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Dissociation is common across psychiatric conditions and can be a response to trauma.

Severe dissociation is often misunderstood, misdiagnosed, or mistaken for other conditions.

Trauma-informed treatment can help people manage dissociation and rebuild a sense of connection.

Healing requires addressing the roots of trauma—not pathologizing dissociative symptoms.

By Suliana Beraki and Robert T. Muller, Ph.D.

Dissociation and its associated disorders: derealization, depersonalization, and dissociative identity disorder exist alongside a spectrum of both psychiatric disorders and mundane experiences. It is a transdiagnostic phenomenon, with studies suggesting that 2 to 10 percent of people will experience dissociative symptoms at some point.

For those with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the numbers are even higher, with 38 to 48 percent meeting the criteria for the dissociative subtype (PTSD-DS), displaying a significant overlap between........

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