![]() ![]() A majority of the women reported previously having partial or complete amnesia of these events, which they typically remembered not in a therapy session but while at home alone or with family or friends. The condition has been backed up not just by psychiatric case studies but by dozens of studies involving victims of child abuse, natural disaster, torture, rape, kidnapping, wartime violence and other trauma.įor example, two decades ago psychiatrist James Chu, then director of the trauma and dissociative disorders program at McLean Hospital, published a study involving dozens of women receiving in-patient treatment who had experienced childhood abuse. Since 1980, dissociative amnesia has been listed as a common symptom of PSTD in every edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( DSM)-psychiatry’s diagnostic bible. “Like many therapists who treat adult survivors of severe child abuse, I have seen some patients who recover memories of abuse.” “We think that these brain studies can help reduce the stigma associated with our work,” Kaufman says. She notes that, as with earlier MRI studies of trauma survivors, this one shows that there is a neurological basis for dissociative symptoms such as amnesia. Milissa Kaufman is senior author of the new MRI study and head of the dissociative disorders and trauma research program at McLean Hospital, a teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School. ![]() In an editorial published in the same issue of the journal, Vinod Menon, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine, praised the researchers for “ a potential brain circuit mechanism underlying individual differences in dissociative symptoms in adults with early-life trauma and PTSD. The new paper uses magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study amnesia, along with various other dissociative experiences that are often said to occur in the wake of severe child abuse, such as feelings of unreality and depersonalization. ![]() A study published in February in the American Journal of Psychiatry, the flagship journal of the APA, highlights the considerable scientific evidence that bolsters the arguments of trauma therapists. But clinicians who also do research have been publishing peer-reviewed studies of dissociative amnesia in leading journals for decades. Tensions between the two positions have often been framed as a debate between hard-core scientists on the false-memory side and therapists in clinical practice in the delayed-memory camp. They maintain that this psychological defense mechanism-known as dissociative amnesia-turns up routinely in the patients they encounter. Trauma therapists assert that abuse experienced early in life can overwhelm the central nervous system, causing children to split off a painful memory from conscious awareness. Some prominent cases of recovered memory of child abuse have turned out to be false, elicited by overzealous therapists.īut psychotherapists who specialize in treating adult survivors of childhood trauma argue that laboratory experiments do not rule out the possibility that some delayed memories recalled by adults are factual. The skepticism is based on a body of research showing that memory is unreliable and that simple manipulations in the lab can make people believe they had an experience that never happened. Warnings about the reliability of a forgotten traumatic event that is later recalled-known formally as a delayed memory-have been endorsed by leading mental health organizations such as the American Psychiatric Association (APA). And the validity of buried trauma turns up as a point of contention in court cases and in television and movie story lines. When adults claim to have suddenly recalled painful events from their childhood, are those memories likely to be accurate? This question is the basis of the “memory wars” that have roiled psychology for decades. ![]()
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