Now more than ever people are capturing their dissociation experiences on social media #dissocociation has drawn more than 775 million views. There is a public fascination with dissociative identity disorder. Christina Caron, the author of the New York times Article states that, “conversations about mental health continue to migrate into public forums.” The media is full of content with millions of voices speaking on their perspective. But research suggests that much of the content is not providing reliable information. Dr. Frank W. Putnam, a professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and an expert on dissociative disorders explains that dissociation is like you shut down and kind of go away and these episodes become a disorder when you end up in a place without knowing how you got there for example. It is thought that the disorder is largely under diagnosed. It comes from severe childhood trauma at an early age.

The article starts off asking if you have ever zoned out. It starts with a question which are hard things to start with and catch attention but the saying caught my attention enough to read the article and keep reading to the end. There is much talk about the effect of social media in the perception of the diagnosis. The article ties in experts and the interesting thoughts they have on the topic and how the disorder has gained so much attention through social media. The end of the article encourages curious people to speak with an attentive and thoughtful health care provider. We are left with a great quote from Dr. David Rettew, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, “Just about everything in mental health is dimensional. It exists on a spectrum,” he said. “And that doesn’t make our conditions less real, but it does make them more complicated.”