Psychogenic Amnesia

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Patient MR appears to be suffering from psychogenic, retrograde amnesia. Retrograde amnesia describes the condition in which an individual cannot remember past events leading up to the amnesia causing event. Psychogenic amnesia results from a psychologically traumatizing event. The forgetting is motivated by the need to block out the memory from a certain emotional period. Typically this is amnesia is seen in the absence of detectable brain injury (Schwarb, slide 9). I would expect to find no brain damage in MR’s brain scans. Typical characteristics of psychogenic, retrograde amnesia include: forgetting autobiographical information, being in a temporary fugue state, the memory loss is temporally general, the individual is aware of the impairment, …show more content…
PN had retrograde psychogenic amnesia caused by the emotionally taxing event of his grandfather passing away. PN's symptoms had a sudden onset. He couldn't remember any autobiographical information like his name, what he did, who is relatives are, his personal history, or how he ended up on a street in downtown Toronto. He couldn't even recognize his own cousin when he was picked up. However, PN had no issues with his semantic memory. For example, PN could give you information about street names, sports teams, public figures and events (Schacter,1982). Thus, PN's amnesia was informationally specific because he only lost autobiographical information. PN recovered his memory in 4 days when he was watching a funeral scene on a TV show. He got his memories back in fragments, starting with his grandfather's funeral and ending with big chunks of personal information he couldn't access previously (Schacter, 1982). One symptom that does not seem to fit with PN is the time in which MR developed his amnesia. PN’s onset of symptoms appeared to be immediately after his grandfather died. MR’s onset of symptoms appeared to manifest years after the traumatic events. However, it is possible MR was triggered by being back in Europe which brought back intense emotions leading to the desire to block out the
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