Dissociative Identity Disorder in Childhood: Five Turkish Cases

In this paper, the diagnostic processes, previous diagnoses, clinical symptomatology, life events, traumatic experiences, family histories, and treatment of five children (three girls and two boys between five and eleven years of age) with DID are presented. Clinical findings were headaches, aggressive behavior and outbursts, trance-like experiences, amnesias, inconsistent school performance, lying, sleep disturbances, and depressive symptoms. One of the patients had been treated previously under different diagnoses. The number of alter personalities ranged from two to eleven. One of the patients, a tenyear-old girl, had two distinct personality systems. All of the cases presented at least four Schneiderian first-rank symptoms except an eleven-year-old boy who had only one. All of the cases had amnesia between at least two alters during interviews initially, except for a five-year-old case who did not. A ten-year-old girl was treated successfully and her alter personalities integrated. The others discon-