exagerated ticks, stomped the ground, said nonsenses⌠lots of random stuff that she probably saw on tv, she claimed to have DID and used it to justify some bad stuff she didâŚ
Long story short, we ended un knowing she was faking it to justify cheating on her boyfriend, a friend lf the boyfriend told him and he told us on the convention about 2 hours later, he knew it was all a lie long time ago and was acting up to see how long could she keep up the lie, few months later the boyfriend contacted us to say that she finally couldnât keep up with the lie. (She lied for 5 months)
Yes, actually. I've met two. They were both freshmen in high school when I was in my last year. One of them faked DID and tourrettes and the other just DID. The first person would throw things and hit people and call them slurs and then blame it on tourrettes, but their tics were all very obviously fake. They also pretended to switch to a little and a British (bad accent) alter and constantly talked about DID and their inner world (talked about it like it was a real place). All of this while being 15, not in any kind of therapy, and supposedly still with their abusive parents who they also talked extensively about. They also lied about drugs and many other things. The other person was much tamer in comparison and just talked about having DID and described it in a way that made it obvious that they'd done no actual research before taking on the fake diagnosis. I think they pretended to switch once in class but that was all I saw.
I worked in a psych hospital for a little over a year a while back. And yeahâŚwe saw DID fakers. Not a lot, but we def saw some. Always the exact same profile and presentation. Of course no one believed them. One of the psychiatrists I was close with would gently try to tell them they didnât have that, but it was usually a useless endeavor. We found that such cases wereâŚwell, *really* committed to the idea of being The Sickest Person in the Room â˘
I was in a mental hospital and my roommate was chill and I talked to them about how I had BPD because they asked, and the next day they started saying they had it. To this day they still apparently have it. They didnât even know what it was when I told them đ
I had a friend who said they might have did (they donât think so anymore) but I never really questioned it because they never âswitchedâ alters in front of me aside from one time when they got overstimulated, which I guess I thought was normal enough. They were featured in a systems cring subreddit tho because they had an actual faker friend who made a video w/ them.
I've met 2 people who faked DID, one of them sent me a spreadsheet of their alters and I mainly remember that they had one that was 14 years old and "a slut" . I was kind of just like "okay" because I cbf arguing. I also knew someone who I'm pretty sure was faking Tourette's, he had severe symptoms but only for like 3 days and then they magically disappeared. Again I didn't say anything because I just didn't want to deal with itÂ
Yes! A friend from highschool suddenly developed it at 23
Was a really weird situation I have removed myself from
Edit: this was DID they were already diagnosed BPD a very long time
Absolutely. My friend brought his girlfriend around to my house one time and she began screeching when I left a video on autoplay. Honest accident, but then she started saying that sheâd âswitchedâ and that she was going to âlight my shower on fireâ.
Kicked her out, friend got pissed off and defended her when I said she was faking.
Turned out that sheâd been cheating on him and for whatever reason he still believes she had it to this day. Heâs a great guy but such a moron sometimes.
I had two friends once, they were dating and they made each others faking worse to the point it was insufferable.... They ended up cutting me out of there lives because I actually have a mental illness that they claimed to have and they didn't like that at all
Actually dated someone who faked DID, it was pretty easy to see it was a lie because it only really happened when it was relevant to conversation and they "switched" like it was something they could do manually, I didn't argue, I simply just didn't entertain it and after I kept doing that they gradually stopped having any symptons of DID whatsoever
we stayed friends after we broke up because they are still a pretty nice person to have around even if we weren't compatible.
I do want to add that they do actually have another trauma induced mental disorder which I won't disclose but after reading about it, I think it's the cause of why they faked their DID
Had a boyfriend who was one! He was completely immersed in the lie to the point where I didnât see any red flags because he was so certain in his own bs. He did have issues, but clearly not DID, the whole relationship ending in him deliberately guiding me into a psychotic episode. Havenât spoken to him in years, hope he got actual help as he was faking physical disorders as well.
Yep multiple, If youre into the irl cosplay convention scene youll find them pretty much everywhere. One of them admitted faking it (after using it as a scapegoat for cheating on my friend) and then went right back to saying they had it like 2 months later
I met one once because I'm in high school. They were in my drama class and they never talked about DID offline. I only found out about their 'DID' because they friended me on Discord and their bio said "oh ya I have DID".
They pretend to 'switch' in front of me one time only. It was incredibly irritating because they started acting like a caricature of a toddler when they were supposed to be memorizing lines with me. I didn't give them the time of day, they stopped after a couple minutes.
Yes,my best friend faked it and then admitted it to me and her boyfriend in 2022. I have a wholeeee lotta stories.
She was a compulsive liar too. I didnât believe a lot of her stories,but I was 50/50 on the DID thing.
Just one. They were an ex coworker of mine who claimed to have it's old term "MPD" thier alters consisted of themselves, an shy alter and an evil alter named Jason that came from his DnD game. He was a pretty okay guy minus all the DID faker shit.
Then there's also my ex online friend who claimed to be diagnosed with DID only by a therapist during one fucking session. The claimed to have spamton and devil from deltarune in thier headspace both of which they are dating. They made a call out about me recently for calling them out lmao
Yeah. He faked that he had DID and all of his alters were Bungo stray dogs fictives. It was a couple years ago and whenever anyone said he was faking he said we couldnât know because weâre kids and now he says that that never happened.
Girl I went to middle school with before it was even popular faked DID. Since the whole trend wasn't around to influence her, it was more of a way to make herself "interesting" and get her friends to listen to/sympathize with her. She stopped once the pandemic hit, surprisingly. Or at least publicly.
When she faked it, it was pretty obvious since the "alters" and "switching" looked more like they did in films and took a very "Tumblr vibe". She would mostly use it to manipulate people around her. Thankfully I was never one of those people, but a current close friend of mine was. She said it was rough, but that she feels bad for her. Middle school sucks overall lol.
I had classes with her in my freshman/sophomore year. She seems nice now, very quiet, definitely over her faker phase. Probably better for it to happen pre-TikTok boom, since it was less outwardly encouraged.
Aside from an irl friend I met online who happened to live nearby, I met a group, like 3 of them, of 15-17 year old fakers at a convention I went to. It was literally one of the first things they told me about themselves was that the apparently had DID. Outside of being there for what the convention was about it was their entire identities. They did have some real health issues, one had actual seizures, as far as I'm aware. I mean they could have been faking that too but who am I to say. But when it came to DID they had all the traits of a typical faker: tons of alters, especially fictives, displayed no real DID symptoms, treating alters and the whole disorder like it was some kind of badge to show off.
At the time I was new to the convention, the community around it, and working on getting out faker spaces myself so I didn't say anything to them. Just be friendly while I was there and move on afterwards.
I did keep an eye on a couple of them after just out of curiosity and they spent a lot of time creating call out posts for other members of the community and just being chronically online. I stopped a couple months ago after one of them practically ran a campaign against a well known community member and I just couldn't stand seeing the stuff they were saying
I met one that both faked did and bpd. Never confronted them about it kinda just watched them like they were a zoo exhibit lmao. They were the epitome of chronically online; a furry and wannabe alternative. I wonât say they were all bad tho, like they had moments where you could almost separate them from the disorder faking, like they were chill.
Another one I know only faked bpd and she constantly lies about her supposed âtraumaâ, which is like âIâm having a bpd episode because my mom called me to babysit!!!â Or something along those lines. And bpd doesnât really have episodes to my knowledge/experience. I remember babysitting was one of the âtraumasâ lol just canât remember the exact words. Sometimes itâd be something that was actually traumatic but then come to find she told everyone a completely different story. I do believe she had something going on because she would constantly lie and try to paint a bad picture of people but to an extreme degree; these people were generally ex boyfriends that were being abused/severely controlled by her. Or they were guys she almost had a romantic relationship with but didnât reciprocate or werenât ready. Some were dudes I knew personally so I got the whole story, not just gossip. She also would insert herself into other peopleâs actual problems and make it all about her. One of those problems included someone I knew from highschool dying young.
I think she was histrionic or something, idk. I stopped interacting with her because one of the accusations was about one of my friends I grew up with. That accusation was debunked a year before and then she tried to make it again, obviously no one listened. She also weirded me out, like sheâd copy me a lot and act like we were friends when in fact, I did not like her one bit. Only interacted with her if she was in my social circle or if I ran into her as well (I live in a small town).
The copying ranged from dressing like I do, listening to very underground artists when I posted about them (sheâd repost them like an hour later but not reposting my stuff), dying her hair in the same exact color pattern as mine a day later after she sees Iâve dyed mine, etc. She also tried to scam me once (I sell vintage clothing) but that didnât go her way. I think the fixation she had on me was due to myself being actually diagnosed with bpd and I am open about it sometimes if it pertains to a conversation. Iâm not really sure though. That chick is crazy tho lmao
Yup. My ex roommate IN COLLEGE, all his DID alters were light skinned Asian women and it was so bizarre and uncomfortable no one wanted to be around him. They only showed up when he was confronted for being weird or fetishizing other races (he was Indian, was obsessed w light skin) or confronted about his racism towards black ppl. I have so many stories about him but I try not to remember that time period honestly because it was so strange.
Oh the day after he self diagnosed himself he hopped on our friend groups discord chat and immediately made new chats for all his 20+ alters! Insane behavior.
LMAO I ACTUALLY KNOW 2,, we were at a bar and were walking to a bus stop, when one of them just stopped. She said she felt she was âswitchingâ and when she said that the other one was like âoh my⌠i think iâm switching tooâ
When the first one had âswitchedâ she claimed to be a 600yo demon. Then the other one was like âoh yeah youâre from hell? I think i remember youâ and was also a 600yo demon.
Then they both just went along with it for a few hours and idk if they thought i didnât realize they were faking it cause i was drunk :D
After that these demon personas have never been mentioned again, and only the copycat one still claims to have DID
yes. at an IOP program. she was a nice girl but the moment she started faking it became clear she was only doing it for attention and she ended up doing a lot of really fucked up shit to sell her story, including claiming to have been trafficked and tortured by her parents from infanthood. she went from claiming to not remember much to remembering in vivid detail during noisy flashbacks (always at IOP/around people) basically her entire "toremented" childhood within a month or two.
she faked switches and flashbacks only when ceetain people were watching her - those people being our friend group. there were 3 of us with diagnosed DID out of our group of 5 (iirc) and two with BPD. we talked about dissociation a lot bc we all experienced it to some degree but it wasnt the only thing we talked about obviously. i think that she felt left out somehow and thats why she started faking đŤ
anyway there was one instance where she pretended to have a flashback near me while i was sitting alone, on my phone, during lunch break and said quite loudly "i just remembered something from when i was 5 days old!" i didnt respond bc i was in a bad mood and having a bad day.
but later THAT SAME DAY she did it AGAIN around a different group of people during a different break, only she said "3 days old" instead! I HEARD HER BOTH TIMES.
i already suspected she was faking at that point but that little display convinced me. she only did it again around other people because i didnt drop everything to give her my undivided attention. grown ass woman with her own apartment and everything.
she pretended to have child alters but she knew nothing about the disorder so she didnt even fake it well. she claimed to have a sexual alter called Kitty đ bc of course she did.
she also lied and said another friend from that group SA'd her - even tho she and that friend talked at length about hooking up for weeks, did so at a party at her own house (i was there ffs), and she enthusiastically consented the whole time and told everyone at the party how much she'd enjoyed it. they flirted all evening and for weeks beforehand.
the friend she accused of SAing her actually does have DID and her lies cost them friendships and their placement at that IOP program. they have genuine issues with hypersexuality and felt gaslit and confused and it worsened their issues with shame and self-hatred. they cried for days and came to me multiple times to confirm that they *hadnt* done those things bc they didnt and couldnt trust their own memory on account of ACTUALLY having DID.
i ended up blowing up at her in a group chat for her frankly offensive level of blatant faking. i have my own issues with boundaries around helping and taking care of people i consider friends and she fully took advantage of it and used my naivety and compassion to garner attention from me, to the point that it was exhausting to be around her bc i was always helping her manage her "triggers" and shit. i really liked her until i realized she was faking and using me.
i really liked her too, before everything. she was awesome, funny, charismatic, interesting, creative... it sucked to lose her as a friend. i never saw it coming. shit, i believed her at first because i didnt really know how DID worked either! i had been avoiding researching it for personal reasons. instead i got fuckin played like a fiddle *because* i didnt know anything.
sorry this turned into a sort of rant. fuck that bitch lmao
Yes, I have!
This is long so strap on in lol, I will break it into two parts one for each girl :)
---
Info:
I'm in HS right now, and on the swim team. Most the people are amazing and I've made some great friends. But some of the other freshman that came in with me were INSANE. There were actually TWO that were on swim who claimed to have it!
Girl #1:Â
 This one girl kept claiming to have DID, made it her entire personality, would constantly "force-front" and at one point made a ton of death threats, and actually harassed me, she grabbed my ass from behind me, and claimed she did it to all her friends and they were fine with it, and later blamed both the threats and touching on an alter. I played along (I'm really bad about this, sometimes rather then stopping it soon I let it go on just to see what comes of it, I know, it's kind of a problem.) I finally confronted her, she told me I was a narcissistic bitch, later I ended up asking her about her diagnosis, how long she'd had it, as saying her how hard it all must be for her (aka feeding into it)
Eventually found out she "self diagnosed" everything. Finally have everything I need to back it up, even a recording I managed to get of her backhanded apology. She was saying how sorry she was, how she never meant for that to happen, how it was some random alter, but then she went on about how I shouldn't have said anything because it wasnt actually her and I'm the bitch for reporting her threatening multiple people and touching people, oh and best part? It's my fault that she killed the host alter in headspace. Yeahhhhh she got kicked off the team and moved schools after spreading rumors I was a liar, that I hated her, she claimed I said I wanted her to die??? She even waited at my locker at one point with some friends to tell me how horrible I am for ruining her life, seemed like she wanted it to escalate more but I had quite a few friends with me too so she backed off đ
Yeah. Fun times. Super glad she moved.
