Vasundhara hummed her favourite Asha Bhonsle number as she cooked palak paneer for her husband, Vikram.

The day had started as usual at 7 am for Vasundhara. By noon a sumptuous lunch was laid out on the table. But there was no sign of her husband. Worried she paced the room and peered out of the window, while her family members looked on helplessly. Her memory lapse was not new to them. Vikram had died in a road mishap five months ago, but Vasundhara is yet to come to terms with the fact.

She slipped into a state of shock and only after sessions with a psychiatrist did she recover, partially though. Only to get into periodic amnesiac lapses, when she forgot that her husband was no more. What happens during those five hours of bliss that Vasundhara experiences? Psychiatrists attribute Vasundhara?s five hours of bliss to amnesia. A state of mind where there is a complete loss of memory. It may be caused either by organic disorders or functional nervous disorders. While organic disorders could be caused by a brain injury or arteriosclerosis, the latter could be caused due to hysteria or shock. ?Amnesia is a symptom rather than a disease,? feels city psychiatrist.

Total amnesia or complete loss of memory Partial amnesia, which is a condition that occurs before or after a traumatic event and Systematic amnesia which relates to a group of experience.

Types of amnesia

?There are primarily two types of amnesia: anterograde and retrograde. While anterograde occurs after an incident, retrograde amnesia occurs just before an accident. ?Before any accident there is a complete blackout of thoughts and after the accident occurs the victim barely remembers what had happened, say 30 seconds before the mishap,? said psychiatrist Prabhat Verma.

However, a third category of amnesia would be para amnesia. This is a condition which is a result of wrong memory caused by distortion.

Symptoms

Since amnesia is a dissociate disorder, it can be classified into five categories. Dissociative amnesia, dissociative identity disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder), dissociative trance, depersonalisation disorder. Psychiatarist deal with all of them distinctly, since they come with their special characteristics. Dissociative amnesia is the inability to recall important information usually due to trauma or stress. This cannot be explained by ordinary forgetfulness, memory loss in this case is episodic and is related to a discrete period of time, could be ranging from a few minutes to a few hours. ?To be explained in more technical terms this is a compensatory mechanism. There is a conscious, sub-conscious and an unconscious state of mind. Through the conscious mind, a thought or an incident passes into the unconscious mind and gets deposited into the memory bank of the unconscious mind barring it from surfacing to the conscious mind by strong screening force of the sub conscious mind. Dissociative amnesia is the most common form of disorder in women especially after a sexual abuse. This may not be the case under stressful conditions like death,? stated Verma.

Dissociative Identity Disorder, which basically harbours two personalities in one man. ?Since two personalities exist in one, there could be a possible interaction between the two. Split personality or schizophrenia is different from identity disorder, since this leads to the splitting of thought process leading to a change in personality,? stated

Ashok Patnayak, another psychiatarist of the steel city. Dissociative Identity Disorder is the presence of two more distinct identity apart from the self. There are in constant interaction with each other and both the mental states exist in their relatively enduring pattern or perceiving to other state recurrently taking control of the person's behaviour. There is a partial or complete inability to recall personal information. A temporary marked alteration in the state of consciousness or loss of customary sense of present identity. There is a replacement of an alternate identity and could be either episodic or permanent.

Since this is almost like getting into a trance this is termed as dissociative trance disorder. A persistent or recurrent existence of a feeling in detached form is termed as Depersonalisation Disorder. ?In this situation there seems to be an outside observer of one's mental process or body just like feeling that one is in a dream throughout. However reality testing remains intact,? stated Patnayak.

Treatment:

?There are two types of treatment or for that matter any mental disorder. Pharmacotherapy and Psychotherapy. ?The core of all these disorders is depression. A patient needs to be treated with anti-depressants. And once the symptoms become clear it is easier to target such symptoms to treat them accordingly,? said Patnayak.

Psychotherapy, the alternative in psychiatry treatment and the more trusted by the medicos, encompasses hypnosis and memory retrieval.

?During hypnosis, a person is taken into a trance like situation and the client then comes out of the subconscious state of mind. Memory retrieval and hypnosis almost fall in the same line. But it is necessary that for recovery the client be brought in by relatives, since he himself is too bewildered to understand his state of mind,? said Patnayak.

Savvy Soumya