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Emma shares about complex trauma, deprivation, and dissociation (CPTSD, OSDD, DID). Educational, supportive, and inspiring, System Speak documents the best and worst of life through insights, conversations, and collaborations. An archive curated for dignity for all.
Welcome to System Speak, a podcast about Complex Trauma and Dissociation.
Speaker 2:It's our story, our learning, and the ideas we've been working with as they've unfolded over time. Earlier episodes give context for where we are now, and current episodes may engage more advanced material, harder content, or reference earlier conversations. A few things to remember as you listen. The podcast is education, reflection, and storytelling. It's not therapy, and listening doesn't create a relationship.
Speaker 2:Although I am a therapist, I am not in that role here, and nothing that I share is individualized clinical advice. Every system, every internal world, all of your own stories are all different and you take up your own shape. What we share about ours won't translate directly to yours. It isn't meant to. We're all different, and all of our stories matter.
Speaker 2:As always, take care of yourself during and after listening, and we are so glad you're here.
Speaker 1:So when we're talking about fake claiming, we're naming a pattern. This one goes underneath it. The question that almost never gets asked out loud when community erupts into credibility fights. What would it actually take to know? That's a real question with real answers.
Speaker 1:And the answers come from two places that we don't consult, the actual diagnostic literature and consumer protection law. Neither one flatters the drama or the performative fake claims. Diagnosing a dissociative disorder is among the more demanding assessments in the field, and the demand is structural rather than mysterious. We have screening measures that identify who warrants further evaluation and settles nothing on its own. We have semi structured diagnostic interviews and multi scale self report instruments that take hours to administer and require training to interpret.
Speaker 1:They're intense, and it's a lot to ask of anyone to go through them. Then there's differential diagnosis, which in these presentations runs across psychotic disorders, personality organization, complex post traumatic presentations, seizure activity, substance effects, and imitative or factitious presentations. Collateral history includes the longitudinal observation, often across months or even years, because the covert presentation is far more common than the televised one, an overt or stereotypical one, and doesn't reveal itself on a first meeting, usually. That's what comes from the guidelines. Drager and Boone spent more than a decade with imitated presentations in The Netherlands.
Speaker 1:Their conclusion was that distinguishing an imitated presentation from a genuine requires systemic assessment by an experienced clinician. That's the whole finding. No checklist. No tell. No shortcut available to a person watching a video.
Speaker 1:And certainly, even regardless of this, no one outside someone else knows what's happening inside. Reindeers and colleagues went further and asked whether motivated role enactment could produce the psychobiological signature of dissociative identity states. Answering that question required PET protocol, autobiographical memory scripts, cardiovascular measurement, and control groups sorted by fantasy proneness who were instructed and motivated to perform these states convincingly. The performances did not reproduce the patterns observed in participants with the diagnosis. When we hold that next to what is happening in our spaces, a question the field can only approach with neuroimaging is now being closed by strangers on the strength of a clip, on rumors, and what someone else wants you to think about someone else.
Speaker 1:That's not okay, and it's deeply violating. And in fact, it's actually reenactment from our abusers, from the memory wars, from those who never believed in us in the first place. In Bethany Brand's research, she examined recurring claims about dissociative identity disorder against the empirical record and found the research did not substantiate them. Two are load bearing for a fake claiming, the belief that the condition is vanishingly rare, and the belief that it is overdiagnosed. If someone already holds both, then everyone you encounter who has the diagnosis becomes a statistical improbability, and the arithmetic starts doing the accusing for you before any evidence arrives.
Speaker 1:But that's confirmation bias. That's not someone judging someone else's peer. That's what we have spent decades fighting against. Now that brings up the other thing that clinical keeps saying and the Internet keeps ignoring. Presentation varies enormously.
Speaker 1:You don't switch the way I do is a comparison of one person's phenomenology to another's dressed up as diagnostic criterion for people who are not even diagnosing. We cannot judge each other. We cannot be cruel in those ways. We cannot do the dirty work for abusers and also heal. That's moral injury.
Speaker 1:And the feelings around that are real and valid and contribute to the way drama escalates online. So in the context of why fake claiming is a problem and using these fake background checks against our peers, we go back to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which attaches real obligations to consumer reporting agencies, Reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy. Limits on who may obtain a report and for what purpose. Dispute procedures. Notice when someone suffers an adverse action based on their report.
Speaker 1:And also, we need to understand about AI and its influence. We need to understand that whether a PeopleSearch site falls inside the framework of the Fair Credit Reporting Act depends largely on how it markets itself and how those reports get used, which is precisely why the terms of service on these sites typically prohibit using the report for employment, tenancy, or credit decisions. That prohibition is not a formality. It's the law. It's the mechanism by which the company stays outside the accuracy obligation while selling something shaped like an accuracy product.
Speaker 1:So it looks real, but they legally kept keep themselves outside of the laws requiring it to be real. And in fact, the enforcement history of this is public and worth knowing. In 2012, Spokeo paid $800,000 to settle FTC charges that it had operated as a consumer reporting agency and violated the FCRA by failing to limit distribution to those with a permissible purpose, failing to ensure the information was accurate, and failing to give users the required notices. They're literally not telling you it's not real, that it's not accurate. The agency also alleged the company had posted employee written endorsements presented as independent reviews.