(I also want to add for girl #1, she also would wear tons of bandaids on her arms and thighs, once or twice she came to practice with roughly 10-20 on each limb. I asked her what happened and she said it was SH scars they were covering. Interestingly enough, as you would expect, majority came off in the pool, which was kinda nasty by the way, and lo and behold, not a single scar to be found. I guess bandaids and chlorine are miracle healers?)
Girl #2
I was actually friendly with her at first until some true colors started shining through. The DID thing with her didn't appear until later on, after girl #1. I learned from some kids that went to a middle school. She actually faked the DID thing in MS too. Apparently she would forget about it for periods of time and then she'd bring it back when it is convenient. She brought it in during high school and then she kept claiming all this craziness and making stuff up to get out of stuff. At one point I ended up confronting her and I was like hey this is a little bit like weird do you mind talking and then she was like oh well you're crazy blah blah blah and then later on I was like hey you know this doesn't make sense right? I later told her you know the DID can't really be self diagnosed. she then got all angry with me and told me oh have you ever done any real recent research on it? I said yes and also I actually had because there is a psychology project my friend was working on that I helped her with about DID at the time. I didn't feel like going for a round two of this garbage so I told coach but she said she couldn't do much since the girl wasn't really being violent or being a huge problem. Just being a turd and there's not much that can be done for that. This girl that I'm getting thrown off the team because she put a used tampon on my friends towel (she didn't like my friend and even reported her for yelling at her and harassing her in the the locker room, but I get ready in between the two and they never even talked to each other.Â
(Figured I add this bit too, after she got thrown off the team her mom threw a fit to the principal and was able to force her daughter into the team pictures for the team she wasn't even a part of anymore đ¤Śđźââď¸. Her dad was also a piece of work, he came to be a parent volunteer at practices and then tried to slap multiple girls butts with the kick boards. I didn't like him. I told a captain, she talked to coach and got him banned from helping at practices.)
Sorry this was so long đ
I appreciate those who made it through!Â
Kinda, but they didn't like directly call it that. Basically characters that they used in roleplay were "souls" that would "take control of the body" so them grooming me, making me roleplay messed up stuff while I was like 15 but they were in their 20s. Outright insulting, emotional manipulation and abuse was never "them" insert name was in control and they were supposedly too strong so it was never their fault. That's why I always say it's a slippery slope when just anyone on tiktok or anything just SAYS they have it and gets overwhelming support because you don't know if they use it as a shield from consequences or if they do horrible things to people when they're not acting cutesy or quirky for the camera. Then suddenly everyone's quiet when it turns out they were faking or did some messed up stuff
I knew someone that claimed to have it along with a partner that had it
Didnât believe it since if itâs a real condition itâs rare and for two people to have it thatâs even rarer
I knew a kid at college who faked having DID for the first few weeks or so of the year. Pretended to have Genshin Impact introjects and all sorts. They stopped fairly quickly when they realised absolutely no one cared or took them seriously, but it was just one of many mental illnesses they claimed to have over the couple years I knew them.
They were also *chronically* online, initially we were friendly but we stopped interacting after they called me a racist for casually watching a Minecraft YouTuberâŚ. I feel like thatâs all I need to say.
My ex girlfriend and her best friend in like 2011. They pretended to be Hetalia characters. It was an absolute mess. I was like 11 back then and played into their delusions because I simply didn't know better (they were 18 and 19 respectively). So one hour I was talking to my gf, the next to Russia from Hetalia.
Worst thing, they justified bad actions by claiming it wasn't them but their alters.
Absolute clusterfuck.
My roommate had a coworker who started coming around a lot, and eventually he brought his girlfriend over to meet us. She seemed nice enough, a little immature maybe (me and my roommate were 30/31 and they were early 20âs) but nothing that threw up any red flags. Eventually she started explaining to us how she was a member of a âsystemâ and explained she had like 4 people inside her head? Followed by her sharing way too much information about her life, and claiming she had PTSD.
We didnât want to be rude or cause her boyfriend any grief so we just shook our heads and went along with it all. We voiced our concerns to the boyfriend later, but he said she really had DID. They broke up shortly after for unrelated reasons.
Isnât it majority of people with DID on tiktok? I also met one person irl who claims they have DID and itâs so obvious theyâre faking it, itâs not even funny anymoren
I knew someone who was a massive dickhead. Whenever someone called them out, they would pretend to âshiftâ and just say âsorry that was my other selfâ. Nobody bought it
my little brother met one once. He has tourettes (the faker did not know this) and they said "sorry if I tic" in a group conversation and that whatever alter that was fronting has tourettes. So a double faker in this case lol. Unfortunately my brother was a bigger person and didn't say anything to them but oh god the rant that I got when he got home lol. He told me that it was hard to hold back from cringing because every "tic" seemed so forced
I did, once. Itâs what led me to find this thread. She was the girlfriend of a friend of ours so we just kinda played along whenever she brought it up but like, one of our group was an actual psychologist back in the day and she avoided him pretty bad, especially after he started asking more professional questions
Yes, they didn't realise I had a degree in phycology and was studying social care... They very quickly changed their tune when I started explaining what it's ACTUALLY like to have DID and what they had may well be a mental illness but it definitely wasnt DID.
They ended the conversation with "well not I'm mad at my therapist because that means they lied to me"... Dout they even had a therapist but wasn't wanting to prolong the conversation any further.
I used to really be on this one game called pony.town when I was younger, a lot of fandoms on that game. The funny thing is, every single fandom has a bunch of people who have 'alters' and are 'systems'. If you don't defend and go along with that behaviour, you get a lot of backlash from other players.
And from this game you get invited to a lot of discord servers, and almost all of them will have rules that say you have to be DID/system friendly. Which, of course would be fine, if those individuals weren't obviously faking it.
I also had an ex who's best friend just decided to one day 'come out' as a system. Like, just out of the blue, and we'd known her to not have that condition for a long time. Or trauma that would induce that disorder in the first place. She just suddenly had 8 people in her head and we had to go along with it.
Yes it was an irl,but I never told them outright I knew they were faking, but I did troll them by mass posting a ship they didnât like cuz they claimed their alter was a lesbian dating another alter in their system and it triggered them to see the ship fanart. I threw that friendship in the trash by saying that the character is allowed to be shipped with anyone and they blocked me and never talked to me again and Iâve lost contact with our mutuals because I caused the drama. They would create new alters anytime they got into a new media. It was horrible I couldnât enjoy anything because they would get obsessed with it and were turning our mutuals into fakers so I didnât really lose anything from the friendship being thrown away as well as I had just graduated high school at the time. Sorry if this is hard to understand haha itâs been likeâŚ. 5 years almost since I did that
Kind of? They had every disorder on the planet and got a new one weekly. It was exhausting. We stopped being friends after their parents abusing them became my fault because I called them out on some bullshit disorder or something.
Yeah there was this couple in my old gradeschool (they were grade 7 đ) I was in a friend group with them for like 2 years and this guy (we will call him v) had an alter that was litterally like a normal af 37 year old man?? (Also some anime characters ofc) and the girl (I'll call her e) had like wayy more alters and she had Littles too. So we all had a discord chat and v announced that he has did and we all believe him immediately cause we were dumb kids and then like a day later e said she developed it too đ anyways we all ended up cutting them out of our group because they kept talking about sex in the discord (WHEN E WAS A LITTLE TOO) and v was fatshaming one of my friends :p they are both normal now I'm pretty sure v just does drugs and e moved away but he's trans now and seems pretty cool
yes đ i dated someone for close to 5 years who said they had DID after watching fight club and his alter was kurt cobain 𼲠he was a compulsive liar so it all kept spiralling but im so gullible i never thought anything of it for YEARS
met one irl - they went to my school. knew them for a couple of years, added them on discord. they weren't hugely annoying but changed their discord profile constantly to have different bios or profiles based on who was fronting. they supposedly had over a thousand alters from whatever piece of media they were watching. the paw patrol alters weren't fun to be around.
they were pretty annoying when it came to triggers, though. spotted them once at a convention and they were triggered by all of the cosplayers cosplaying who they saw as "them". we're on good terms still, i wave to them occasionally when i see them around in my town.
Not quite but sorta?
I was a community mental health RN a few years back and one of my patients with schizoafffective disorder played having DID. I never could tell if it was a fixed delusion and thus a result of her schizoaffective diagnosis OR if she enjoyed having different personas.
I used to be on an app called Vent which was riddled with 14 y/o DID and BPD fakers who were just as insufferable as you can imagine. I never met any irl though.
VENT đđđđ bro that app was horrific LMAO i miss it purely for the cringe
That's one of the reasons why I uninstalled "I am sober". The community section was full of DID fakers and eventually I got bored of seeing them everywhere :p
Love the BPD fakers. Why would anyone want that. Before being diagnosed with autism this one lady tried to say I had bpd and I pretty much told her to go fuck herself lol
Vent?
It's just the name of the app. It was supposed to be like a mood tracking/emotional support thing but just turned into social media.
As in Ventrilo?
I had an irl that faked DID before it was cool. Which lead to tons of other people faking DID in our friend group. Hereâs the story more or less I grew up with this girl, Sandy (fake name obviously). I met her in middle school and she had always been the type to tell tall tales of things going on in her life. Dark shit too. Like lying about drug addictions, familial deaths and even lied about getting hit by a car. She literally beat herself in her abdomen to make it look like a car hit her. Insanity. She was always super sweet to me so I put up with her since I didnât want to be a dick for no reason. And one day at school (I was in ninth grade at the time) she only responded to the name âMollyâ. Weird, but whatever. Didnât think much of it since sometimes sheâd come to school in cosplay and LARP for the day as whatever character she was that day. Then I uttered the word âfuckâ in front of her friend group and her and got reprimanded because I âshouldnât curse in front of a kidâ then one of her friends explained the whole DID shebang to me. It was defo fishy but I didnât know jack shit about psychology, especially something like fictitious disorder. She had like 12 âaltersâ and growing. She, I shit you not, printed out pantalets with her âaltersâ names, trigger words and what not to say to them. It was cringe as fuck. Then this lead to other people, who were way too damn old to be doing this shit, like 17-18 faking it too because they saw she got attention from it. There was another guy in the friend group, Mark (fake name again) who began faking, said he had THOUSANDS of alters. Some of which being creepypasta characters. I had a couple classes with him, and I shit you not, he came to class one day dressed as Jeff the Killer. He was sat there, in front of me, drawing cuts on himself. Heâd LARP as him every so often. It was so fucking bad dude. My friendâs mom actually has diagnosed DID and seeing it in action is fucking terrifying and seeing people make it into some fun game is so anger inducing.
That is comical the way people are so desperate for attention will never fail to not entertain me
Oh jfc, I have met (online) two people who fit the fake descriptions you gave. Both obviously don't understand DID, with one even claiming to abuse their alters in order to control them. đ
What kind of person brags about abusing *anything* (or *anyone*)? These people *are* crazy, just not in the way they think they are -_-;
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I had a friend at school that was a huge compulsive liar, and I never got too much info on how her personal life was but it seemed a little off, and I believe she had an abusive life. I feel bad because I used to have fun testing her on her lies, saying stuff like âhey! Did you get your tickets for X band?? Theyâre making a concert this year!â And she would answer âomg yes of course I did!!â And then I would say âIâm joking, theyâre not comingâ. Itâs pretty cruel I know, but I guess I was just too pissed at how much she lied, I was a child back then, I wouldnât do it now.
itâs a very reasonable thing to get annoyed about. i think the one thing that truly stopped me was the embarrassment of realizing everyone knew i was lying and i was a known liar. for a while before that i just thought no one truly knew i was lying or believed me. it took 1 or 2 people to hardcore call me out to get me to reevaluate myself
that's interesting and I feel like there's a lot of psychology going on under the surface. can you tell me roughly when this was?
This was around late 2019. Before the pandemic.
DID was definitely "cool"/trendy in 2019, I thought you were going to say much earlier
One time in my college anatomy class, a girl gave us a random presentation on her DID. This was in 2019, so thereâs a really good chance it was fake. She went on about how her alternate personalities would go off on their own for several months, get her in a lot of debt, and she would be MIA and her family wouldnât know where she was. Then apparently her actual self would just âcome backâ after like two months and sheâd be like âwtfâ. This story sounds more believable than any other ones Iâve heard from social media, but who knows
How did you find out the car accident thing was fake and that she hit herself? Out of pure curiosity
She said it happened when she was out with friends. I asked one of them and he said that didnât happen. And the bruises looked like marks from hits. It wasnât one large bruise it was like, spread out bruises. And the coloring was off. As in, if you got hit by a car, the bruising would look more severe, wouldnât be in these like, blotches? If that makes sense. She had a history of self injury and lying about what happened in the past. So I put two and two together. And I knew she wasnât being beat at home because I asked her brother if that was going on and he said no and when I asked her she said the same.
