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Dissociative Identity Disorder Dissociative Disorders Term Paper

clevelandclinic.org/health/health-info/docs/2800/2819.asp?index=9786&src=news.,2002). Dissociative fugue -- In this kind of dissociative disorder, the person is found to have lose his or her sense of personal identity and impulsively wanders or travels away from home for a temporary period of time. People with dissociative fugue often become confused about who they really are and may even create new identities. Outwardly, people with this disorder show no signs of illness, such as a strange appearance or behavior (http://www.clevelandclinic.org/health/health-info/docs/2800/2819.asp?index=9786&src=news,2002).

Depersonalization disorder -- This involves a person's sense or feeling that he or she is disconnected or detached from his or her body. T he disorder is sometimes described as being numb or in a dream, or feeling like you are watching yourself from outside the body (http://www.clevelandclinic.org/health/health-info/docs/2800/2819.asp?index=9786&src=news,2002).

Dissociative identity disorder (DID) -- This is believed to be the most severe type of dissociative disorder, was formerly called multiple personality disorder. As a coping mechanism, a person with this disorder splits off feelings, personality traits and characteristics or memories. This then result to a person having severe stress or other triggers can cause the person to act and speak as though he or she is a different person. Each identity can have its own name and personal history, or the identities can be less well-defined and simple feel like people talking inside the person's head (http://www.clevelandclinic.org/health/health-info/docs/2800/2819.asp?index=9786&src=news,2002).

Symptoms of dissociative disorder are found to be dependent on the severity or type of disorder. But the most common symptoms include the following (http://www.clevelandclinic.org/health/health-info/docs/2800/2819.asp?index=9786&src=news,2002):

Amnesia (loss of memory)...

Although it is still unknown why some people develop dissociative disorders, but most experts believe these disorders develop as a protection against remembering painful and/or traumatic life experiences, such as abuse, rape, war and natural disasters. There also may be a genetic link to the development of dissociative disorders, since people with these disorders sometimes have close relatives who have had similar disorders (http://www.clevelandclinic.org/health/health-info/docs/2800/2819.asp?index=9786&src=news,2002).
Meanwhile, there are research that suggest that amnesic barriers between alter personalities are typically impervious to explicit stimuli, as well as conceptually driven implicit stimuli. Autobiographical memory deficits are also experimentally evident in DID. Although no experimental studies have addressed the issue of source amnesia or pseudomemories, there is some evidence that pseudomemories are an infrequent and real phenomenon in DID patients (Dorahi, 2001).

Works Cited

An Overview of Dissociative Disorders." (2002). http://www.clevelandclinic.org/health/health-info/docs/2800/2819.asp?index=9786&src=news

Grohol, John. (2005). "Dissociative identity disorder." Psych Central http://psychcentral.com/psypsych/Dissociative_identity_disorder.

Dorahi, MJ.(2001). "Dissociative identity disorder and memory dysfunction: the current state of experimental research and its future directions." Clin Psychol Rev. (5):771-95.

Sources used in this document:
Works Cited

An Overview of Dissociative Disorders." (2002). http://www.clevelandclinic.org/health/health-info/docs/2800/2819.asp?index=9786&src=news

Grohol, John. (2005). "Dissociative identity disorder." Psych Central http://psychcentral.com/psypsych/Dissociative_identity_disorder.

Dorahi, MJ.(2001). "Dissociative identity disorder and memory dysfunction: the current state of experimental research and its future directions." Clin Psychol Rev. (5):771-95.
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