Dissociative Amnesia Psychology

It has been documented that disassociative identity disorder can only develop during childhood, usually between the ages of 3 and 9. There is no "adult onset" disassociative identity disorder, due to the fact that "...only children have sufficient flexibility (and vulnerability) to respond to trauma by breaking their 'still coalescing' self into different, dissociated parts" (Rainbow House 2). It has also been found that only children who are highly susceptible to hypnosis are able to accomplish disassociative behavior. This is because a hypnotic state is very similar to the trance-like

American Psychiatric Association (APA). 1994. Somatoform Dissociative Disorder, Dissociative Amnesia. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth Ed. Retrieved from http://behavenet.com/capsules/disorders/disamnesia.htm

Post-traumatic amnesia is confusion or memory loss that occurs immediately following a traumatic brain injury. The person that was injured is usually disoriented and is unable to remember the events that occur after the injury like their name, where they are, and the time. They may experience retrograde amnesia (loss of memories that were formed before the injury) and retrograde amnesia (problems with creating new memories). They may regain their memory. When they experience anterograde amnesia they memories are never regained because they were not encoded completely. Memories from just before the trauma are often gone forever, due to repression, also because the memories may be incompletely encoded, if the injury interrupts the encoding

Dissociative disorder is a disorder in which individuals feel detached from themselves or their surroundings and reality, experience and identity may disintegrate. Dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder, is characterized as a disorder in which up to 100 personalities or fragments of personalities coexist within one body and mind (Barlow). The client was diagnosed and given an assessment with the goal of determining the factors. In many cases, only a few characteristics are distinct, because the identities are only partially independent. DSM-5 criteria for DID include amnesia, as in dissociative amnesia. Dissociative amnesia occurs when a person blocks out certain information, usually associated with a stressful or traumatic event, leaving him or her unable to remember important personal information. With this disorder, the degree of memory loss goes beyond normal forgetfulness and includes gaps in memory for long periods of time or of memories involving the traumatic event. In DID, however, identity has also fragmented. How many personalities live inside one body is relatively unimportant, whether there are 3, 4, or even 100 of them. Through a process of discovery, the client's history finally revealed that the impotence was actually a result of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) caused by a past experience. People with PTSD fear re-experiencing a traumatic event and sometimes are unable to remember certain aspects (Barlow 138). However, through psychoanalytic therapy, this client illustrates a successful

Out of the seventy-one designated psychiatric facilities under the Mental Health Act in Ontario, fifty participants (both male and female) diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder were randomly selected to participate in the study. Out of the fifty participants selected, twenty-five (n = 9, n = 16 respectively) agreed to participate in the study for a payment of $50.00.

About three months ago, during the summer, I was living a very unhealthy lifetsyle. For about a week I felt like I wasn't remembering things that should have been easily known. During normal daily activites such as work, I would tend to forget things that would have been easy to remember any other day. I've been working as a deilvry driver at a pizzeria now for close to 2 years, and I know the neighborhood extremly well. However, during this time, I was starting to forget items at the pizzeria such as sodas or where streets were, that I knew extremly well. It is for these reasons that I feel like I was experiecing symptoms of disaciative amnesia

(Chu & Dill, 1990), and sexual abuse (Bernier et al., 2013; Chu & Dill, 1990). Although

Dissociative disorder is an extreme case of Dissociation, which causes a person to disconnect with their own thoughts. During the review of the video, Dissociative disorder leads me to think why one would suffer from this illness, my findings were formed by an individual having a traumatic event in their lives, such as a severe sexual, emotional, or physical abuse in their early cycle of life.

Every person has experienced a time when they get lost in their thoughts and start to daydream in the middle of an action. You lose track of what’s going on around you. Our thoughts and experiences can become dissociative. Dissociative Disorders causes a disruption of identity and conscious awareness. People who suffer from Dissociative Identity Disorder, they develop two or more distinct identities. These identities form to deal with traumatic event, and to protect one’s sense of self. People who suffer DID experience periods of amnesia, and sometimes only one identity could be aware of the others. The identities can be a different gender, age, ethnic

A person with dissociative amnesia cannot recall personal information as a result of a traumatic event. The person does possess “autobiographical memory” but they cannot assess the memory. The individual will not be able to recall events from a certain period but it

The primary cause of Dissociative Identity Disorder appears to be severe and prolonged trauma experienced during childhood. The traumatic events therefore remain sealed off – dissociated and unprocessed. This will result a partial amnesia from what has happened.

The two concepts that I resonated with are Memory and the Psychodynamic theory. Starting with the Psychodynamic theory is an approach to psychology that studies the psychological forces underlying human behavior, feelings, and emotions, and how they may relate to early childhood experience. This theory is most closely associated with the work of Sigmund Freud, and with psychoanalysis, a type of psychotherapy that attempts to explore the patient’s unconscious thoughts and emotions so that the person is better able to understand him or herself. The second one is Memory; understanding how memory works will help you improves your memory. Which is an essential key to attaining knowledge. Memory is one of the important cognitive processes. Memory involves remembering and forgetting. I chose the two concepts because throughout the class they stood out to the most. Understanding the conscious, subconscious mind and also memory. I’m interested in understanding the human behavior.

Retrograde Amnesia is, being a common type of Amnesia, is the one most people are familiar with. Retrograde Amnesia is the loss of past memories. If someone falls and hits their head, the damage caused by that accident could cause the person to forget that the accident even occurred. For example, a friend once decided to try snowboarding, and did not learn how to stop before she went to the top of the hill. She went down, picking up speed, and did not notice the small cliff at the bottom until it was too late to turn away. She decided to fall so she would not go over the cliff, and while she was successful at that, she unfortunately hit her head on a patch of ice as she fell. She remained conscience, but lost not only the memory of the accident, she lost her memory of the entire week of the trip.

Dissociative disorders are a very particular and unique type of mental illness. They cause the patient to, in many various ways, lose touch or disassociate from reality. While all people experience periods of disassociation such as being in a car and not remembering driving home, these disorders take dissociation to a whole new level. In some cases such as schizophrenia, the patient develops voices in their head. These voices can build them up or, more often, break them down. In more extreme cases such as dissociative identity disorder, the patient can develop multiple personalities. These personalities can “take over” at random times or be triggered by a specific action. Dissociative identity disorder is an important topic because people

While dissociative disorders did not get a lot of attention in the beginnings of psychology, the ideas of it had been present in a “body of medical and scientific literature that emerged from 1775 to 1900” and first introduced in a concept coined by Ellenberger, known as “First Dynamic Psychiatry” (Kihlstrom). After this was introduced, concepts and possibilities skyrocketed in the 1980s and now receive a large amount of attention in the world of psychology and psychiatry ("Dissociative Disorders", 2016). This disorder, known as dissociative amnesia, is a subset of dissociative disorders and can be accompanied by multiple other disorders, such as depression and anxiety ("Mental Health and Dissociative Amnesia"). Just as well,