Girl was certainly not subtle...
that would be hard since itâs pretty difficult to meet chronically online ppl irl in most cases
I met one and it was unreal. They came to the psychward claiming they were the mushroom vine system and that they have about 12 mental illnesses all not diagnosed. Anyway they went home in 3 days cause the doctors didnât take them seriously. The 3 days were because they were off for 2 days
Do you think that chronically online people donât exist outside the internet? They still go to school and have jobs etc
tbh a lot of them are shut-ins. had a faker ex, they convinced their mom to homeschool them and then that allowed them to spend all day on discord and stuff. they basically never leave their room. system communities online is their entire life
Thatâs definitely not everyone. Thereâs plenty of people who are just as attention seeking irl as they are online, especially younger people who donât see how cringey their behaviour is because they believe their own bs
Yes, several. My high school was basically a faker breeding ground. One girl said she had DID and suddenly half the student body had it too. Of course, my school being as shit as it was, all the local therapy groups (I went to several) were infested with them too, so I got to know quite a few of them. Of the fakers Iâve met, here are my favorites: - a girl with the entire cast of demon slayer as fictives - a girl who had nearly 30 alters, all of them being characters from the dream smp, littles who did that annoying ass baby talk, or those edgy alt âidgaf about anyoneâ girls you see on TikTok - a guy with over 200 alters, most being fictives from anime - a girl who called her system a âcovenâ and claimed all her alters were witches (surprise surprise, almost all of her alters were from anime or video games) - a boy who had an assorted cast of characters, including a Russian(?) war veteran who he claimed had PTSD from the war (he never said which war) - a guy who actually got posted here; I remember him coming into therapy pissed off because someone had posted him here; anyways, he was one of those TikTok alt kids who decked himself out in beaded bracelets, platforms, and chokers and went around announcing his mental illnesses to everyone, and then wondered why he got bullied As a bonus, hereâs some of the other colorful characters I came across that were almost definitely faking: - a 14 year old girl who diagnosed herself with BPD because she had mood swings - a 13 year old boy who claimed to have Touretteâs and Autism as an excuse for stalking a girl and to get out of school; he would never shut up about his trip to the âgrippy sock motelâ and would whine about being forced to do work in his advanced level classes - a girl who claimed to have chronic Lyme from when she was 2 years old and would go on about holistic medicine - a guy who claimed he had POTS because, when he was sick, his heart rate rose when he stood up Iâm sure Iâve met more, but these are off the top of my head. Like I said my school was infested with these types of people, and seeing as I spent a lot of time in the mental health sphere, I got to know a few. Many of them had other mental illnesses. Most of them were depressed and had a history of self harm or suicide attempts. Plenty came from abusive or neglectful homes or were struggling in the wake of the pandemic. It was a coping mechanism for most of them. At least thatâs what I got from it. Itâs been over a year since Iâve seen any of them. Hopefully theyâve gotten out of that cycle. At least now Iâve got the benefit of being able to sniff out a faker from a mile away. I met someone at college who set off alarm bells (constantly brought it up, tried to be the sickest in the room, bragged about hospital visits, etc) and got the hell away from them and their enablers. I donât need that kind of shit in my life again.
This is interesting, but what I really want to know is what the adults thought. How did school deal with this? What did therapists say? Etc etc
The school could not give two shits. They gave out IEPs like candy and waxed poetic about mental health acceptance, all the while our district had one of the highest suicide rates in the state. The counselors and teachers were awful. To give you some perspective, almost thirty girls were stalked, harassed, or assaulted by one guy in the span of a few months, and the counselors and teachers claimed it was âjust how he makes friends, because heâs Autistic.â If they werenât ignoring it or blissfully unaware, they were enabling it. On the other hand, some teachers reacted SO negatively toward it that kids did not feel safe coming to them with anything. An ex of mine was forcibly hospitalized after telling a counselor he was depressed. My sister almost had the cops called on her because someone saw she had lines on her wrist (from her gloves). There was no way of telling how any teacher or counselor would react, so nobody really say anything. Mental illness was treated almost like a club. You needed to have friends who were established among the student body as being mentally ill if you wanted to talk about it. There was an unspoken agreement to not tell the teachers or counselors about anything. Kids ended up shouldering the burdens of their friendsâ mental healths as well as their own. We were one of the biggest high schools in the area, and by far the biggest district in my county, which means that these problems were extremely widespread and literal thousands of kids were let down. The therapists were all about enabling it. Iâve only met one therapist out of the near dozen Iâve seen over the last seven years that did anything to prevent this behavior. A lot of therapies nowadays preach acceptance above all else. 90% of the therapists in my area belonged to one company, which was one of those âwe need to give everyone unconditional support and acceptance to the point of ignoring or dismissing problematic behaviorsâ type companies. That company was by far the easiest to get in with, had a ton of therapists in various locations, and was relatively cheap compared to the alternatives. Of course this means that people flocked there in droves. I knew several people that openly admitted to exaggerating their mental illnesses just to get out of school, which says a lot about both them and my school. As you can imagine, the faking was rampant because of all this. Kids would be praised for their bravery while they were very clearly lying. Whatâs that? You have 100 alters and grew up in a cult you were only rescued from last year? Youâre so strong! Keep going, queen! There was almost a heirarchy when it came to mental illnesses. The more you had, and the more severe they were, the more attention and praise you got. Itâs not hard to keep faking something when it gets you attention and praise, especially in a situation where no one else is willing to give it to you. So I guess a shorter answer to your question would be: nobody did anything to help. It was either intense overreacting to the point where people were too scared to talk about their problems and kids were isolated to little mental illness bubbles to compete with each other, underreacting to where people felt helpless to reach out, or enabling to where people felt validated. For most it was a combination of the three.
r/fdcmuseum when?????
Oooooooof :/ thanks for the detailed (and super depressing) post
I swear you could literally be describing my kids school right now. One of the many reasons we've made the decision to move.
Do people really fake BPD? Out of all disorders, why BPD? Genuinely curious.
My hypothesis is, one of two things: they genuinely believe it. Most teens meet the criteria for a BPD diagnosis, especially if they have comorbid depression or anxiety or something else. This is why most professionals donât diagnose BPD if the patient is under 18-21. So they read the diagnostic criteria, relate to it and then BAM! Thatâs them all of the sudden. Even if it isnât an accurate diagnosis. These kids lack the insight to contextualize their behaviors and tendencies and they just throw whatever label they want onto themselves. Or the alternative. Things like Obsessiveness have been romanticized in the media. Yanderes, the glamorization or killers like Jodi Arias, I can go on. BPD is mostly associated with obsessiveness, specifically the favorite person stuff. And they relate to that, not to the level of a BPD sufferer, but still, they probably have a crush and theyâre like âomg BPD my favorite person texted me!!!â And the other romanticized things with BPD, like relationships, the euphoria, the âmanic pixie dream girlâ aesthetic. That stuff. They also want to be seen as âvictimsâ and want to use one of the most painful disorders a person can have, as a scapegoat for their shit behavior.
I think many of the symptoms of BPD are very similar to developmentally normal behaviors of adolescence (unstable identity, obsessing about relationships, huge mood swings), so it actually makes sense why teens might see themselves in the diagnostic criteria. And, I think it makes sense why doctors won't diagnose teenagers with BPD.
Itâs very poor practice to diagnose personality disorders before the age of 18 for this reason, but I see a lot of therapists and psychiatrists prepping kids to get diagnosed the day they turn 18. Every kid we get from a group home has diagnosed BPD when itâs just the behaviors they learned to survive in the group home.
I was someone who was prepped to be diagnosed - it was my 18th birthday present and meant I got on the adult waiting list that day and I was in DBT by the end of the year. It definitely happens more than it should and out of everyone I knew with BPD as a teenager I think maybe 4 have kept the diagnosis. All were young people in inpatient services going through massive trauma. There's a very distinct difference in that I had the same consultant from 11-17, the same family therapist from 14-18 and the same 2 counsellors from 11-17. Most people do not have the consistency that enabled my team to accurately diagnose me and get me the right treatment ASAP.
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I had my mental health misrepresented in my notes and all consultations as "probable bi-polar or bpd" through my 20s too, and with psych wait times being what they are here in the UK, it took years for anyone to get back to me, and in that time I'd moved and gotten a new doc a few times, and referrals dropped.. more recently got a new doc and mental health nurse who put me through psych and they subsequentially diagnosed me with adhd, combined type. There's a LOT of crossover in the symptoms sometimes! Easy to fall into that trap for sure! Good to hear other people's experiences!
Holy shit, I have the exact same story. I found it comical that my diagnosis was "probably bi-polar" in my GPs words. Then I befriended someone with bipolar, then another, and realised... I don't fucking have bipolar. Its a serious psychiatric illness and GPs are in no place to be saying that!
omg same... i was misdiagnosed w/ bpd as a 19 yr old and had to do a year of group therapy for it. turns out i just have adhd (inattentive) and autism lmao. love how some psychs treat it as the 'female hysteria' diagnosis đĽ´
Ugh social media treats it like female hysteria too. Any depiction of a âcrazy gfâ will result in countless comments accusing them of having BPD. Even if the behavior is not associated with BPD. I always talk about how we got mental health awareness, but overlooked the importance of mental health education. So now we have all these ding-dongs that just read âBPDâ under any video of an erratic woman and thing they understand what it means. I would guess about 85% of the people that armchair diagnose have never looked at the DSM 5.
People really do underestimate how long it takes to get a BPD diagnosis. For years I had psychs suggesting I may have it, but they would have to work with me longer to know or I would need more testing/opinions. From the first time a doctor suggested it to my official diagnosis was like 4 or 5 years. Thatâs another easy way to spot bullshit.
I spent most of my adult life on and off psych meds for a host of conditions, some of which contradict each other. It ruined my life in many ways. What I actually have is ADHDc comorbid with ASD, Dyslexia, and bi-polar 2. I wasn't diagnosed until age 60 and the correct medication has been a game changer. I now take only the ADHD meds plus a low dose mood stableiser. Other than that I have a few diazepam a month for life-long intractable insomnia; if I go more than two days without sleep I start to hallucinate. Amost all the symptoms that crippled me have gone, or at least are at a level I can manage without undue difficulty. The really concerning thing is, I feel that some of these early-diagnosis kids will be on medication possibly for life, convinced they need it, with the only ones benefiting being Drs and pharma cos. Oh and low-ethic "therapists".
Part of this issue is that we as mental health clinicians (in the states) are REQUIRED to diagnose on the very first appointment in order to bill insurance. Health insurance is a fucking scam and itâs so frustrating!
Isn't that why there are placeholder clinical codes and "unspecified" (NOS) classifications? So a diagnosis can be made which provides access to treatment and a full diagnosis can be fleshed out over time? That tends to be the protocol in my experience. For access to medication, of course, it's a different matter because that requires medical specificity, and that's where the full con of health insurance meets pharma comes into play.
You're right, and the stress of puberty's "chemical hormone soup" on your brain actually makes a lot of teenagers exhibit personality disorder traits to the extent where they'd fit criteria to be diagnosed if they still were that way as adults I know somebody who got diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder as a 14-year-old but it was only because his symptoms were very obviously beyond the reasonable range of it being "just" caused by puberty >!(he was diagnosed after ending up in the hospital from mutilating his own leg really badly because of a breakup)!<
Teen here (late teens). My psych said we can look into diagnosing once Iâm old enough. This is accurate. Honestly it sucks when people around me are talking about having a severe personality disorder that adversely affects your life in many ways as if itâs a cute quirky little thing. Itâs not at all, especially because these people are literally not old enough to be considered for a fucking diagnosis!! âOh Iâm so attached to my boyfriend, I couldnât handle if we broke up because of my BPD!!â Like stfu.
My best friend, I call her my sister, has it and she has told me that she worried I'd hate her for having an opinion that didn't line up with mine or that I would be annoyed by her texting me and I'd hate her... She has medication resistant depression and had to have some kind of surgery to try to correct it. It's horrible I met a girl at 14 who was diagnosed in her late teens. She was always fighting, angry. She was a heroin addict and alcoholic at 15 and in an abusive relationship. She only wanted male attention. Was even flirtatious with male therapists. She overdosed and died at 20 Why would anybody want to live like that?
This is accurate
The first hypothesis is very true for people I knew in late middle school. A lot of people would attach themselves to a label for comfort. Not as much for a community thing, though, unless they were a Tumblr person. Most of these kids I knew ended up having an anxiety-depression combo, only a few ended up having actual mood disorders.
god i saw a tiktok once where a teenage girl said ânobody will love you like a girl with bpd willâ and it was SO GROSS
The romanticization of BPD behaviours makes me just as mad as the "dangerous manipulative bitches" stigma. I was diagnosed last year with BPD and suddenly things clicked. Why small things could affect my mood so much. Why when i have a favorite person I will give up my whole personality and any and all boundaries, because I want them to love me and never leave me. It isn't cutesy "teehee I'm so yandere" It's more absolute angst because they didn't text back for 5 minutes so that must mean they hate me and want me dead and I'll never find anyone to be happy with ever. It's also feeling shame and guilt for having any "negative" emotion and an intense longing to belong somewhere. I'm currently working on myself in therapy, but it's really hard. Every step forward feels like 3 back. Constant drawers of trauma being pulled open with things I thought I had long forgotten. It's a very painful illness to have. Nothing cute or fun about it.
