Download - Dissociative Amnesia and Dissociative Fugue Tyler Pascocello, Caroline Edwards, and Nassir Adderly
Dissociative Amnesia and Dissociative Fugue Tyler Pascocello, Caroline Edwards, and Nassir Adderly
What is Dissociative Amnesia? • Formerly called psychogenic amnesia
• mental illnesses that involve disruptions or breakdowns of memory, consciousness or awareness, identity and/or perception—mental functions that normally operate smoothly
Causes • Overwhelming Stress
• Children subjected to physical, sexual or emotional abuse
• Traumatic Events(war, natural disasters, etc.)
• Genetics
• Injuries interacting with the brain
• Abuse of alcohol and/or drugs
Symptoms of Dissociative Amnesia • Inability to remember past
experiences or personal information
• Some people with disorder might also suffer from depression and/or anxiety
Treatments of Dissociative Amnesia • Try to get the patient in a safe and supportive environment
• Try hypnosis or get the patient into a drug induced hypnosis state.
• When the bad memories that originally caused the state are recovered, the patient may need psychotherapy to help deal with the memories.
Complications of Dissociative Amnesia • Dissociative amnesia will interfere with a person’s general life.
It will affect poorly the patient’s social life, work life, and relationships
• May also cause anxiety or depression
• Dissociative Amnesia can also lead to substance abuse.
Jodi Arias • Said to suffer from dissociative
amnesia and that’s why she can’t remember the day she killed her boyfriend
• http://www.azcentral.com/community/mesa/articles/20130318expert-arias-suffers-from-dissociative-amnesia.html
What is Dissociative Fugue? • One or more episodes of
amnesia in which the inability to recall some or all of one’s past and either the loss of one’s identity or the formation of a new identity occur with sudden, unexpected, purposeful travel away from home.
Cause • Same as dissociative amnesia
Symptoms of Dissociative Fugue • The disturbance does not occur
exclusively during the course of Dissociative Identity Disorder and is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse, a medication) or a general medical condition (e.g., temporal lobe epilepsy).
• Sudden and unplanned travel away from home
• Inability to recall past events or important information from the person's life
• Confusion or loss of memory about his or her identity, possibly assuming a new identity to make up for the loss Can be partial or complete
• Extreme distress and problems with daily functioning (due to the fugue episodes)
Treatments of Dissociative Fugue • There are many treatments for dissociative fugue.
• 1. psychotherapy will help get insight into the main source of the problem
• 2. cognitive therapy will help change bad thinking patterns.
• 3. anxiety or depression medication may help because it is often a patient with Dissociative fugue will suffer from anxiety or depression.
• 4. creative therapy involving music or art.
Complications of Dissociative Fugue • Can lead to traveling far away from home.
• There can be a state of confusion about who the patient thinks they are and might create another identity
• May lead to heavy drinking that will lead to black outs.
• Will interfere with everyday functioning.
Celebrities with Dissociative Fugue Roseanne Barr- also a sufferer of Dissociative Identity Disorder, claimed she was a victim of sexual abuse when she was a child
Hershel Walker- winner of the Heisman Trophy, detected in him when he claimed he didn’t remember ever winning the trophy in the past
Background Info • Dissociative amnesia is more common in women than in men
• Dissociative Fugue is considered to be a rare disorder
• Dissociative amnesia, unlike other types of amnesia, does not result from other medical trauma such as a blow to the head
• Most fugues don’t last very long, range from less than a day to several months
• People suffering from dissociative amnesia often have memories return, but in some cases are never able to retrieve their buried memories
Video of Dissociative Amnesia • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1is6S4sCK4