Child Psychiatric Emergencies
R. Thara, Lakshmi Vijayakumar in Emergencies in Psychiatry in Low- and Middle-Income Countries, 2017
Dissociative disorders typically manifest as disruptions or a discontinuity in the normal functions of consciousness, memory, identity, emotion, perception, body representation, motor control, and behavior (American Psychiatric Association 2013). Dissociative disorders may present with “positive” symptoms such as depersonalization, derealization, or fragmentation in the experience of identity, or subjective “negative” experiences, with loss of access or control over mental functions such as memory, resulting in dissociative amnesia (American Psychiatric Association 2013). Children and adolescents who experience traumatic events, including maltreatment, abuse, natural disasters, or war are at increased risk of dissociative disorders (American Psychiatric Association 2013; Shipman and Taussig 2009; Laor et al. 2002; Cagiada, Candido and Pennati 1997).
Psychiatric Disorders
Walter F. Stanaszek, Mary J. Stanaszek, Robert J. Holt, Steven Strauss in Understanding Medical Terms, 2020
Dissociative disorders include dissociative amnesia or fugue, formerly called psychogenic amnesia; dissociative identity disorder, formerly called multiple personality disorder; depersonalization disorder; and transient global amnesia. In the dissociative states, the patient dissociates himself from the stressful event through a fugue or multiple personality. Fugue is from the Latin for "flee" and is also used for a musical form that may be viewed as a flight. A fugue is a massive amnesia allowing the patient to flee all memory of the stressful event, but it often leaves the patient wandering aimlessly. Double or multiple personality also allows the patient to dissociate from the event by creating one or more separate identities with no ties to the stress.
Descriptive and Psychodynamic Psychopathology EMIs
Michael Reilly, Bangaru Raju in Extended Matching Items for the MRCPsych Part 1, 2018
Alcoholic dementia.Confabulation of embarrassment.Dissociative amnesia.Echolalia.Fantastic confabulation.Ganser syndrome.Korsakoff psychosis.Mamillary body.Negativism.Parietal lobe.Subthalamic nucleus.Suggestibility.
Oversimplifications and Misrepresentations in the Repressed Memory Debate: A Reply to Ross
Published in Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 2023
Henry Otgaar, Olivier Dodier, Maryanne Garry, Mark L. Howe, Elizabeth F. Loftus, Steven Jay Lynn, Ivan Mangiulli, Richard J. McNally, Lawrence Patihis
Finally, Ross (2022) brushed away the importance of mechanisms that might explain dissociative amnesia. Specifically, he wrote that “a postulated mechanism can neither validate nor invalidate a phenomenon.” But when it comes to phenomena, mechanism is the difference between plausible and magical. What Ross proposed, of course, puts no limit on accepting any phenomena as having a legitimate origin. When people start burnishing the reality of putative phenomena by declaring their existence is “not allowed by science,” we are not far off from accepting claims of witchcraft, alien abductions, or the idea that shooting a beam of energy out of your eyes could open your garage door (Ross, 2007, 2010, n.d.). And even if there is more than one potential mechanism underlying a non-controversial phenomenon, that situation alone is insufficient to question the validity of a phenomenon. Take, for example, the phenomenon of false memory. A multitude of experiments show the existence of this phenomenon (e.g., Loftus, 2005) but whether these memories are caused by source monitoring errors, spreading activation, or some combination does not mean false memories do not exist. But it is an entirely different picture when this discussion is about a controversial phenomenon such as dissociative amnesia, which is both a descriptive and an explanatory concept (Mangiulli et al., 2022). The entire idea of dissociative amnesia is controversial because it assumes that traumatic memories are successfully stored but lie dormant and inaccessible in pristine form, sometimes for many years.
The False Memory Debate A Reply to Otgaar
Published in Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 2023
Colin A. Ross
The DSM-III, DSM-IV, and DSM-5 criteria for dissociative amnesia do not require a mechanism, only that the amnesia cannot be explained by ordinary forgetting. One would not ordinarily forget a rape that occurred last week, in the absence of drug intoxication, a head injury or some other medical cause. Such causes are exclusion criteria for the diagnosis of dissociative amnesia. Dissociative amnesia does not occur only for traumatic events in childhood. Similarly, a dissociation of the ability to move one’s arm can be diagnosed as a conversion disorder only if there is no known medical cause of the paralysis, and if it is not better explained as a factitious disorder or malingering.
Review of the International Literature
Published in American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 2020
Shelagh Freedman, Ian E. Wickramasekera
The authors provide a critical perspective of the concept of repressed memory and dissociative amnesia from academic, clinical, and legal points of view. The authors begin with a historical analysis of how the concept of repressed memories evolved in early psychoanalytic work and expanded into the commonly accepted notion of dissociative amnesia in all schools of psychotherapy which is noted to occur in many clinical situations including trauma- and dissociative-related syndromes. The authors provide extensive research documentation to their thesis that the phenomenon of repressed memory is inaccurate in its commonly understood clinical context. They also discuss the adverse clinical and legal consequences that can occur as a result of this misunderstanding. The authors also discuss their perspectives that the clinical community of psychotherapy and counseling still holds many inaccurate views of the phenomena of dissociative amnesia and that the popularity of these inaccurate views may in fact be increasing rather than decreasing. This is a very important article to review for any clinician in practice using hypnosis regardless of whether you may agree with the author's assessment of the research and clinical work on the client’s presenting with an experience related to dissociative amnesia. At the very least, the authors provide a very well-documented article discussing the academic, clinical, and legal objections to the term repressed memory that should be factored into your understanding of the ethical practice of psychotherapy and counseling. Address for reprints: Henry Otgaar, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Section Forensic Psychology, Maastricht University, Universiteitssingel 40, 6200 MD, Maastricht, the Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]
Related Knowledge Centers
- Amnesia
- Anterograde Amnesia
- Dissociative Disorder
- Dissociative Fugue
- Episodic Memory
- Psychological Stress
- Traumatic Memories
- Memory Disorder
- Brain Damage
- Retrograde Amnesia