Speaker 1:It was the first FTC case addressing the sale of the Internet and social media data in employment screening. In 2023, Truthfinder and Instant Checkmate paid $5,800,000. The allegations describe the machinery of all of this. The FTC alleged that all the information in the background reports came from third parties who expressly disclaimed the information was accurate, and the companies took no steps to verify any of it. That marketing notifications announced the subject had a criminal or arrest record when the underlying record was a traffic ticket, and the remove and flag is inaccurate buttons didn't even function as advertised, with removal affecting only the displayed version of the report.
Speaker 1:Sit with that in the structure of what's been happening online. The upstream sources disclaim accuracy to the vendor, literally tell them the information is not accurate. The vendors use AI to aggregate the results and then disclaim accuracy to the customer, But the terms of service forbid the exact use being made of the file, and the correct mechanism in the cases the FTC pursued was just cosmetic. But then someone sends screenshots or prints it out and calls it proof. It's actually Miranda Fricker who gave us vocabulary for this.
Speaker 1:It's called testimonial injustice, occurring when a speaker is assigned as a credibility deficit because of prejudice attached to a group they belong to. Her account may be accurate, and the listener discounts it anyway on grounds that have nothing to do with the account. Her manutical injustice is the subtler cousin, the harm of lacking the shared interpretive resources to make sense of your own experience because the collective vocabulary was built without you in it. Kersten, Carroll, and Kidd argued that people with psychiatric diagnoses are unusually exposed to that first kind testimonial injustice, owing largely to the prevalence and force of negative stereotypes about mental disorders. The patient may be telling the truth.
Speaker 1:If we place a dissociative diagnosis inside that structure, the credibility deficit is already assigned. It arrives before the conversation does. It's present the moment someone opens a browser tab. That's what the Internet has done. This is why the report matters and simultaneously why it does not.
Speaker 1:It never created disbelief. It launders it like money. It takes a prejudice that would sound obviously ugly if a person just said it out loud and returns it in a format as fake evidence that resembles a finding. That's how we got true crime TikTok and armchair detectives. Some of that's real and in some cases has been really helpful.
Speaker 1:But in most in many cases, it's collective dogpiling, it's cyberstalking, and becomes harassment. That hermeneutical layer runs quieter and lasts longer When the terms of legibility get set by whoever is loudest, the language available for describing dissociation narrows to whatever the loudest person recognizes. Someone whose switching is subtle, whose amnesia is patchy, whose parts have no interest in being seen, ends up with no vocabulary at all for what is happening in their own body, and that loss is a harm even in seasons when nobody's being accused of anything. So what do we need to be able to ask out loud without it being treated as taking a side? First, there's Providence.
Speaker 1:Who commissioned this document, and what did they need it to show? Where did it come from? A file produced in the middle of a conflict by a party to that conflict is evidence about the conflict. And even with the vendor's own position, what does the company that sold this to someone say about it in its own terms of service? The matching logic, a name and approximate age in a shared state do not constitute identification.
Speaker 1:Relatives, former names, misspellings, clerical errors, and people who simply share a name all aggregate into the same file. The scope, even granting every line is accurate. What does an address history establish about dissociation? Nothing. A category error stays an error at higher resolution.
Speaker 1:And a history even of dates and times of this or that is only evidence of that one thing. It is not evidence of why that thing or the story behind it or what resulted from it. We do not have context, trauma the nuance and complexity of trauma histories, and we are not the judges. And our online communities need compassion. And then finally standing, I was not in the room where that person was assessed.
Speaker 1:Almost nobody is. And why are we focusing on other people's assessments instead of our own? The harder discipline then is about what accountability looks like when it is working. It's spoken in the first person. It describes behavior and specifics bounded in time and leaves the other person able to answer.
Speaker 1:It doesn't require anyone's diagnosis to be revoked, and it's considerably more durable when it doesn't reach for that because a claim about behavior can be examined, while a claim about someone's interior cannot. And just like those assessments, when we join in harassment or dogpile on another or join in fake claiming online, we're not just assessing that person. The whole apparatus depends on amplification, and our participation is amplification. A dossier accomplishes nothing sitting on the person of the one. Every share, every mention, every participation amplifies the drama.
Speaker 1:Four decades of research went into establishing that this diagnosis is real, validating it more than any other mental health diagnosis, making it recognizable across countries and through new generations of new kinds of research, and making it reliably identifiable by clinicians using validated instruments. By 2016, ten years ago, the professional literature was settled enough to publish the objections as myths and be done with them. There's no battle in the comment section that's going to bring healing in the therapy room. The bar for belonging isn't proof or amplification. The bar for belonging is care because we are humans, and we need each other.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for listening to us and for all of your support for the podcast, our books, and them being donated to survivors and the community. It means so much to us as we try to create something that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing,
Speaker 2:and healing brings hope.