Dissociative Personality Disorder

Dissociative Personality Disorder

DSM-IV-TR criteria

1. Longstanding or recurring feelings of being detached from one’s mental processes or body, as if one is observing them from the outside or in a dream.
2. Reality testing is unimpaired during depersonalisation
3. Depersonalisation causes significant difficulties or distress at work, or social and other important areas of life functioning.
4. Depersonalisation does not only occur while the individual is experiencing another mental disorder, and is not associated with substance use or a medical illness.

The DSM-IV-TR specifically recognises three possible additional features of depersonalisation disorder:

1. Derealisation, experiencing the external world as strange or unreal.
2. Macropsia or micropsia, an alteration in the perception of object size or shape.
3. A sense that other people seem unfamiliar or mechanical.