helloo ! ive been wanting to ask if you have any specific tips or things to focus on while writing characters with DID ! im not a system myself but psychology in general has been a topic that ive always been interested in and want to depict it to the best of my ability + i love your art and wish you the best ^^
Good question!
Writing about DID/OSDD is incredibly difficult- even I a system probably couldn’t do it, but I can give you some advice regardless. Obviously saying “research” is expected, but finding good research on it is hard. As always I recommend as a starter for understanding the fundamentals of the disorder : “The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and Treatment of Chronic Traumatization” just look that up and I’m sure you can find it on the internet archive or docdriod. As a rule of thumb don’t trust system tiktok, tumblr, carrds, or any personal account to get the majority of your information from just because there’s an incredible amount of misinformation (of course there’s plenty others on there who probably know what they are talking about, but I’d always recommend using credible peer reviewed sources.)
With the research disclaimer thing out of the way here’s a few points:
-It’s a trauma based disorder, everything is structured around trauma. Not just a singular trauma but repeated emotional, physical, and typically sexual trauma that is experienced under the age of 10 (You don’t need all three, just a lot of systems experience a mix of trauma) To write DID/OSDD right you should be able to write child traumatization accurately and be comfortable with writing it.
-There is a vast amount of different experiences with DID/OSDD. There are varying levels of amnesia, alter presentations, system structures etc. not all systems use plural terms, have names for alters, or have much personality differentiation between alters. The experience of a Osdd1a system will be different to a DID system, so you’d probably want to look into the specifics of those differences and stick to one type of system.
-Try to avoid misconceptions and DID tropes in media. The most obvious one I can think of is “the evil alter” trope, there’s quite a lot of demonization of the disorder so you have to be critical when viewing media depicting it (fuck the split movie).
-unless it’s apart of a character arc avoid the uncritical idea that alters are just their source. it’s healthy for them to branch out and expand from their baseline purpose and identity.
As for things I’d like to see in DID/OSDD rep it’d be:
-representing extreme denial
-loss of time
-source separation would be cool
-fusion and dormancy being mentioned
A lot of media hyper focuses on Alters when that is only one aspect of system hood. I think I’d be cool to look at the other symptoms.