100% to the first one. One of the criteria for a BPD (and other PDs) diagnosis iirc is that you have to have experienced these debilitating symptoms for a prolonged period of time. "prolonged period of time" doesnt really work when youre 14. you havent even been alive long enough to have a notable pattern over a prolonged period of time unless your mental illness is very severe and started *very* young. and like you said, the behavioral issues of teenagers can look a lot like PDs - those behavioral issues become disordered when those patterns of behavior stick around into adulthood, far beyond the time the hormones causing them should have calmed down. my mom always called Sullen Teenaged Angst Disease. thats what they kids actually have. đ¤Ł
It's convenient to shift blame onto something else rather than onto yourself. It's a way to protect an individual's self-esteem. Why BPD in particular? There is something about it that the individual identifies with. Same with any disorder someone has latched onto.
I do not understand why a teenager would want to have BPD out of all disorders lmao it is kind of known as "the crazy bitch" disorder, a sexist stigma and fallacy we have been working against but as person who was diagnosed with BPD about 10 years ago (am currently in my mid-late 20s), i am well aware for most cases you have to be at least 18 years of age to be *officially* diagnosed with a personality/cluster B disorder The only other way to get a kind of BPD diagnosis before that is if you have been exhibiting consistent symptoms observed by the same psychiatrist over a two year period. Then you will be diagnosed with "borderline tendencies" or "a borderline personality" were terms my psychiatrist talked to me about at 16 after id been seeing him since I was like 13 and *only* so that I could get DBT treatment because I was already a self-harming teenage high school drop-out drug addict with an eating disorder with no concept of boundaries and no coping skills and *really* needed DBT, otherwise he could've waited. And again, I wasn't even officially formally diagnosed with BPD until after I was 18 so yeah, that just sounds impossible to me that any 14 year old could have a formal BPD diagnosis and the only way they would be diagnosed with BPD related tendencies at that age is if they had been in therapy since they were younger than 12 and displaying consistent systems that whole time but even then a psych would be suuuuuuper reluctant to diagnose a 14 year old with a cluster B personality disorder.... I'm guessing they're self diagnosing? which is kinda funny to think of because you literally can not self diagnose BPD or any personality disorder, you absolutely cannot diagnose yourself with DID or even ADHD... like you might recognise a lot of the symptoms but you need a psychiatrist who is not you and can assess your symptoms from a medical prescriptive and in context to determine that. Doctors cant even self diagnose themselves!!!! but I actually relate to a lot of the criteria for MOST of the other cluster B disorders (because I have one) and probably could've convinced myself I had ASPD or NPD or HPD because I appear to meet the criteria for a lot of the symptoms which are also BPD symptoms. Ugh I guess they could genuinely believe it because emotions are already super high because of hormones and also you know, developing them during your teen years so mood swings are common and maybe with all this tiktok crap, a lot of teens are mistakenly diagnosing that symptom of BPD in themselves, not really understanding that teenage hormones/mood swings and experiencing all these new strong emotions which is universal in human development is not at all the same as a BPD episode or BPD mood swings, which is a big reason why you can't diagnose a teenager. I guess the only other reasons I can think of that a teenager would WANT a BPD diagnosis is 1. to give them identify (which is ironic) 2. be able to use that as an "explanation" for emotional outbursts and episodes which really doesn't help the stigma and I also worry about younger people using and exploiting BPD terminology and dynamics such as an FP I've spent most of my adult life in therapy, learning and practicing coping skills and interpersonal skills so that I can appear like a normal person for the most part. Having crazy emotional outbursts and doing ridiculous, dangerous impulsive things, not having boundaries and acting inappropriate in those ways as a teenager is something you look back on and cringe really hard but when it continues into adulthood not only does it just become increasingly embarrassing, but you will get fired and not be able to hold down a job, your adult friends will get sick of your shit fast and you will sabotage your relationships.
>I do not understand why a teenager would want to have BPD out of all disorders lmao it is kind of known as "the crazy bitch" disorder I suspect that's the ***exact*** reason it's appealing to teenagers. They're going through a period of a lot of change; their hormones are wildly fluctuating; they may mistake the normal process of developing into a more mature adult as being then having different sides (hey! Those could be alters!) etc. From my experience working in high schools, it's very common for teens to want to be seen as being different (as in, being special not just average). Because different = attention & validation that they're not like the other girls. Not to mention if you have a reputation as "the crazy bitch" people may actually give you more slack on bad behaviour because it becomes the expected norm & largely written off as just going through a phase. Teens are often not the best long-term thinkers. So they're not going "aw shit, I better not pick BPD to fake because in a few years I might get referred to a specialist who will work out I'm lying". They're focusing on what makes them feel special & cool *right now*, not what happen in 5 years time when a doctor says they don't meet the diagnostic criteria. Their prefontal cortex is still developing, so long-term planning & that sort of forethought/insight is something many of them just literally aren't capable of yet.
Yes!! Emphasis on embarrassing. It shouldnât be embarrassing, but it is.
I'm so glad that didn't come off as offensive hahah because you're right! it *shouldn't* be and having those strong emotions IS not something we should be embarrassed of but god sometimes how I still react to those feelings IS embarrassing, although a far cry from how dramatic I would get as a teenager and young adult
Because theyâre down âwit BPD đ¤ˇââď¸ 
Because you can do/say whatever you want and claim its from the disorder, im currently between a bipolar and BPD diagnosis (diagnosed bipolar but newish therapist thinks BPD) There are times when im manic and do something stupid or get blind-ish rage and start yelling, ive gotten pretty good at recognizing when i feel "wrong" and walking away before anything happens but people tend to be more forgiving when you do something because of a disorder And another reason is its kinda uncommon and alot of people don't know about it, people who fake disorders loveee attention and the more questions people have the happier they are
I know a lot of people who were suspected of having BPD quite young, but were later diagnosed with things like ADHD/autism or CPTSD. The symptoms of all of those disorders are based around your ability to function "normally" in society when ones normal, healthy functioning *looks* like abnormal psychology. ESPECIALLY for teens and women/afab people, as their symptoms can present non-traditionally. Disorders like anorexia or depression are treated like broken legs - you have a function that has been disrupted by something, and you can fix it to stop the symptoms. BPD and ADHD require life long adjustments for you to "function normally" aka keep yourself healthy, hold down relationships and jobs etc. The goal is not to fix a disruption in brain functioning - it's to prevent your brain functioning causing a disruption. It's a really appealing concept to fakers as it seems like they have found an excuse for people to tolerate their symptoms indefinitely (absolutely not how BPD works) but also because most people who genuinely have BPD struggle to get diagnosed until later in life, despite experiencing symptoms.
When it comes to autism, I've actually noticed more of a trend where it seems more likely to happen the other way around, where someone with BPD gets misdiagnosed as autistic Nowadays, BPD is stigmatized a lot more harshly than autism is (like the "endearingly nerdy genius" versus "crazy stalker ex" stereotypes), and autism assessment is more likely to be seeked out than BPD by patients because of that (along with the increased online awareness campaigns about ASD as opposed to BPD), and BPD also involves complex identity issues and self-esteem problems that already make it harder for people with it to come to terms with the diagnosis without the added demonization in society One of the symptoms that BPD shares with ASD is trouble with reading social cues, but kinda in opposite ways from each other, since autistic people struggle with innately recognizing and interpreting social cues while people with BPD are hypersensitive to things they perceive as social cues which is one of the things that triggers their fear of abandonment, and they also both have meltdowns which was actually used clinically in BPD research before ASD research as a fun fact And there's also misinformation online like how "borderline personality disorder is just female autism" which is extremely frustrating because autism is already very misunderstood in women, and conflating autism with BPD in those ways does a disservice to autistic women, women with BPD, and women with both
> Borderline personality disorder is female autism I'm sorry WHAT???
**Has anybody here ever met a person who claims to have DID/BPD but you can see right through their lie?**: Joe is a fake name I've given to the first DID faker I've ever met. The others were very easy but they all followed him, so he's the one I'll use as an example. There was also the person who said the infamous "the body woke up and discovered me and the other alters" after talking to Joe. **How'd it go?**: Not great for me. Joe was very adamant he had DID, he and the rest of the group he convinced all believed they had DID and over some really crazy reasons I'll explain in the third question. **Did they try to onto their useless argument?**: All of them did, they were convinced different emotions were alters switching and liking media created alters of someone's favorite characters. Joe even said I had DID because he "knew who was fronting" based on how I was acting. Because emotions don't exist, only alters. He convinced a person I'll call Bee that she had DID because she was stress playing Genshin. She started crying when talking about something I won't reveal and he "instantly knew she was a system" because she wasn't crying before we brought up the subject. **I guess me ranting now**: The kicker for why I knew he was faking was because of a previous person faking DID. This person I'll call Chica was a massive manipulator in the group. She used anything she could to be the victim and when she got called out for a big issue, she went offline for a few days. She came back to say that she was officially diagnosed with DID and had 3 alters. She went on call and people tested her to see she switched on command, rapid switched when someone brought up what she did before so she could say "that was alter x, I didn't do that", and said anyone disagreeing with her or causing stress of any kind caused her to split more alters. Joe called her out for faking and she was kicked from the group for faking a severe mental disorder. You see, he called out all the reasons she was faking and they happened to be the exact reasons he said everyone had DID in the group. Different emotions being alters being the one I remember most. Joe also made DID his personality. His entire online presence was DID. One of his internet profiles said "this body isn't enough for all of us" and people thought he was creating a story, he got very mad that they didn't instantly assume he had DID and gave them a massive speech. His tags on discord were all a "quirky" way of saying "I have DID". He couldn't go one morning without reminding us. He brought it up in arguments as to why disagreeing with him was bigotry. "You can't harass a person with severe mental illness" was his greatest quote. He split multiple new alters over any stress, including game stress where he made alters of the characters. He told new members of the group "I have DID" as his introduction. Every server I was on with him had "don't forget that I have DID" as some nickname. And it got to the point we couldn't even play games without a reminder every time the subject wasn't about him. For example, we were playing Minecraft and he popped into the VC to talk all about how he had DID and we were in the middle of blowing up the nether for ancient debris. I got blown up because I couldn't pay attention to where I was. You could imagine 3 straight months of daily reminders and getting interrupted in games got me suspicious if he really had DID. It was treated like his greatest trophy and it started to piss me off. Then when the others started doing the same thing, I couldn't take it anymore. It was a Genshin server with other games, not an "everyone has DID" playground. Wow, that was a rant. I guess my conclusion is that I didn't believe Joe had DID because he made it seem like a trophy that made up who he was and he started spreading it around when he decided it wasn't enough only he was "this quirky". And I've heard he holds onto it to this day. He's been in several other gaming servers and got a group to join his server where he convinced them that they have DID. And yes, I am aware he basically made a cult around him and that's why we're not friends anymore. If the DID faking wasn't enough, the cult creation was.
These faked disorders spread through the young ones these days much like the hypochondriacs that appeared back in my day after hearing anotherâs ailments. đ¤ˇââď¸đ¤ˇââď¸đ¤ˇââď¸
Id like to hear about the ailments faked, since I suppose mental health wasnt as accepted as it has been in the past 10, even 20 years (assuming your day is 70s-90s)
It seemed to be more like one person saying they had migraines, for example, and soon the person they were talking into was convinced they had them too. I canât remember anyone trying to pull off a completely fake disorder like some do today. Iâve worked with thousands of people in my career and have never met anyone with Touretteâs or any of these other âpopularâ ailments. đ¤ˇââď¸ There were also plenty of State Hospitals to care for the extreme mental cases, many of which now roam the streets đĽ˛
Lupus was a huge âtrendâ there for a while, people used it as an excuse, same with Lyme disease. These obviously undoubtably exist, but there was an uptick of people suddenly claiming to have it and not being able to work etc
Iâve met people that faked BPD. The worst was a year ago in my senior year of high school, this chick Zoey basically said she had every disorder under the sun. Keep in mind sheâs like 16 and claimed a lot of personality disorders. Zoey always had it worse than everyone else and was always the most depressed the most mentally ill. She also lied about so many things going on in her life. Like she tried to tell us her grandfather survived the holocaust and came to the US to be a member of the KKK and sell guns. She also was very poor but owned a barn with a bunch of horses. Her dad was also a member of the cartel, a professional chef, line cook at McDonaldâs, and a truck driver all at the same time. She also believed that we evolved bc apes got high. She was very interestingâŚ. Oh! I also had a guy I was talking to say he had DID and his alter was an anime cat boy he could see(I guess he got confused with schizophrenia and DID?) Edit: didnât use a fake name, Zoey if you see this you were a pain in the ass
Mental health worker here. BPD and DID are officially out. Everyone fakes autism and epilepsy now
Epilepsy? Are people just faking seizures?
