Is Maladaptive Daydreaming an inappropriate name?

[Nicola]

I'm just thinking out loud here but Maladaptive Daydreaming seems to be a very loose term for what we all experience. It appears to be so much more than daydreams.

For example a lot of us have sensitivity to light and sounds. Our moods are greatly affected. We are somewhat emotionally distorted. There is reason to believe low self esteem could be a major factor in developing MD, which applies to me but I'm unsure if this applies to everyone else. When we are daydreaming excessively we tend to ignore reality.

These are just a few examples. There are so many more elements that we experience and I'm thinking MD is perhaps not an appropriate term. If we tell someone we have MD we aren't likely to be taken seriously because daydreaming is difficult for people to see as a serious disorder. I think the name needs to be changed or added to in order for its severity and implications to be fully understood in society.

What do you think? Does anyone have any ideas about an alternative name to MD?

[Cordellia Amethyste Rose]

The term Maladaptive Daydreaming was coined by Dr. Eli Somer many years ago.  "Maladaptive" means that it interferes with your life, so "maladaptive daydreaming" means daydreaming that interferes with your life.  That doesn't mean there aren't other symptoms, but 1) We don't all experience the same symptoms, even if lots of us do. There's a lot of variations in our experiences.  2) It's impossible to include them all.  Not everyone on here appears to be a "maladaptive" daydreamer.  Some are just compulsive daydreamers.  Everyone is welcome.  I don't see anything wrong with the term.  It's loose, like it should be, to include a broad spectrum of people.  If you get more specific, you'll end up ignoring those who don't fit, and we don't want that.  Plus, if we keep changing the name, then it'll be harder for people to find it and find info on it.  It'll just get confusing.

[Cordellia Amethyste Rose]

Also, just because a lot of people claim to experience a certain symptom does not by any means make it universal.  It's been shown that a lot of people enact a certain movement while daydreaming, but not everyone does.  I don't.  If we try to limit this condition to only those who do that'll leave some of us out, like me, and that's not really fair.  I experience a lot of sensory sensitivity, like you mentioned, but I've only seen a few like me who do.  It may feel universal, like a lot of things, but it's definitely not.  Just because something feels universal doesn't make it so.  There's really a lot of variety in this condition.

[Nicola]

Hiya, yeh I understand what you mean and I wasn't trying to make it specific, which would indeed mean it wouldn't fit everyone. It just seems that although daydreaming is the focal point of what we have, there seems so be so many other effects that people experience and it occurred to me that the term Maladaptive Daydreaming doesn't quite grasp that? Unless there are people who just experience daydreaming alone? For example, when i told my mum about my MD yesterday, her initial reply was "well I daydream too", so I had to explain that it's about more than just daydreams. I have no intention of trying to get the name changed because I wouldn't know what to change it to, I wouldn't know how to get it changed and like you sed, people are familiar with the term MD now so it would be wrong to change it. Like I said I was just thinking out loud and wanted to hear other people's views.

[Ruby]

I agree with your definition of "maladaptive" Darkangel. I think it is is fair measure of whether someone has MD by  how much that person feels their 'daydreaming'  is "controls their lives?"  Of course this is just my opinion, but if someone daydreams a lot, excessively but if they're daydreaming because they WANT to and it's something that find productive, I'm sorry but that's not a maladaptive behaviour. And I am not trying to be rude, but a few minority of 'self-admitting MD's' claim they have MD and even boast about it, and I find it insulting to those who genuinely have a hard time living with this addiction or disorder. It's like I can enjoy alcohol as much or as little as I like, just because I had a lot a few times, does not make me an alcoholic. And for me to boast and joke about 'being an alcoholic' would be an insult to someone who have genuine issues with alcohol. 

 

So I do believe MD is a good term, it is a broad term that's able to cover 'many behaviours and forms of it" but no matter how broad it can still be ' classified.'

 

1) People of this disorder know the difference between reality and fantasy

2) The behaviour can be considered an addiction, it's distressing because of the significant impact is has on the organisation of someone's life? 

 

I am not the expert, but reading everyone's posts I think the above 2 are 'safe'  to say. 

darkangelX1 said:

Maladaptive Daydreaming Disorder

Disorder is opposite to order it is unpredictability, chaos, it is a disturbance.

A mental disorder or mental illness is a psychological or behavioral pattern generally associated with subjective distress or disability that occurs in an individual, and which is not a part of normal development or culture.
Adaptive behavior is a type of behavior that is used to adjust to another type of behavior or situation. Maladaptive behavior is a type of behavior that is often used to reduce one's anxiety, but the result is dysfunctional and non-productive.

For example my daydreaming started because of loniness and no source of human contact, so it was adaptive for me to daydream, daydreaming about having friends took away the sense of loniliness for sometime but in the long term the lonliness was still there and worse i got into the daydreaming habit. So daydreaming was a Maladaptive behaviour for me that i developed.
So MDD is a disorder it is bad because it interferes with your ability to live a perfectly normal healthy life. It gets in the way. It renders you unconcious and it disables you.