"I am Not a Disorder": The Chrysalis Community-Based Treatment Program‪.‬

Introduction In 1980, I took a job as a social worker in a Children's Aid Society treatment centre in Toronto. Within this context, I began to meet women and children who had been subjected to the most brutal forms of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, among them a woman who suffered from a severe case of what we then called "multiple personality" and now call "dissociative identity disorder." I knew I was over my head trying to help this woman, but the psychiatric facility from which she was referred to our program made it clear that they had no intention of taking her back. So I decided to return to school to learn more about how to do this work that was suddenly much more complex than I had previously experienced, and I enrolled in the Community Psychology program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in the University of Toronto.