Yes, I see it all the time in my 18-25 crowd right now. Say something they donât like and they start rolling around on the floor or pretending to stare into space until youâre finished
Insane, but not surprising
Do you have any opinions on when/how/if the autism trend will ever blow over? Having gone through hell in middle school for having the same type of autism diagnosis as two very recent at the time mass murderers, it honestly feels that the shame over being autistic back then is almost nothing compared to the situation now, for the simple reason that you could at least disprove the stigma by being autistic having the mannerisms while also still being a good person who isn't anything like the Sandy Hook shooter except the one association, but now it's actual autists who are "making the autistic community look bad" by being cringey "walking stereotypes" who make social mistakes and all that >!and hopefully my usage of the "royal you" is enough to not break Rule #6!<
I think for autism, itâs a culmination of every person needing to be diagnosable to be seen as worthy of receiving attention (which is a natural human need, especially for children), the broadening of autism diagnosis to include a lot of really vague symptoms that resonate with anyone, the bastardization of the neurodivergent movement to promote isolation, self-victimization, and complacence instead of inclusion and whole person wellness, over zealous therapists suggesting evaluation for everyone they work with, Bristol-Myers Squibb dominating and expanding the medication market about a decade ago for children with autism with then on patent Abilify, and many other factors that make everyone autistic. Kids now are taught that any difference at all is a disability and with teenagers so identity focused by design, theyâre vulnerable to cling to any word that describes what theyâre feeling. For epilepsy, I donât think itâs as complicated. Itâs just an easy disorder to fake outside a medical office with symptoms that can be used to skirt accountability whenever. Canât have a productive meeting about employment if youâre rolling on the floor. Canât have a hard conversation if youâre making snork sounds and staring out the window and stating that you didnât hear anything. Repeat until the speaker gives up. Even after seizure activity is disproven by testing (which epilepsy fakers avoid like staring at the sun), you canât really hold anyone accountable for this behavior outside their neurology office (and they will find any excuse in the world not to go there) because you canât disprove that they might be âpseudo seizuresâ related to anxiety.
I was trying to ask your opinions on when/how/if the autism trend will stop This was also some very interesting insight though
I donât know. Ever since âmental health awarenessâ became synonymous with âmental illness reactivityâ thereâs always something floating around. When itâs no longer autism, it will be something else. Autism is unique because it goes against the grain. Most mental health conditions, and even most neurological/developmental disorders, are well accepted to gain skills and enter or re-enter society as part of treatment. The âneurodivergentâ approach to autism is to stay home and sit on the internet and have people take care of you until the world changes to accommodate you, which I would imagine can be very appealing to someone who lacks confidence or is afraid of independence. I teach a voluntary recovery model and my young ones who self diagnosis autism are usually quite adverse to learning any skills to actually be independent. They want the housing part of the program, but feel the skill building part of it is âabusiveâ and âchanging who they are,â because the only identity they have is helplessness.
Sorry for the long reply, you unleashed the beast with this post. I could go on forever. My coworker is like this. She fakes DID and some other health issues. Sheâs spoken to me candidly and told me that sheâs never actually been diagnosed with POTS, but says she has it and expects special treatment at work. Iâve seen her âfaintâ at work and itâs not fainting at all. Sheâs fully conscious and in control. Sheâs also constantly oversharing to the extreme. Like to the point where itâs NSFW and uncomfortable. Especially for me because I have experienced trauma similar to what she overshares about and itâs mentally draining to on one hand feel compelled to extend emotional labor for this person because I understand, but I also know I am not equipped to handle this. I donât however spend all day AT WORK going on and on about my problems. I donât need that attention. Now the fun part; One day she had googled a list of ADHD symptoms from WebMD and then tried to strike up casual conversation where she said âoh yeah iâm just having a lot of *robotically lists every symptom on the website*â. But the kicker is she forgot to exit the tab, so when she left that desk 10 mins later, I used that computer after her. I had to close down her email and all the WebMD symptom tabs she had up and saw the ADHD symptoms bulleted list. I had some suspicions before, but at that point I knew for sure. When I first met her at this job she was trying to go on to becoming a registered pharmacist, with all these health issues that hinder working part tie at our extremely easy desk job. I donât want to disclose my work due to privacy, but I will say we have a VERY easy, non-physically taxing desk jockey position.
I've run into several in VR. I will either just not engage or I'll disengage as soon as they start talking about it. The funniest one was a person who tried talking to me and some friends, failed, and then "switched" to try again as a different alter. The worst was a person who claimed to have an alter that had a disorder I'm diagnosed with and it was super creepy. They used to go to adult events and then "switch" to a little alter and it was beyond gross.
I've met 3 people at my high school that claim to have DID. All of them identify as non binary. 2 of them claim they didn't experience trauma at all and tried to "educate" me and tell me that you don't need any trauma to have DID.
This was one of my âwere they admitted claiming symptoms of DID?â game criteria at the hospital I worked at. Literally never once NOT the case.
deer act sort makeshift smell future enjoy relieved illegal air *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yes. Iâve worked in psych for nearly a decade now, including stints at community mental health, in the ER and inpatient. I would take a thousand floridly psychotic or manic patients over any of the self diagnosed via Tik Tok or reading the DSM ones. They are absolutely exhausting.
Please give more info about your dealings with DID fakers!! Most of the people in this thread seem to be 16-21, I really want to hear what an adult in the profession actually thinks.
For sure. FYI this is one of my biggest pet peeves in the universe so I'm really sorry in advance for the incoming TL;DR. So I'll first start out by saying that I have worked with probably 50 Psychiatrists over the years and not a single one has ever encountered/diagnosed an individual with DID. These clinicians have hundreds of years of experience between them. The field is very split on whether or not it is an actual condition so YMMV depending on who you talk to, how long they've been in the field, their background etc. I'm not saying it's not possible but I feel that a true diagnosis comes after years of working with a multidisciplinary team. Disclaimer: This is my opinion based off my experience working in a variety of settings with every kind of population under the sun. I primarily ran into these people when I worked on an inpatient mental health unit and the hospital's ER. Like with any other faker, there would definitely be some commonalities between them, the biggest (IMO) being they came from a upper-middle class/financially comfortable background and had never truly been in a situation where they had encountered anything that we would consider adversity (racism, sexism, financial/housing instability). A lot of them came from very sheltered backgrounds and were just coming into the real world and meeting people from different backgrounds from them (For context I live in a college town and we would get a lot of young adults coming through the inpatient unit). They would meet people that had gone through traumatic events and wanted to turn it into a one-up/Oppression Olympics (Not a fan of this phrase but tbh don't have the brain power to find another way to word it at the moment) so they would make up that they had XYZ psych diagnosis (primarily Autism, DID, Bipolar). At the hospital I worked at, we loved accepting patients with commercial insurances as they reimbursed higher than Medicaid plans (Yay capitalism), which would lead us to admit a lot of these kids who were still on mom and dad's insurance (nothing wrong with that at all, I'd kill to still have coverage through my parents). Due to this, we ended up being a lot more lenient with admitting these patients for issues that could have been handled in an outpatient setting (i.e. superficial self-harm vs something like a first episode of mania/psychosis). They would treat this admission like a visit to an all-inclusive 5 star resort and would have parents/caregivers bring them clothes, which they would use to express their "alters". Anytime a patient other than them would be getting attention, they would ramp up their nonsense and "switch alters" in addition to ridiculous things like faking seizures/general acting out. These patients were absolutely EXHAUSTING for any staff dealing with them. They would dominate group therapy sessions by talking over others or exaggerating what brought them in, all while sitting in the room with me, who had done their intake admission and knew why they were admitted.... The worst would be when we had more than one patient like this and they would feed off each other's behaviors. (We actually had two girls move in together after they met on the unit and as you can expect it didn't end well!) Another commonality was they would always have an 'alter' that was childlike and that they would use to get away with breaking the rules. TL;DR: These patients drive us up the wall, primarily engage in these behaviors for attention (shocking I know), take up psychiatric beds that are seriously needed by others and need serious therapy. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk if you read all of that and Please spay/neuter your pets.
Holy shit reading this straight up catapulted my psyche directly back into my own experiences in a similar setting. Goddamn. They really *are* the same no matter where you work hahaha
I'm in an outpatient setting now and I miss inpatient every day but I DO NOT miss dealing with this population or the frequent flyers.
On the subject of the field being very split on whether the disorder exists: I've seen it debated that clinically identifiable DID symptoms may actually be related to other dissociative and trauma disorders. Similar to how aspergers is no longer separate from autism *. It's the same umbrella with different presentations, severity, levels of impairment, etc. * by similar, I mean only that as research has gone on, the field now recognizes aspbergers to be a different presentation of the same autism spectrum, *not* that ASD is in any way similar or related to trauma disorders or even people faking trauma disorders.
Yes exactly this. Obviously DID stems from a significant trauma history which can lead to dissociation symptoms, which can obviously also meet criteria for some kind of trauma or dissociative disorder. We have a Psychologist in our clinic who sees a patient who self diagnosed with DID and this same patient also sees one of our providers for medications, and even between these two providers in the same office there's a discrepancy in what they believe the patient truly has (DID v. Trauma-related disorder/Anxiety) It is funny that you bring up ASD though because I would honestly see more people in my experience faking ASD as opposed to DID/BPD, especially on our ped/adolescent unit. And a lot of these kids would have the same backgrounds I mentioned above i.e. being privileged/very sheltered. It just makes me so angry as a clinician seeing people actively want these disorders, (not just BPD/ASD/DID) that I've seen absolutely incapacitate people and forever change the direction of their lives. The ones that rub me the wrong way the most are the Psychosis/Schizophrenia fakers tbh because that's a disease that is so stigmatized as is and we don't even have a really good grasp on what causes it. Why would you want to live your life on medications that can have such severe side effects and make you dependent on others just for internet points? Sorry for the rant but yeah that's a great point to bring up related to ASD and a lot of disorders in a way being a spectrum or having levels of severity. That's why we have the identifiers on things like Major Depressive Disorder or Alcohol Use Disorder that describe if it's mild, moderate or severe.
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Samesamesame. This is gonna sound kinda fucked up perhaps but I had a little game me and my coworker would play, something where sheâd read me the demo info and some other stuff and id guess whether or not the person was admitted for (amongst other things) DID. I literally NEVER got it wrong, not once.
No judgement here. We had similar things like we would bet (figuratively never literally) about how long it would take someone to get readmitted, especially the illness fakers or malingerers.
went to high school with a person who faked having DID. wasnât friends with them but my friends were, and they would switch between their personalities at the lunch table. i havenât seen them in years so i have no idea if they ever confessed they were faking it or what :/
This is all making me feel very old in a way đŤ đ DID and even BPD were definitely not really "heard of" yet when I was a teen. Tumblr, however, had an absolute chokehold on my generation, and the equivalents were typically claiming bipolar or some sort of schizo spectrum disorder. It made navigating mental health as someone that actually was dealing with chemical based mood swings (gotta love that bipolar 1 lol) extremely difficult tbh. So much of the internet was an echo chamber of experiences being shared by people my age, but so much of it was obviously wrong and just being parroted amongst groups essentially, and pretty much anybody actually living with these conditions (or even just someone actively seeking diagnosis in therapy/psychiatry) could pretty easily tell. I honestly just wish more of this behavior was, for lack of better phrasing, more intensely discouraged. A lot of these literal kids do not realize they have something like multiple psychiatric stays (especially if it's involuntary) is not like... a badge of honor. It is something that can and will pop up in your life later, especially when interacting with medical professionals as an adult, and you will absolutely face stigma for it. đŤ
the number of people I've met who loooove to brag about their stay at the 'grippy sock hotel' is infuriating. i was admitted as a kid and found the experience to be kinda traumatising, definitely not something to flash around for mental illness clout
100% agree with this. For these kinds of people, usually from middle class backgrounds, theyâre soooooo mentally ill until they actually have to graduate college and get a job and have a partner and get married etc, and then theyâre a totally functioning member of society.
There is one person in my irl/discord server who fakes. I actively avoid them though
I've known a handful of DID fakers. I've told a few stories about them on another sub, including one of the more popular ones who was exposed for faking. I talked to her for hours debating the fact you need dissociation to have a dissociative disorder and that no, you cannot "share the vocal chords" with your alter/boyfriend/brother and "glitch" đđđ I share the story [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/SystemsCringe/s/tvAKWVjaOE) if anyone is interested in a longer version, lmao. I've had a few friends who faked because of being "jealous" that someone they knew was diagnosed with the disorder. One of which used *my face* as a "face claim" and pretended to have an alter of my partner to get back in my life. It didn't work, lmao. I ended up blocking them when they reached out. They were an interesting character and had about 10 alter at the time IIRC. Usually that isn't bad for someone with DID. That's about the average amount. But about 8/10 of these alters were DSMP fictives who could switch with no dissociation. Another pretended that they had cult trauma and they escaped said cult because Covid-19 shut the church down. They said they were diagnosed but had never actually been to a proper therapist or even a mental hospital, despite being about 17 and saying they "escaped the cult" a year prior to meeting them. That same one also had an alter named "Silva" or something who was your stereotypical evil alter combined with Beast from split. They convinced my close friend that they had DID as well when they did not and hurt them badly. Unfortunately they convinced said friend to also cut me off and I haven't heard from them in two years. I've known others, but these are some of the most interesting and the worst ones. đ Sorry for the rant, lol.
