Trouble dissociatif de l’identité et adolescence : quels enjeux cliniques ?

In child psychiatry services we are seeing more and more adolescents reporting “dissociative” symptoms, and it is no longer rare for the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder to be evoked. The increased visibility of certain psychiatric symptoms may be related to better identification and increased training of clinicians, but it may also be related to changes in societal contexts that may favor the emergence or maintenance of certain forms of expression of psychological suffering. Adolescence also contains its own identity reorganizations and dialectics which necessarily color the disorders and their significance, and which sometimes must be deciphered beyond the act or the inaugural syndromic form. We propose here to discuss our interrogations in relation to dissociative identity disorder in adolescence and some of the psychopathological issues that are raised.