Dissociative Amnesia and Dissociative Fugue

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This week our focus in on something other than hormone replacement specifically. This topic is often more related to Counseling and Psychology. But it is real, and it does sometimes show itself in Dr. Maupin’s office. It is called a Fugue State.
Fugue State is a diagnosis under Dissociative Disorders in the DSM V. These are the diagnostic and statistical manuals of the American Psychiatric Society. These books (there are five revisions), describe the criterion for diagnosing mental and emotional disorders.
If you experience traumatic events or excessively stressful events, especially early in childhood, you use a defense mechanism called repression. This does not mean that you forget these events or experiences, it means that you block them from your consciousness in order to appear normal and to function without calling attention to yourself in ways that could jeopardize you.
Sometimes when the stress levels are more than your system can handle, you will “lose” some of your awareness. You may forget your name and where you live, and you may forget some event or period of your life.
If you leave home and get in your car and drive somewhere and during the drive have a wreck, and wake up in the hospital and do not know who you are or what you were doing and do not remember the drive at all, you suffer from what we call Amnesia. This amnesia can be limited in duration and will go away and you will recover your memory of the event. If the amnesia is caused by severe brain trauma you may not get the memory back. The type of amnesia that may happen and from which you may recover is the type caused by stress and emotional trauma. There are levels of amnesia and dissociation that are recoverable if your stress levels diminish.
All of us repress things because of our focus of attention. If you break up with a girlfriend and then automatically and unconsciously dial her number on the phone, that is called repression. However, if you have had severe levels of trauma you are not repressing you are dissociating from reality.