MEMORY LOSS FROM A TRAUMATIC EVENT

There are two types of  DISSOCIATIVE DISORDERS.  ORGANIC AMNESIA: Which is direct damage to the brain as a result of head injury, physical trauma or disease. DISSOCIATIVE AMNESIA(once known as psychogenic amnesia).  It is an example of a traumatic event.  An event where something is so distressing occurs that the mind chooses to forget rather than deal with the stress. With this condition, the patient is unable to remember vital personal information that has nothing to do with normal forgetfulness. This is commonly seen after witnessing a violent crime or a grave accident.  It does not occur due to a mental illness. Usually this is seen as a gap or gaps in recall for aspects of someone's life history, but with severe acute trauma,such as during wartime, there can be a sudden acute onset of symptoms. Patients with dissociative amnesia do not experience an identity crisis but they tend to pass through a trance-like state and may develop depersonalization as an effort to block out the trauma.  The subtypes of this amnesia include: GENERALIZED AMNESIA  This involves the person's whole life.  LOCALIZED AMNESIA  There is no memory of a specific traumatic event that took place.  SELECTIVE AMNESIA  Only selective parts of events that occurred in a defined period of time.  SYSTEMATIZED AMNESIA  There is memory loss regarding a specific category of information.  A FUGUE STATE, formally DISSOCIATIVE FUGUE, is a rare condition precipitated by a stressful episode.  It is caused by psychological trauma and is usually temporary, unresolved and therefore may return.  A person with this is unaware or confused about his or her identity and will travel in journeys away from familiar surroundings to discover or create new identities.  They find themselves in a strange place with no idea how they got there.  There have been cases of fugue where men have left their families, moved hundreds of miles away, started new families, claiming only to remember the old families years later.  The claim is that the psychological stress in the lives, forces the mind to split from their current reality.  They forget who they are and just wander off.  With dissociative disorders there is a break or disruption in the conscious process.  Someone's mind, what was once one, is now fragmented, as a split in the mind.