Waking up in a new city without a memory of a person or a previous life - this may sound like a script for a Hollywood movie or a soap opera. Dissociative fugue - the so-called effect of amnesia, associated with the identity of what is happening around, for several weeks or months.
What is a fugue?
A dissociative fugue is considered a disorder that separates a person from previous memories of past experiences, feelings, or people in their life. People suffering from it do not remember their identity or any details of life.
A dissociative fugue disease description has this: a split of consciousness occurs, while reproducing actions. At the same time, the people around him, seeing the patient, do not understand that something is wrong with him. A typical example of dissociation is driving and skipping a turn because of daydreaming. The thoughts inside split the consciousness of where the car is currently located. The realization that a person missed his turn, as a rule, returns him to the return route. Thus, dissociation can occur in healthy people, but it does not last so long.
Is it possible
After severe stress, some of the memory is blocked and a dissociative fugue sets in. Life examples:
The 57-year-old husband and father of two children, the Boy Scout, left the garage near his office and disappeared. Six months later, he was found, already living under a new name in a homeless shelter in Chicago, not knowing who he was or where he came from.
A middle-aged woman buys a newspaper to find out the date and which city she is in, then she turns to the social service to determine her personality. As it turned out later, she had been missing for 5 years.
Agatha Christie was perhaps the most famous writer of all time. In 1926, on the evening of December 3, 36-year-old Christie mysteriously disappeared from her home in England. The next morning, her abandoned car was discovered, but she herself was nowhere to be found. Before her disappearance, her husband Archibald threatened to divorce. On December 14, Christie was found alive and registered under the name Teresa Nile at the Harogate Hotel. She claimed that she did not know how she ended up there. Someone believes that this disappearance was a performance for public relations and reunion with her husband. Nevertheless, there is evidence that Christie was in a state of fugue and really lost her memory. On the day of the disappearance, people saw her and claimed that she was not wearing warm clothes, despite the cold season, she seemed confused and discouraged. There is speculation that the upcoming divorce and the recent death of her mother forced her into deep depression. Agatha Christie died in 1976 and took the truth about what really happened with herself to the grave.
How does the fugue manifest
Subconsciously separating from all their memories and experiences, a dissociative fugue is activated. Causes, symptoms, diagnosis are always of interest. In some cases, a person may leave work, but never return home. Instead, the individual continues to move without a goal, preserving the partial consciousness responsible for his mechanical actions. In the end, he will be in an unfamiliar city away from home. He will not have the slightest idea who he is or what he is doing in this new city. Sometimes a person with a fugue creates a new identity to compensate for memory loss. It can exist in this way for several days to several months and even years before the fugue dissipates, after which the memory is restored and it returns home.
Symptoms of the state of the fugue
Unplanned travel away from home alone.
Inability to recall past events and experiences.
Depersonalization or the feeling that a person is outside his body.
The inability to remember the personality and details from your life for a few days to months, in rare cases, can drag on for years.
What to do
Patients with a dissociative fugue should be under close medical supervision. The patient's medical history should be studied to rule out an organic cause for the disease (e.g., epilepsy or other personality disorder). If no reasons are found, a psychologist or other mental health professionals will interview the patient and also conduct psychological assessments. These assessments may include dissociative experience, a structured clinical interview for a disorder called dissociative fugue. Causes of development, symptoms of the disease can occur when using and abuse of certain drugs and illegal drugs. For example, patients with alcohol addiction are often in a state of “blackout”, while doing some actions, and sometimes make unplanned trips, a vivid example of such a dissociative fugue is the film “With a light steam”.
Dissociative fugue: disease symptoms, prevention
It is not easy to explain the cause of the condition of the fugue, but people who suffer from the disorder, as a rule, have had some serious injury or stress in life. War veterans or people who have suffered from terrible violence, survived disaster scenarios, may be more prone to these symptoms. Some psychologists believe that sufferers of a fugue may have an unresolved conflict in life, which can be added to the likelihood of abnormal dissociation. It is possible that drug abuse can contribute to the development of this disease.
How common is the disease?
Dissociative fugue is relatively rare, with a prevalence rate of 0.2% among the general population. The length of the fugue episode is thought to be related to the severity of the stress or injury that caused it. In most cases, this appears as single episodes without recurrence. In some cases, a person will not remember the events that occurred during the state of the fugue. In other situations, amnesia associated with the traumatic event that triggered the fugue may persist to some extent after the episode is completed. Prevention of this disorder can be a conversation with a therapist after a tragic episode of life, good family support and close trusting relationships with friends. If thoughts traumatic to the psyche have no way out, the brain blocks memory for protection and amnesia sets in.
Freudian Psychology
Freud suggests that psychogenic amnesia is an act of self-preservation, where traumatic anxiety or even suicide can be an alternative. Unpleasant, unwanted or psychologically dangerous memories are blocked from entering the consciousness. Neurologically normal autobiographical memory processing is blocked by an imbalance of stress hormones such as glucocorticoids and mineralocorticoids in the brain, especially in regions of the limbic system involved in memory formation.
Such repressed memories can be restored spontaneously by a special smell, taste or other identifier, years or decades after the event. Because this is due to the psychological rather than physiological causes of psychogenic amnesia.
Dissociative fugue: symptoms, treatment
When treating dissociative fugue, one should focus on helping the patient and come to terms with the traumatic event or stress that caused the disorder. This can be achieved using various types of interactive treatment methods that investigate trauma, and work must also be done to create mechanisms to overcome the patient's difficulties in order to prevent further recurrence. Some therapists use cognitive therapy that focuses on changing inappropriate patterns of thinking. It is based on the principle that inappropriate behavior, in this case an episode of a fugue, is triggered by inappropriate or irrational thinking. A cognitive therapist will try to change these stereotypes of thinking (also known as cognitive biases) by exploring the reasonableness and validity of the assumptions behind them with the patient.
Medication can be a useful supplement to treat some of the symptoms that a patient may experience with dissociative episodes. In some cases, some antidepressants or sedatives may be prescribed.
Treatment with therapy
Creative therapies (art therapy, music therapy ) allow patients to express and channel thoughts and emotions into “safe” channels. They empower the patient by encouraging self-knowledge and a sense of control.
Group therapy - a therapist or consultant may be useful in supporting the patient on an ongoing basis. It also provides the patient with the opportunity to gain self-confidence and interact with colleagues in a positive way.
Family therapy can be part of the treatment regimen, both in the study of the trauma that caused the episode of the fugue, and in clarifying the topic of the disease for the rest of the family.