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What are they?

Your senses of identity, reality and continuity depend on your feelings, thoughts, sensations, perceptions and memories. If these become ‘disconnected’ from each other, or don’t register in your conscious mind, it changes your sense of who you are, your memories, and the way you see things around you. This is what happens during dissociation. A common example is ‘motorway hypnosis’ – you get to the destination you were heading for, but have no recollection of making any turnings or passing anything on the way. Your body has ‘switched to automatic mode’ – in other words you have experienced a form of dissociation with mild amnesia. Dissociation is also a defence mechanism with the primary function of helping people to survive traumatic experiences. Dissociative disorders occur when people have persistent and repeated episodes of dissociation.

How common is it?

Everyone can, and does dissociate, but research among psychiatric inpatients has shown that up to 22 per cent of them may have a dissociative disorder. However, most people dissociate to some extent, and it is when this affects everyday functioning that a dissociative disorder may be diagnosed

What age range does it affect?

Generally the disorder will not develop until later in life, but it is often in childhood that the causes of it will occur.

Other information

Dissociative disorders are split up into categories – the best known two of these are post traumatic stress and dissociative identity disorder (DID), also known as multiple personality disorder.

Symptoms

• Gaps in memory, or finding yourself somewhere without knowing how you got there
• Distorted views of your body, inability to recognise yourself in the mirror
• A sense of detachment from your emotions
• Internal voices and dialogue
• Forgetting important personal information or a learned skill
• Feeling like there are different people inside you, referring to yourself as ‘we’

Regular Causes

• Repeated trauma or abuse – especially if there is no supportive parent so the child has to be emotionally self sufficient
• Disturbances in the stages of childhood development – parental separations, moving between homes a lot

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