Dissociative Disorder
Dissociative disorders are conditions that involve disruptions or breakdowns of memory, awareness, identity or perception. People with dissociative disorders use dissociation, a defense mechanism, pathologically and involuntarily. Dissociative disorders are thought to primarily be caused by psychological trauma.
The five dissociative disorders listed in the DSM IV are as follows:
- Depersonalization disorder: periods of detachment from self or surrounding which may be experienced as "unreal" (lacking in control of or "outside of" self) while retaining awareness that this is only a feeling and not a reality.
- Dissociative amnesia: (formerly Psychogenic Amnesia): noticeable impairment of recall resulting from emotional trauma
- Dissociative fugue: (formerly Psychogenic Fugue): physical desertion of familiar surroundings and experience of impaired recall of the past. This may lead to confusion about actual identity and the assumption of a new identity.
- Dissociative identity disorder: (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder): the alternation of two or more distinct personality states with impaired recall among personality states.
- Dissociative disorder not otherwise specified: used for forms of pathological dissociation that do not fully meet the criteria of the other specified dissociative disorders.
The ICD-10 classifies conversion disorder as a dissociative disorder while the DSM-IV classifies it as a somatoform disorder.
Read more about Dissociative Disorder: Diagnosis and Prevalence, Children and Adolescents, Current Debates and The DSM V
Famous quotes containing the word disorder:
“Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible, and that of disease and disorder is the obvious one for the case in point. Is not crisis itself a concept we owe to Hippocrates? In the social and cultural domain no metaphor is more apt than the pathological one.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)