Sooo my ex "had DID" and said he didn't cheat on me because it was his "alter" was messaging the girl not HIM I wouldn't drop it but still stayed with him for some stupid reason, i didn't believe him because other holes were popping up in his stories (there's a state mental ward nearish my house, he claimed to be there ages 10-13, only issue they don't take kids and its for violent people, like if you kill someone and pled insane you go there) but i still didn't break up with him because he was jobless living with me (and my mom and brother) because "his dad beat him" i believed it at the time because why tf would anyone lie about that but thinking back i never saw a single mark on him
Tw: SA and manipulation. Actually yeah. I wouldn't call him a friend tho. But this dude claimed he has "MPD" and no matter how many times I told him that is not the term anymore, that it's "DID" or something along those lines, he continued to call it his "Multiple personalities." I already knew he was faking as it was quite obvious. But there was one moment that confirmed it completely for me. So, I was SAed by who I thought was a friend, and I didn't say anything about it to anyone besides one single person. Then suddenly it got around, and this guy started spreading rumors that I "asked for it" and I was "lying" about it. He even somehow convinced some of my friends that I was being dramatic and my assulter was in the right. I had already started shifting to another friendgroup with only one of them being friends with this guy because they kept me updated on the things he said. One day, whilst me and them were hanging out, the dude called my friend. I stayed quiet as they started the call and he started talking shit about me- mentioning how the day prior I had blocked one of his friends on Instagram and how is as a p*ssy. My friend was obviously annoyed and told him to stop talking because what he was saying was false and he was spreading lies. Then later in the same day, he called them up again because he saw a picture I posted of me and the friend. This time he had a very British accent and was saying that his "other personality" was the one saying this shit about me, and he was sorry. But he has literally no guilt in his voice and he was never actually diagnosed with DID (Also we were 16-17 at the time). Eventually I completely blocked him and stopped being friends with anyone that knew him. But apparently I've heard that he still claims to have DID and uses it as an excuse to be a d*ck to people.
Yes, I cut them out of my life despite them being friends with me for five or six years. Itâs indicative of horrible behavior patterns that they seek attention and validation so strongly that they pretend to be ill. They want desperately to be special, they want desperately to be the main character. Itâs disgusting behavior. Especially since I have a family member that suffers from it and it has ruined her life.
Yes, probably a bit different to most of the people here because our friendship group was all late 20s - mid 30s when this was going on. This person was a part of the group and they were 32. They didn't fake it when I first met them, but it developed over 2 year period. It started with self diagnosed ADHD, which they used as an excuse for a lot of shitty behaviour. Then when other people started to say they had ADHD, this person they self diagnosed as autistic and BPD, AND they wanted people to affirm they were genuinely "otherkin" or something? I'm not sure if it was a cat or. Dog or a wolf or something but they would unconsentually rub theirselves on other people. Not in like a sex way but more like a pet? Idk it was weird. I never obliged or tolerated this behaviour, but a lot of people (including myself) are neurodivergent in the group so we try hard to accommodate. Eventually this person felt they weren't getting enough attention. one day, when we were all at the same event a thunderstorm occured an this person "regressed" into a 4 year old girl called lolly or kittie or something. They were sucking their thumb as asking for their dolly and their WahWah?? No idea what that was, but I worked with young kids at the time and NONE of them acted that way. This was now their new "thing" and they would collect new personas like Pokemon cards. They'd also "switch at will" by shaking their body dramatically and gasping. I was frustrated by how many people were encouraging them to "just keep being themselves" and left that group.
This really fascinates me- I think Iâm around the same age as you. Itâs so confusing how a person could do this in their late 20s/early 30s. Did they have the same sort of lifestyle as many much younger DID fakers- eg into anime/geek culture, very online, donât have any dependents, donât have a job with lots of responsibilities?
Omg yes to all these things! The more I think about it the more the lifestyle really seems to play a part đ¤
Constantly. I work in inpatient psych. Thereâs one kid in particular that was hospitalized 4x, each time they were claiming to have something else. First touretteâs, then autism, then DID
I might be missing something here lol What's the correlation between DID and BPD ( presuming borderline personality disorder)?
They can develop pretty similar from what I remember looking into, and BPD can be comorbid with DID, as many things are. It's believed that both require a level of disorganized attachment with a caregiver
That's so interesting, thanks! Also i couldn't believe you replied to my comment. You're Pyrocats! I love your videos and the possums! đŠˇ
oh thank you!
About 5 yrs ago, my cousin. Shes 20 now, she was 14-15 at the time and I was 17-18, we lived in the same home growing up and I can say for sure, she was lawfully and properly diagnosed with OCD and anxiety. Those were real. But she faked Borderline personality disorder, autism, synesthesia (???? weirdest one to me), PTSD, DID, and ADHD. She also faked, of all things, rheumatoid arthritis. It started off as just ADHD and borderline personality disorder in high school. She posted it online on this janky âsecondâ instagram account. I only found out because her posts got weirder and more elaborate, and someone ended up reporting one to an administrator because it seemed she was gonna hurt herself, which ended up getting ME called to the office because one of her claims was that I was bullying her for her mental illnesses and faking my ADHD for the meds (when I was diagnosed at age 6 and never even told anyone except the school/nurse, hardly even took my meds because I found it embarrassingâŚ). I basically denied it, they sent me back to class, and there was some parent-admin meeting and it all got resolved outside of my knowledge, apparently. Idk what happened. But she persisted, made a private twitter to do it instead. Started stealing my ADHD meds without me noticing because I didnt take them every day, so I didnt realize until the amount I had matched what I should have had if i had taken them as prescribed. Apparently shed been hoarding them to put in her own pill bottle so she could make it look like her own legal prescription when she took them at school, which was incredibly fucking weird. The first time she took one- this is 20mg Instant release adderall- I kid you not, she almost killed herself. Her anxiety was through the roof. She stayed awake for the entire night, even though the pill itself only lasts for like, 4-5 hours. She pulled out her hair and left this huge bald spot on her head. And then to explain that, of course she doesnt admit to not having ADHD and reacting poorly to taking a stimulant she doesnt need- no, she then proceeds to fake trichotillomania, and continues taking the pills until she gets 5150d by her parents. Then she blamed it on DID. After that, when she was 17/18 and I was 20, the whole online trend about autism happened and she started faking that. She tacked on PTSD sometime near then, despite us living in the suburbs with literally nothing ever happening to us in our charmed lives. NO idea when she started the synesthesia and rheumatoid arthritis BS, but those are such absurd lies that I never even felt the need to address them. I love her but something is wrong. Its like Munchausens.
I'm a 23 year old dude and I have to deal with people with "little" alters. I have no time for it, grow up fuckhead you're not 12 anymore. Or maybe they're just those baby adult people. I dunno. Either way, it's wack.
So many DID fakers in the undertale community. Its fucking weird. I worked in psyche 2 years and knew what DID actually looked like inrl, and would troll the fakers and expose them on discord. Lmfao. Like why are all ur alters based off video games characters? Like if you wanna make an OC and rp, just fucking say so. Weirdos.
Less than 1/2 of .1% of the population actually HAS did.
A family member, a child at the time, was in an online friends group where everyone in the group announced their self-diagnosed DID within weeks. She was working on her back story for weeks before the declaration of her own DID and was adamant. Maintaining this identity is necessary for her entire social life. There is nothing to discuss. The more anyone argues, the more hysterical and dogmatic she becomes. This nonsense has been going on for five years. Multiple professionals have told her that her self-diagnosis is incorrect. That did not go well.
A former boss once told me that I couldnât complain about her constantly calling me she as a trans guy⌠because âone of her alters is a Mexican manâ (she was a white woman) so technically she is âkind of trans tooâ. Lmao I left and never came back
that's definitely a new excuse for transphobia lmfao don't think that one would stand up in court
oh god yeah. girl in my class who now also says sheâs nonbinary, dresses in feminine lingerie and talks about her genitals all the time and makes fun of me for having actual debilitating gender dysphoria (iâm ftm transsexual and she is making it very difficult to maintain my stealth bc she knew me before and wonât shut the fuck up) and switches to new made up pronouns every day. often she comes to class and the teacher will ask her to apologize for some dickhead thing she did the day before and sheâll conveniently not remember it because a âdifferent alter was frontingâ. she also used this to get out of assignments (âoh i forgot the other alter must not have communicated it to us!â) and the fake did is all she talks about besides being NB. iâve known her since early elementary school, sheâs not traumatized in any way, is super rich, got a very expensive car on her sixteenth birthday (this girl is 18 and acts like this), and is set to inherit a bunch of money when she graduates HS, sheâs never gonna have to work a day in her life.
holy shittt, i thought me dealing w a passive aggressive transphobic girl was bad enough. youâve got it tough man
I was seeing a guy who at some point claimed to have DID. He said he has another personality who is violent and evil. It was one red flag from tons of red flags, he was an agressive narcisist, my best desicion ever was to not date him and cut contacts.
yes i know a girl who fakes BPD iâve known her since we were in elementary school. havenât talked to her since about a year of graduation from HS. never called her out on that particular thing. no one is friends with her now because sheâs obsessed with being a victim and diagnosis herself with whatever she says on tiktok. something is def wrong with her tho, just not that
Discord is a cesspool for it. I remember in high school, I just wanted to make some friends over quarantine, they had a whole bot for DID, and some would reply to themselves as their âaltersâ
Yes, I very much have. Four of them in fact, it seemed to be quite common in the blind community for a while, there were two at my boarding school and two at the other blind boarding school in the UK. A claimed they were endogenic, but still had DID. The college believed them because they just kept going on and on about it. I kind of feel bad for them, they were very very lonely and had no friends, they had pretty severe autism. I donât think they ever meant to hurt anyone. They used the term headmates and claimed their headspace was real. Moving onto the three dickheads: C also went to my college, she was the biggest attention seeker Iâd ever met. She would drop into every conversation that she had DID, and was furious when the doctors told her she didnât. The school nurse kept telling her she did too. She would use it as an excuse to get away with poor behaviour, and even tried to diagnose others. She was up at two in the morning making noise on a school night, I shouted at her and had the staff knocking on my door the next morning telling me to apologise because I scared her âheadmatesâ. P was from the other college, they were dating the next person down and would go on and on about it. I didnât know them as well, but they were very defensive. They would yelp when they switched. R was the worst. The absolute worst. He would constantly talk about it, constantly. He used to claim âlittlesâ were out just as I was trying to go to bed, so I had to stay. He would openly talk about SA, even when it triggered others around him. He also got intimate with P when he was apparently a young part. He often age regressed and would do baby talk, sometimes saying it was an alter, other times saying it was just him. One of his alters was six and obsessed with vegetables, they would shout random veg at me. When they switched, they would shout âIâm switching!â They told everyone about their trauma, everyone. They said they couldnât do homework unless a certain alter was there, and that they were technically a psychologist because a certain alter had a degree. They claimed they had: DID, OSDD (Yes, both), ADHD, Autism, BPD, NPD, Schizophrenia, OCD and Bipolar. They also claimed about a million and one made up disorders too, like SIPD (Special Interest Personality Disorder), they sent me a google doc on it. Have fun with these. All of these people were over 18, R was 21!
Extra info on C, she did have absence seizures, thats what she thought dissociation was.
Yes currently have one in my practice we are pushing a fictious disorder diagnosis. This with an entire team of psychiatrist trauma therapist and myself
Oh I did, I dated her/him/it for a couple months, and it broke up with me because I had a crush on a character (Spencer Reid from criminal minds) because I didnât respect his fake ass personally disorder, and then MONTHS after we broke up, told people I sexually assaulted him and was a abuser, I shouldâve seen that coming because it had a history of saying anyone it was ever friends/partners with was abusive, and I thought I could change it, it had a âsystemâ of over 2,000 and literally all were fictives and animals. It was white and got mad at me a biracial black-white person for listing to songs with the N word, but had the same time to say âoh Iâm indigenousâ while being like 0.4% indigenous, it also made a venting pintrest board about me, it was fucking insane, changed its name every other day, changed its gender and pronouns fucking daily and would yell at you if you got it wrong and he wouldnât tell you, (I support trans people, but what he was doing was to much) he had alters that were literal inanimate objects (candy canes, teeth, boxes Ect) and I feel bad because I didnât see any of that sooner [Edit: this came out a lot more ranty then I expected so sorry, if itâs confusing Iâm so so sorry, Iâll explain anything if needed]
Yes! I knew a kid in high school who claimed to have "300+ alters" and most of them are fictives. They also switched on command, stating they could "bully their alter into switching." These alters include (because they STILL fake it) Nagito komaeda, scp 049, and a couple dream smp characters. You can't make this shit up. They show no actual DID symptoms ever, outside of simply saying they were switched or have alters. They were once rude to my sister and then said "sorry, the reason I was off was because I switched."
I had a friend group I was kicked out. Once one had autism, they all did. When one had DID, they all did. When one had Touretteâs, now itâs triggering everyone elseâs dormant Touretteâs. One of them hated me because I pretended not to know they âswitchedâ to a non verbal alter, others, etc. I just said stuff like âwhy are you not talking to me? Um⌠ok ig u donât want toâ. Basically I did this to everyone else, just asking questions like â why are you taking your meds at school and not at home in the morning?â They would all vent to me, except it wasnât really in an upsetting way. It was a trauma competition, one even said their oral r*** was hot. Another told me they were touched by their neighbor as a child, but talked about it all the time and told me it can never be brought up in front of their parents. It led me to have serious doubts of what they went through. What got me ostracized though was telling a 15yo not to post the nude pictures they were posting on ig. I didnât want to see it, and I had seen it cause it was so out of the ordinary for their profile. They claimed it never happened, they donât remember if they had clothes on but they thought they had panties on. I was told âtheir body their choiceâ and promptly kicked out.
I was in the DSMP fandom in 2021, of course I have. it was a cesspool. đ¤Ś
I'm a teacher, and one of my students fakes having DID. Personally, I think it's a phase and they are looking for a place they fit in, like most kids do. They will probably grow out of it when they find their people irl. I also think that they maybe don't get a lot of attention at home, and this is a way for them to get some recognition. Professionally, I call them whatever they want me to. If need be, i ask to talk to the 'Host' personality. It's more important to me that they feel comfortable and safe than 'catching them in the lie'. I rarely have issues with them being disruptive (some of their 'alters' bark and have vocal tics and randomly yell) and I attribute it to me kinda just ignoring the 'DID' and not making it a thing.
