Treatment Failure Quotes

“DID may be underdiagnosed. The image derived from classic textbooks of a florid, dramatic disorder with overt switching characterizes about 5% of the DID clinical population. The more typical presentation is of a covert disorder with dissociative symptoms embedded among affective, anxiety, pseudo-psychotic, dyscontrol, and self-destructive symptoms, and others (Loewenstein, 1991). The typical DID patient averages 6 to 12 years in the mental health system, receiving an average of 3 to 4 prior diagnoses. DID is often found in cases that were labeled as "treatment failures" because the patient did not respond to typical treatments for mood, anxiety, psychotic, somatoform, substance abuse, and eating disorders, among others. Rapid mood shifts (within minutes or hours), impulsivity, self-destructiveness, and/or apparent hallucinations lead to misdiagnosis of cyclic mood disorders (e.g., bipolar disorder) or psychotic disorders (e.g., schizophrenia).”
― Gilbert Reyes, The Encyclopedia of Psychological Trauma

“But such is the nature of man that as soon as you begin to force him to do a thing, from that moment he begins to seek ways by which he can avoid doing the thing you are trying to force upon him. A man with malaria parasites in his blood is a danger to his companions. To kill all the parasites, he was then required to continue doses of quinine a week or ten days after his fever. When the convalescing men were given their daily dose of quinine they would manage to throw their tablets out of the dispensary window. The old turkey-gobbler pet of the hospital gobbled up all the tablets he could find. He became so dissipated he finally developed a species of blindness caused by too much quinine. I cannot vouch for this, but I was often twitted with this story as an illustration of how the men were treating prophylactic quinine.”
― William Crawford Gorgas, Sanitation in Panama