Since dissociation can be a person 's standard response to trauma, its symptoms are a common reaction to such life-threatening events as a car accident or such intense, lasting traumas as rape.
This hidden epidemic has occurred simply because people have been unable to identify their problem, or were not asked the right questions about their symptoms. The surprising truth revealed in The Stranger in the Mirror, a groundbreaking book based on eighteen years of pioneering research, is that millions of people have dissociative symptoms that have gone undetected or untreated. These are all symptoms of dissociation-a fragmented state of consciousness involving feelings of disconnection and amnesia that affects 30 million individuals in North America alone. You feel as if you're going through the motions of life. You can't remember if you actually did something or only thought you did. (Oct.You peer into the mirror and have trouble recognizing yourself. While DID doesn't have as much cultural currency as ADD, Steinberg's research has much to add to the contentious debates surrounding childhood trauma, diagnostic categories and the changing relationship between incurable disease and manageable disorder. Readers interested in clinical depression and ADD will gravitate to this book, although Steinberg's throwaway comments that suggest that seeing ""alternative"" lifestyles depicted on TV can cause psychic confusion and that stepparents have a greater tendency to violate the incest prohibition may cost her some otherwise sympathetic readers. Readers can gauge their own dissociative tendencies with the book's abridged version of the Steinberg clinical interview for DSM-IV dissociative disorders.
Arguing that DID often results from early childhood abuse, Steinberg passionately calls for removing the stigma from its related behaviors, noting that the popular conception of the disorder is gleaned from overblown films such as Sybil and The Three Faces of Eve.
In more extreme forms, it is a debilitating disorder-similar, she argues, to attention deficit disorder-that is in need of psychiatric recognition and intervention. Steinberg, whose research was supported with grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, argues with conviction that mild dissociative behavior-temporary episodes of disconnection or memory loss-can be a useful mechanism for coping with such mundane but stressful events as giving public presentations as well as major traumas like an operation or an assault.
What do the Columbine killings, ""getting lost in a good book"" and your midlife crisis have in common? According to psychiatrist Steinberg, they are all events that can be placed on a broad continuum of behaviors related to dissociative identity disorder, popularly known as multiple personality.
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