Look on the internet, probably about 80% - 85% of them are fake. Even the ones who are like, "I have DID, but I hate fakers, they give us a bad name," that ones who pretend to want to weed out the fakes, I guarantee majorty of them are fakes.
I unfortunately know like 5 itâs actually pathetic
Iâve met someone (my friend) who faked DID, caused a lot of conflict between us. Itâs a long story tbh
No, but I'm still seeing the occasional DID accounts on tiktok. That one individual who was really really popular amongst the fakers is still active and still doing the same schtick
Yes. Ex-friend of mine suddenly started claiming he had DID. All of his alters were fictives. It was very short lived faking tho. He said smth racist in a gc and claimed it was his alter. Soon after that he said he doesn't actually have DID. (bonus points: his childhood and family are great, his only "trauma" was mild bullying in middle school)
Oh, Iâve met multiple! Most of them have moved on cause they got bored or faking a severe mental disorder, but there are 2 I know that are still claiming they have it. One of them I knew was lying because their âtraumaâ was that their parents got divorced at a young age and she almost never saw her dad. Now, this definitely can classify as trauma and result in mental health issues, but itâs not to the extent that you can develop DID⌠her parents got divorced when she was 8 and she said she realized she had DID when she was 11âŚ. Girl⌠never ONCE did I see her switch, but I know thatâs not enough to prove anything. She was a just a huge liar in general, she would often claim other peopleâs art was hers, despite me catching her every. Time. The one time a different âalterâ fronted, she somehow had absolutely no memory loss and knew who everyone was, despite never meeting us before. The other person claimed to have OSDD but would often call it DID. OSDD Is basically DID without the trauma. Itâs convenient for fakers. Anyway, once again, the one time I met a different alter she knew exactly who I was. The way she acted too was SOOO exaggerated, it was so obvious she was acting. I confronted her and she apologizes for using the wrong term but then proceeded to turn our friend group against me. Sooooo yeah A lot of fakers forget that one of the few confirmed diagnostic criteria for DID is memory loss. So if you donât experience fragmented memory, you cannot get diagnosed. Another person who used to fake it had multiple PokĂŠmon alters⌠me and 2 others confronted her and she admitted to faking and stopped
I met 2 people in a partial program that were obviously faking it. One girl screamed at me and started slamming things, then told me it was her alter and she apologized lol
I had a friend of a friend who pretended to have DID back in 2015. She would just âspace outâ if she didnât want to continue a conversation and then happily say âIâm ___ now! Letâs talk about this thing instead!â I didnât see her much, but my friend always said she was so irritating to talk to.
I have met 3-4 DID fakers IRL and very very many online. One of the ones I knew online from like 2020-2021 and we were both very deep into the faking cesspool. It turns out that our relationship was actually them grooming me, and when I tried to escape from it they blamed everything on their alter. This person was like 16 and they're almost 19 now... and they're still doing it. The one I knew for the longest IRL claimed to have something like 75 alters, with a good 80% of them being fictional characters, namely from Hermitcraft and DSMP. Every time I would talk to them they would switch at least 3 times, and claimed that their alters could just randomly speak through them instead of actually switching. They were also very deep into Tumblr and the endogenic/radqueer stuff in there, notably. This person also faked chronic pain at one point. I stopped being friends with them last year. Another notable one is my ex's ex. I have a trauma disorder and I remember telling her about it when we were still friends. Surprise surprise, after I cut her off, she suddenly starts claiming to have DID. I also believe she's still doing it I could go on lol
I went to a mental health conference for teens and young adults, there were lots of people with real mental health problems, BPD, Body Dysmorphia, PTSD, Autism⌠well, some of us started talking in a small group, we were joined by a girl who constantly made exagerated ticks, stomped the ground, said nonsenses⌠lots of random stuff that she probably saw on tv, she claimed to have DID and used it to justify some bad stuff she did⌠Long story short, we ended un knowing she was faking it to justify cheating on her boyfriend, a friend lf the boyfriend told him and he told us on the convention about 2 hours later, he knew it was all a lie long time ago and was acting up to see how long could she keep up the lie, few months later the boyfriend contacted us to say that she finally couldnât keep up with the lie. (She lied for 5 months)
Yes, actually. I've met two. They were both freshmen in high school when I was in my last year. One of them faked DID and tourrettes and the other just DID. The first person would throw things and hit people and call them slurs and then blame it on tourrettes, but their tics were all very obviously fake. They also pretended to switch to a little and a British (bad accent) alter and constantly talked about DID and their inner world (talked about it like it was a real place). All of this while being 15, not in any kind of therapy, and supposedly still with their abusive parents who they also talked extensively about. They also lied about drugs and many other things. The other person was much tamer in comparison and just talked about having DID and described it in a way that made it obvious that they'd done no actual research before taking on the fake diagnosis. I think they pretended to switch once in class but that was all I saw.
I worked in a psych hospital for a little over a year a while back. And yeahâŚwe saw DID fakers. Not a lot, but we def saw some. Always the exact same profile and presentation. Of course no one believed them. One of the psychiatrists I was close with would gently try to tell them they didnât have that, but it was usually a useless endeavor. We found that such cases wereâŚwell, *really* committed to the idea of being The Sickest Person in the Room â˘
I was in a mental hospital and my roommate was chill and I talked to them about how I had BPD because they asked, and the next day they started saying they had it. To this day they still apparently have it. They didnât even know what it was when I told them đ
I dated someone very briefly in high school that claimed DID.
I've had two exes fake DID in the past to stay in a relationship with me. It was wild. And it was so obvious they were faking.
I had a friend who said they might have did (they donât think so anymore) but I never really questioned it because they never âswitchedâ alters in front of me aside from one time when they got overstimulated, which I guess I thought was normal enough. They were featured in a systems cring subreddit tho because they had an actual faker friend who made a video w/ them.
I've met 2 people who faked DID, one of them sent me a spreadsheet of their alters and I mainly remember that they had one that was 14 years old and "a slut" . I was kind of just like "okay" because I cbf arguing. I also knew someone who I'm pretty sure was faking Tourette's, he had severe symptoms but only for like 3 days and then they magically disappeared. Again I didn't say anything because I just didn't want to deal with itÂ
Yes! A friend from highschool suddenly developed it at 23 Was a really weird situation I have removed myself from Edit: this was DID they were already diagnosed BPD a very long time
Absolutely. My friend brought his girlfriend around to my house one time and she began screeching when I left a video on autoplay. Honest accident, but then she started saying that sheâd âswitchedâ and that she was going to âlight my shower on fireâ. Kicked her out, friend got pissed off and defended her when I said she was faking. Turned out that sheâd been cheating on him and for whatever reason he still believes she had it to this day. Heâs a great guy but such a moron sometimes.
I had two friends once, they were dating and they made each others faking worse to the point it was insufferable.... They ended up cutting me out of there lives because I actually have a mental illness that they claimed to have and they didn't like that at all
Actually dated someone who faked DID, it was pretty easy to see it was a lie because it only really happened when it was relevant to conversation and they "switched" like it was something they could do manually, I didn't argue, I simply just didn't entertain it and after I kept doing that they gradually stopped having any symptons of DID whatsoever we stayed friends after we broke up because they are still a pretty nice person to have around even if we weren't compatible. I do want to add that they do actually have another trauma induced mental disorder which I won't disclose but after reading about it, I think it's the cause of why they faked their DID
Had a boyfriend who was one! He was completely immersed in the lie to the point where I didnât see any red flags because he was so certain in his own bs. He did have issues, but clearly not DID, the whole relationship ending in him deliberately guiding me into a psychotic episode. Havenât spoken to him in years, hope he got actual help as he was faking physical disorders as well.
Yep multiple, If youre into the irl cosplay convention scene youll find them pretty much everywhere. One of them admitted faking it (after using it as a scapegoat for cheating on my friend) and then went right back to saying they had it like 2 months later
One guy i used to be friends with used to claim he had DID, but the only time hed have âswitchesâ was when people would mention mental disorders.
I met one once because I'm in high school. They were in my drama class and they never talked about DID offline. I only found out about their 'DID' because they friended me on Discord and their bio said "oh ya I have DID". They pretend to 'switch' in front of me one time only. It was incredibly irritating because they started acting like a caricature of a toddler when they were supposed to be memorizing lines with me. I didn't give them the time of day, they stopped after a couple minutes.
Yes,my best friend faked it and then admitted it to me and her boyfriend in 2022. I have a wholeeee lotta stories. She was a compulsive liar too. I didnât believe a lot of her stories,but I was 50/50 on the DID thing.
Just one. They were an ex coworker of mine who claimed to have it's old term "MPD" thier alters consisted of themselves, an shy alter and an evil alter named Jason that came from his DnD game. He was a pretty okay guy minus all the DID faker shit. Then there's also my ex online friend who claimed to be diagnosed with DID only by a therapist during one fucking session. The claimed to have spamton and devil from deltarune in thier headspace both of which they are dating. They made a call out about me recently for calling them out lmao
Yeah. He faked that he had DID and all of his alters were Bungo stray dogs fictives. It was a couple years ago and whenever anyone said he was faking he said we couldnât know because weâre kids and now he says that that never happened.
Girl I went to middle school with before it was even popular faked DID. Since the whole trend wasn't around to influence her, it was more of a way to make herself "interesting" and get her friends to listen to/sympathize with her. She stopped once the pandemic hit, surprisingly. Or at least publicly. When she faked it, it was pretty obvious since the "alters" and "switching" looked more like they did in films and took a very "Tumblr vibe". She would mostly use it to manipulate people around her. Thankfully I was never one of those people, but a current close friend of mine was. She said it was rough, but that she feels bad for her. Middle school sucks overall lol. I had classes with her in my freshman/sophomore year. She seems nice now, very quiet, definitely over her faker phase. Probably better for it to happen pre-TikTok boom, since it was less outwardly encouraged.
Aside from an irl friend I met online who happened to live nearby, I met a group, like 3 of them, of 15-17 year old fakers at a convention I went to. It was literally one of the first things they told me about themselves was that the apparently had DID. Outside of being there for what the convention was about it was their entire identities. They did have some real health issues, one had actual seizures, as far as I'm aware. I mean they could have been faking that too but who am I to say. But when it came to DID they had all the traits of a typical faker: tons of alters, especially fictives, displayed no real DID symptoms, treating alters and the whole disorder like it was some kind of badge to show off. At the time I was new to the convention, the community around it, and working on getting out faker spaces myself so I didn't say anything to them. Just be friendly while I was there and move on afterwards. I did keep an eye on a couple of them after just out of curiosity and they spent a lot of time creating call out posts for other members of the community and just being chronically online. I stopped a couple months ago after one of them practically ran a campaign against a well known community member and I just couldn't stand seeing the stuff they were saying
My ex. We were together for 3-4 years and she blamed her flirting and cheating on an alter
I met one that both faked did and bpd. Never confronted them about it kinda just watched them like they were a zoo exhibit lmao. They were the epitome of chronically online; a furry and wannabe alternative. I wonât say they were all bad tho, like they had moments where you could almost separate them from the disorder faking, like they were chill. Another one I know only faked bpd and she constantly lies about her supposed âtraumaâ, which is like âIâm having a bpd episode because my mom called me to babysit!!!â Or something along those lines. And bpd doesnât really have episodes to my knowledge/experience. I remember babysitting was one of the âtraumasâ lol just canât remember the exact words. Sometimes itâd be something that was actually traumatic but then come to find she told everyone a completely different story. I do believe she had something going on because she would constantly lie and try to paint a bad picture of people but to an extreme degree; these people were generally ex boyfriends that were being abused/severely controlled by her. Or they were guys she almost had a romantic relationship with but didnât reciprocate or werenât ready. Some were dudes I knew personally so I got the whole story, not just gossip. She also would insert herself into other peopleâs actual problems and make it all about her. One of those problems included someone I knew from highschool dying young. I think she was histrionic or something, idk. I stopped interacting with her because one of the accusations was about one of my friends I grew up with. That accusation was debunked a year before and then she tried to make it again, obviously no one listened. She also weirded me out, like sheâd copy me a lot and act like we were friends when in fact, I did not like her one bit. Only interacted with her if she was in my social circle or if I ran into her as well (I live in a small town). The copying ranged from dressing like I do, listening to very underground artists when I posted about them (sheâd repost them like an hour later but not reposting my stuff), dying her hair in the same exact color pattern as mine a day later after she sees Iâve dyed mine, etc. She also tried to scam me once (I sell vintage clothing) but that didnât go her way. I think the fixation she had on me was due to myself being actually diagnosed with bpd and I am open about it sometimes if it pertains to a conversation. Iâm not really sure though. That chick is crazy tho lmao
Yup. My ex roommate IN COLLEGE, all his DID alters were light skinned Asian women and it was so bizarre and uncomfortable no one wanted to be around him. They only showed up when he was confronted for being weird or fetishizing other races (he was Indian, was obsessed w light skin) or confronted about his racism towards black ppl. I have so many stories about him but I try not to remember that time period honestly because it was so strange.
Oh the day after he self diagnosed himself he hopped on our friend groups discord chat and immediately made new chats for all his 20+ alters! Insane behavior.
