The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

Speaking as someone who lives with the effects of PTSD, I thought this was an amazing book. What stunned me was Dr. Stout's creative and effective use of language to describe emotional states. It is so rare to find anyone who is capable of viscerally understanding this hell without having been through some version of it. She even helped me put into words some of my fears that I didn't have words for before. Reading her book gave me so much comfort and helped me understand not only myself, but also my mother, and a friend of mine. I don't feel as crazy anymore.

I loved reading the stories because in them I could see demonstrated the concepts that she was talking about. Some things I could relate to, some not - but it gave me concrete show more pictures through which to understand her intellectual theories (or hypotheses?).

I think she has a good point when she writes that there is a lot of unrecognized dissociation in 'normal' society; I also like her pointing out that dissociation is a normal part of human life and can be just pleasant (daydreaming) or downright life enhancing (when used in creative endeavors). show less

Explores the prevalence of Dissociative Identity Disorder, popularly known in its most extreme form as multiple personality disorder. Dr. Stout, a psychological trauma specialist, conveys how small things we interpret as distraction, spacing out, or situational fatigue are physiologically and behaviorally not different from an abused individual’s experience of dissociation or hypnotic trance. Events in our life that we may not quantify as abusive or traumatic affect us; our brains catalog traumatic experiences and trigger "dissociative" coping strategies even for things we may label as insignificant. The “severity” of an event is irrelevant; the presence of fear, for whatever reason, and a desire to escape it causes our brain to show more develop coping mechanisms. Future feelings of fear that our brain processes as similar trigger those mechanisms and, consequently, end those feelings. Stout’s explanation and accounts of this idea are fascinating reading. show less

As a clinical psychologist, Stout draws upon twenty years experience with trauma survivors to explain, in clear, easy-to-understand prose, the spectrum of dissociative disorders—from the everyday experience of being completely absorbed in a movie to the most well-known of the dissociative disorders, dissociative identity disorder (DID), previously known as multiple personality disorder (MPD). Her story-telling approach, using individual cases and composite characters, has the air of a good novel. What sort of dissociative events have you experienced? Is there someone in your life who never seems to remember something they said just yesterday, just an hour ago? Stout is helpful and hopeful to those who suffer and those who know someone show more who suffers from any of the various dissociative disorders. Awareness and self-responsibility, she writes, are the first steps to a return to normalcy, even for victims of the more extreme dissociative disorders. show less

Like most books written by professionals, academics, and clinicians, this one would certainly have done better had some understanding and loving editor gone through the manuscript with a heavy blue pencil. But though the written dialogs are often clumsy and amateurish, the meat of this book is substantial.

Early in the text, Stout explains how the human brain processes traumatic events differently than it processes other events, and the memories that result are consequently stored in very different ways. For the most part, traumatic events bypass the cerebral cortex, go straight to the amygdala and are stored in the limbic brain system. The lovely ability of the cerebral cortex to weave events into narratives and storylines just doesn't show more come much into play. Thus the memories of these events are experienced as disconnected flashes, sensory impressions and images, fleeting and profoundly emotional experiences that don't seem to have any storyline to make sense of them.

Dissociative disorder used to be called "multiple personality disorder", but that term became so politicized that the mental health industry--and I use the word in it's most commercial sense--decided that multiple personalities were nothing but a scam being played by criminals or neurotics desperate for attention or pity or escaping responsibility for their actions.

And that information got poured into the river of General Perceptions just as much by mental health professionals as it did by law enforcement, judiciary, and political professions eager to "make people pay for what they do".

And it was poison.That terrible cooperation among these various professional fields brought us once again to the Theater of Denial.

Dissociation is not an uncommon problem. Moreover, for people who suffered traumas that were so terrible the brain simply could not process them through normal channels, the resulting denial has been yet another avenue through which horrific experiences are simply disregarded as fantastic and imaginery.

For a while there, it seemed as if practioners oin the field of mental health were finally breaking through the hundred-years of denial that Freudian analytical theory had instituted. But a lot of mangled therapy by a lot of incompetent therapists in the 1980s and 1990s lead to a great deal of damage being done to patients and their families. The very profession to which people in terrible pain turned for relief or solace became an arena of destruction itself. So, there was a backlash. And the damage done through incompetence and misguided memory retreival lead to the minefield of what is now labeld False Memory.

But childhood sexual, physical, and emotional abuse is all too real. And the unspeakable horrors it creates in the human mind stay just that--unspoken, unacknowledged, but NOT non-existent.

Stout is a specialist in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and treats mostly victims of unremembered trauma. She lays such theories of denial to waste. She fully accepts that trauma does indeed cause the personality to split itself up so that the victim has some hope of survival.

But the person who "survives" is certainly not the one who was born into that original body. The terrible trials-by-fire that one endures to get to adulthood once these traumas have occured peels off one aspect after another of the individual's personhood, and each bit of that personhood gets relegated to some dark space where, s/he hopes, s/he will become invisible enough not to be detected so s/he may survive.

Dissociation is a common experience. Most people dissociate at certain times with out much harm coming from it. Sometimes we call it distraction, sometimes we throw it off as just being spaced out, or the result of too much caffeine or not enough sleep. And most of the time it problaby is. But for survivors--and I use the term grudgingly--these periods of being removed from present reality are far more insidious in nature, and far more profound.

Stout recounts the experience of patients who become so dissociated from their surroundings they can lose days at a time, or have no clear memory of outbursts or rages into which they fly without any control.

If you or someone you know is prone to spacing out frequently or flying into rages, do both yourselves a favor-- read this book. It will finally make sense of what has always seemed incomprehensible. show less

Dissociation is the ability to mentally depart from reality. It's something that we all do to a greater or lesser degree, like when we deaden ourselves to physical pain after a car accident or become so absorbed in a movie that we lose our conscious selves. This process is an outgrowth of our imaginations and a natural device for escape and self-protection. The Myth of Sanity outlines both normal and abnormal dissociation, focusing especially on how childhood trauma warps our ability to form memories, assess danger and live in reality. The patients Dr. Stout describes are heartbreakingly absent from their lives. Some appear to be absent-minded professors who zone out of conversations at unpredictable intervals. Some dissociate from show more reality so strongly that they cannot remember anything of their childhoods and forget large pieces of their old lives. Others develop dissociative identity disorder, or multiple personality disorder. I found this book fascinating. Technical psychological and neurological information is conveyed in an interesting and easy-to-understand way. I feel far better informed about the symptoms, causes and effects of mental illness than I ever have been. What I've learned about how childhood trauma affects with the brain will stick with me for a long time. This book does have some writing problems, like overly grandiose language and a superabundance of irrelevant details. Still, the core material was sufficiently intriguing that I was able to overlook these flaws. I did skim occasionally, but the book's 235 pages went by fast. I'd recommend it to anyone who's curious about how the human brain works or who wants a better understanding of mental illness. show less

Sometimes too grandiose in the descriptive passages, these stories of trauma and their impact on the victims lives are touching and poignant.

If you or someone you know has survived trauma, I strongly recommend this book. I found it both engaging and informative.