Misdiagnosis
One of the problems with seeking a therapist when you are multiple is that there's a good chance that you're going to be misdiagnosed -- or already have been. If you know that you're multiple already and seek out treatment, then you might be luckier than some, but that doesn't guarantee that the therapists will understand or believe you. A good article giving an example case of misdiagnosis is at http://www.fortea.us/english/psiquiatria/alternative.htm and deserves reading by therapeutic staff.
Dangers of misdiagnosis include prescribing medications to multiples which may be entirely inappropriate to them, and many psychopharmaceuticals are dangerous or have strong side effects, especially for multiples who often can't get consistent results across all their residents when they take an analgesic (headache medicine). For more information on multiples and medications, try this article.
At the same time it is plausible for a multiple to have two or more psychiatric issues (comorbidity), in which case most or all alters will have the diagnosis in question. One good example of this is depression or generalized anxiety disorder. In cases where a mood disorder seems pandemic -- applies across almost everyone -- it is usually responsive to medicine. All medication for multiples should be viewed with caution and stopped if there are adverse effects to the system.
There are no known psychoactive medications for multiples, although a few of them may help calm down rapid switching, which generally is caused by anxiety (which is a physiological reaction) anyhow.
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Comments:
Thank you so much! I don't think we wrote this page; it's quite old. Maybe we can find the info on Archive.org but if it's old enough it might predate the internet archive — lol. This site is very old and it was initially created by a group of members of the otherkin plural community. So it might be time to consider updating this article entirely. Who knows.
Thanks for pointing this out.
Here's the first article on Archive.org.
I'm not vetting the original articles, just putting links here — from around 2005ish — so note that these are quite old (probably outdated) references and a lot may have changed since then. But including the original references the author of this page intended way back when.
There may be other articles mentioning misdiagnosis on the site that are much more recent, so please also use the search bar at the top of the site : )
Hi! Just wanted to let you know that both of the articles listed on this page seem to have broken links -- the first website returns a 404 for the specific article and the second link doesn't open anything at all.