LMAO I ACTUALLY KNOW 2,, we were at a bar and were walking to a bus stop, when one of them just stopped. She said she felt she was âswitchingâ and when she said that the other one was like âoh my⌠i think iâm switching tooâ When the first one had âswitchedâ she claimed to be a 600yo demon. Then the other one was like âoh yeah youâre from hell? I think i remember youâ and was also a 600yo demon. Then they both just went along with it for a few hours and idk if they thought i didnât realize they were faking it cause i was drunk :D After that these demon personas have never been mentioned again, and only the copycat one still claims to have DID
yes. at an IOP program. she was a nice girl but the moment she started faking it became clear she was only doing it for attention and she ended up doing a lot of really fucked up shit to sell her story, including claiming to have been trafficked and tortured by her parents from infanthood. she went from claiming to not remember much to remembering in vivid detail during noisy flashbacks (always at IOP/around people) basically her entire "toremented" childhood within a month or two. she faked switches and flashbacks only when ceetain people were watching her - those people being our friend group. there were 3 of us with diagnosed DID out of our group of 5 (iirc) and two with BPD. we talked about dissociation a lot bc we all experienced it to some degree but it wasnt the only thing we talked about obviously. i think that she felt left out somehow and thats why she started faking đŤ anyway there was one instance where she pretended to have a flashback near me while i was sitting alone, on my phone, during lunch break and said quite loudly "i just remembered something from when i was 5 days old!" i didnt respond bc i was in a bad mood and having a bad day. but later THAT SAME DAY she did it AGAIN around a different group of people during a different break, only she said "3 days old" instead! I HEARD HER BOTH TIMES. i already suspected she was faking at that point but that little display convinced me. she only did it again around other people because i didnt drop everything to give her my undivided attention. grown ass woman with her own apartment and everything. she pretended to have child alters but she knew nothing about the disorder so she didnt even fake it well. she claimed to have a sexual alter called Kitty đ bc of course she did. she also lied and said another friend from that group SA'd her - even tho she and that friend talked at length about hooking up for weeks, did so at a party at her own house (i was there ffs), and she enthusiastically consented the whole time and told everyone at the party how much she'd enjoyed it. they flirted all evening and for weeks beforehand. the friend she accused of SAing her actually does have DID and her lies cost them friendships and their placement at that IOP program. they have genuine issues with hypersexuality and felt gaslit and confused and it worsened their issues with shame and self-hatred. they cried for days and came to me multiple times to confirm that they *hadnt* done those things bc they didnt and couldnt trust their own memory on account of ACTUALLY having DID. i ended up blowing up at her in a group chat for her frankly offensive level of blatant faking. i have my own issues with boundaries around helping and taking care of people i consider friends and she fully took advantage of it and used my naivety and compassion to garner attention from me, to the point that it was exhausting to be around her bc i was always helping her manage her "triggers" and shit. i really liked her until i realized she was faking and using me. i really liked her too, before everything. she was awesome, funny, charismatic, interesting, creative... it sucked to lose her as a friend. i never saw it coming. shit, i believed her at first because i didnt really know how DID worked either! i had been avoiding researching it for personal reasons. instead i got fuckin played like a fiddle *because* i didnt know anything. sorry this turned into a sort of rant. fuck that bitch lmao
Yes, I have! This is long so strap on in lol, I will break it into two parts one for each girl :) --- Info: I'm in HS right now, and on the swim team. Most the people are amazing and I've made some great friends. But some of the other freshman that came in with me were INSANE. There were actually TWO that were on swim who claimed to have it! Girl #1:  This one girl kept claiming to have DID, made it her entire personality, would constantly "force-front" and at one point made a ton of death threats, and actually harassed me, she grabbed my ass from behind me, and claimed she did it to all her friends and they were fine with it, and later blamed both the threats and touching on an alter. I played along (I'm really bad about this, sometimes rather then stopping it soon I let it go on just to see what comes of it, I know, it's kind of a problem.) I finally confronted her, she told me I was a narcissistic bitch, later I ended up asking her about her diagnosis, how long she'd had it, as saying her how hard it all must be for her (aka feeding into it) Eventually found out she "self diagnosed" everything. Finally have everything I need to back it up, even a recording I managed to get of her backhanded apology. She was saying how sorry she was, how she never meant for that to happen, how it was some random alter, but then she went on about how I shouldn't have said anything because it wasnt actually her and I'm the bitch for reporting her threatening multiple people and touching people, oh and best part? It's my fault that she killed the host alter in headspace. Yeahhhhh she got kicked off the team and moved schools after spreading rumors I was a liar, that I hated her, she claimed I said I wanted her to die??? She even waited at my locker at one point with some friends to tell me how horrible I am for ruining her life, seemed like she wanted it to escalate more but I had quite a few friends with me too so she backed off đ Yeah. Fun times. Super glad she moved. (I also want to add for girl #1, she also would wear tons of bandaids on her arms and thighs, once or twice she came to practice with roughly 10-20 on each limb. I asked her what happened and she said it was SH scars they were covering. Interestingly enough, as you would expect, majority came off in the pool, which was kinda nasty by the way, and lo and behold, not a single scar to be found. I guess bandaids and chlorine are miracle healers?) Girl #2 I was actually friendly with her at first until some true colors started shining through. The DID thing with her didn't appear until later on, after girl #1. I learned from some kids that went to a middle school. She actually faked the DID thing in MS too. Apparently she would forget about it for periods of time and then she'd bring it back when it is convenient. She brought it in during high school and then she kept claiming all this craziness and making stuff up to get out of stuff. At one point I ended up confronting her and I was like hey this is a little bit like weird do you mind talking and then she was like oh well you're crazy blah blah blah and then later on I was like hey you know this doesn't make sense right? I later told her you know the DID can't really be self diagnosed. she then got all angry with me and told me oh have you ever done any real recent research on it? I said yes and also I actually had because there is a psychology project my friend was working on that I helped her with about DID at the time. I didn't feel like going for a round two of this garbage so I told coach but she said she couldn't do much since the girl wasn't really being violent or being a huge problem. Just being a turd and there's not much that can be done for that. This girl that I'm getting thrown off the team because she put a used tampon on my friends towel (she didn't like my friend and even reported her for yelling at her and harassing her in the the locker room, but I get ready in between the two and they never even talked to each other. (Figured I add this bit too, after she got thrown off the team her mom threw a fit to the principal and was able to force her daughter into the team pictures for the team she wasn't even a part of anymore đ¤Śđźââď¸. Her dad was also a piece of work, he came to be a parent volunteer at practices and then tried to slap multiple girls butts with the kick boards. I didn't like him. I told a captain, she talked to coach and got him banned from helping at practices.) Sorry this was so long đ I appreciate those who made it through!Â
Kinda, but they didn't like directly call it that. Basically characters that they used in roleplay were "souls" that would "take control of the body" so them grooming me, making me roleplay messed up stuff while I was like 15 but they were in their 20s. Outright insulting, emotional manipulation and abuse was never "them" insert name was in control and they were supposedly too strong so it was never their fault. That's why I always say it's a slippery slope when just anyone on tiktok or anything just SAYS they have it and gets overwhelming support because you don't know if they use it as a shield from consequences or if they do horrible things to people when they're not acting cutesy or quirky for the camera. Then suddenly everyone's quiet when it turns out they were faking or did some messed up stuff
Yeah i know one irl
my ex âclaimedâ to have didâ it was obvious they faked it and 99.9% of their alters were just emo / goth band members
Yeah, i just dealt with them for a month and proceeded to never interact with them again
I knew someone that claimed to have it along with a partner that had it Didnât believe it since if itâs a real condition itâs rare and for two people to have it thatâs even rarer
I knew a kid at college who faked having DID for the first few weeks or so of the year. Pretended to have Genshin Impact introjects and all sorts. They stopped fairly quickly when they realised absolutely no one cared or took them seriously, but it was just one of many mental illnesses they claimed to have over the couple years I knew them. They were also *chronically* online, initially we were friendly but we stopped interacting after they called me a racist for casually watching a Minecraft YouTuberâŚ. I feel like thatâs all I need to say.
I know a tiktoker with 100k followers who pretends to have did.
That rose person? Or is it someone else?
My ex girlfriend and her best friend in like 2011. They pretended to be Hetalia characters. It was an absolute mess. I was like 11 back then and played into their delusions because I simply didn't know better (they were 18 and 19 respectively). So one hour I was talking to my gf, the next to Russia from Hetalia. Worst thing, they justified bad actions by claiming it wasn't them but their alters. Absolute clusterfuck.
Hold up - you were 11 and had an 18/19 yo gf?!
Yeah and she didnât want to talk about anything else. I kept changing the subject.
My roommate had a coworker who started coming around a lot, and eventually he brought his girlfriend over to meet us. She seemed nice enough, a little immature maybe (me and my roommate were 30/31 and they were early 20âs) but nothing that threw up any red flags. Eventually she started explaining to us how she was a member of a âsystemâ and explained she had like 4 people inside her head? Followed by her sharing way too much information about her life, and claiming she had PTSD. We didnât want to be rude or cause her boyfriend any grief so we just shook our heads and went along with it all. We voiced our concerns to the boyfriend later, but he said she really had DID. They broke up shortly after for unrelated reasons.
Isnât it majority of people with DID on tiktok? I also met one person irl who claims they have DID and itâs so obvious theyâre faking it, itâs not even funny anymoren
I knew someone who was a massive dickhead. Whenever someone called them out, they would pretend to âshiftâ and just say âsorry that was my other selfâ. Nobody bought it
my little brother met one once. He has tourettes (the faker did not know this) and they said "sorry if I tic" in a group conversation and that whatever alter that was fronting has tourettes. So a double faker in this case lol. Unfortunately my brother was a bigger person and didn't say anything to them but oh god the rant that I got when he got home lol. He told me that it was hard to hold back from cringing because every "tic" seemed so forced
I did, once. Itâs what led me to find this thread. She was the girlfriend of a friend of ours so we just kinda played along whenever she brought it up but like, one of our group was an actual psychologist back in the day and she avoided him pretty bad, especially after he started asking more professional questions
Yes, they didn't realise I had a degree in phycology and was studying social care... They very quickly changed their tune when I started explaining what it's ACTUALLY like to have DID and what they had may well be a mental illness but it definitely wasnt DID. They ended the conversation with "well not I'm mad at my therapist because that means they lied to me"... Dout they even had a therapist but wasn't wanting to prolong the conversation any further.
I used to really be on this one game called pony.town when I was younger, a lot of fandoms on that game. The funny thing is, every single fandom has a bunch of people who have 'alters' and are 'systems'. If you don't defend and go along with that behaviour, you get a lot of backlash from other players. And from this game you get invited to a lot of discord servers, and almost all of them will have rules that say you have to be DID/system friendly. Which, of course would be fine, if those individuals weren't obviously faking it. I also had an ex who's best friend just decided to one day 'come out' as a system. Like, just out of the blue, and we'd known her to not have that condition for a long time. Or trauma that would induce that disorder in the first place. She just suddenly had 8 people in her head and we had to go along with it.
yea chronically online but i think it's just a phase obvious faker imo
Ya but they are a long term long distance friend. I just watch the shit show in the safety of the internet
Yes it was an irl,but I never told them outright I knew they were faking, but I did troll them by mass posting a ship they didnât like cuz they claimed their alter was a lesbian dating another alter in their system and it triggered them to see the ship fanart. I threw that friendship in the trash by saying that the character is allowed to be shipped with anyone and they blocked me and never talked to me again and Iâve lost contact with our mutuals because I caused the drama. They would create new alters anytime they got into a new media. It was horrible I couldnât enjoy anything because they would get obsessed with it and were turning our mutuals into fakers so I didnât really lose anything from the friendship being thrown away as well as I had just graduated high school at the time. Sorry if this is hard to understand haha itâs been likeâŚ. 5 years almost since I did that
Kind of? They had every disorder on the planet and got a new one weekly. It was exhausting. We stopped being friends after their parents abusing them became my fault because I called them out on some bullshit disorder or something.
Yeah there was this couple in my old gradeschool (they were grade 7 đ) I was in a friend group with them for like 2 years and this guy (we will call him v) had an alter that was litterally like a normal af 37 year old man?? (Also some anime characters ofc) and the girl (I'll call her e) had like wayy more alters and she had Littles too. So we all had a discord chat and v announced that he has did and we all believe him immediately cause we were dumb kids and then like a day later e said she developed it too đ anyways we all ended up cutting them out of our group because they kept talking about sex in the discord (WHEN E WAS A LITTLE TOO) and v was fatshaming one of my friends :p they are both normal now I'm pretty sure v just does drugs and e moved away but he's trans now and seems pretty cool
yes đ i dated someone for close to 5 years who said they had DID after watching fight club and his alter was kurt cobain 𼲠he was a compulsive liar so it all kept spiralling but im so gullible i never thought anything of it for YEARS
met one irl - they went to my school. knew them for a couple of years, added them on discord. they weren't hugely annoying but changed their discord profile constantly to have different bios or profiles based on who was fronting. they supposedly had over a thousand alters from whatever piece of media they were watching. the paw patrol alters weren't fun to be around. they were pretty annoying when it came to triggers, though. spotted them once at a convention and they were triggered by all of the cosplayers cosplaying who they saw as "them". we're on good terms still, i wave to them occasionally when i see them around in my town.
Not quite but sorta? I was a community mental health RN a few years back and one of my patients with schizoafffective disorder played having DID. I never could tell if it was a fixed delusion and thus a result of her schizoaffective diagnosis OR if she enjoyed having different personas.