cont. from

Treatment

Treatment of the dissociative disorders often combines several methods.

Psychotherapy

Patients with dissociative disorders often require treatment by a therapist with some specialized understanding of dissociation. This background is particularly important if the patient's symptoms include identity problems. Many patients with dissociative disorders are helped by group as well as individual treatment.

Medications

Some doctors will prescribe tranquilizers or antidepressants for the anxiety and/or depression that often accompany dissociative disorders. Patients with dissociative disorders are, however, at risk for abusing or becoming dependent on medications. As of 2001, there is no drug that can reliably counteract dissociation itself.

Hypnosis

Hypnosis is frequently recommended as a method of treatment for dissociative disorders, partly because hypnosis is related to the process of dissociation. Hypnosis may help patients recover repressed ideas and memories. Therapists treating patients with DID sometimes use hypnosis in the process of "fusing" the patient's alternate personalities.

Prognosis

Prognoses for dissociative disorders vary. Recovery from dissociative fugue is usually rapid. Dissociative amnesia may resolve quickly, but can become a chronic disorder in some patients. Depersonalization disorder, DDNOS, and DID are usually chronic conditions. DID usually requires five or more years of treatment for recovery.

Prevention

Since the primary cause of dissociative disorders is thought to involve extended periods of humanly inflicted trauma, prevention depends on the elimination of child abuse and psychological abuse of adult prisoners or hostages.

Key Terms

Amnesia

A general medical term for loss of memory that is not due to ordinary forgetfulness. Amnesia can be caused by head injuries, brain disease, or epilepsy, as well as by dissociation.

Depersonalization

A dissociative symptom in which the patient feels that his or her body is unreal, is changing, or is dissolving.

Derealization

A dissociative symptom in which the external environment is perceived as unreal.

Dissociation

A psychological mechanism that allows the mind to split off traumatic memories or disturbing ideas from conscious awareness.

Fugue

A dissociative experience during which a person travels away from home, has amnesia for their past, and may be confused about their identity but otherwise appear normal.

Hypnosis

The means by which a state of extreme relaxation and suggestibility is induced: used to treat amnesia and identity disturbances that occur in dissociative disorders.

Multiple personality disorder (MPD)

An older term for dissociative identity disorder (DID).

Trauma

A disastrous or life-threatening event that can cause severe emotional distress, including dissociative symptoms and disorders.

Books

"Dissociative Disorders." In Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 4th ed. Washington, DC: The American Psychiatric Association, 1994.

Eisendrath, Stuart J. "Psychiatric Disorders." In Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment, 1998. 37th ed. Ed. Stephen McPhee, et al. Stamford: Appleton & Lange, 1997.

Kolb, Lawrence C., and Keith H. Brodie. Modern Clinical Psychiatry. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Co., 1982.

Napier, Nancy J. Getting Through The Day: Strategies for Adults Hurt as Children. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1994.

Nemiah, John C. "Psychoneurotic Disorders." In The New Harvard Guide to Psychiatry, ed. Armand M. Nicholi Jr. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988.

Noll, Richard. The Encyclopedia of Schizophrenia and the Psychotic Disorders. New York: Facts On File, 1992.

Pascuzzi, Robert M., and Mary C. Weber. "Conversion Disorders, Malingering, and Dissociative Disorders." In Current Diagnosis. Vol. 9. Ed. Rex B. Conn, et al. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Co., 1997.

"Psychiatric Disorders: Hysterical Neurosis." In The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy. 16th ed. Ed. Robert Berkow. Rahway, NJ: Merck Research Laboratories, 1992.

van der Kolk, Bessel A., and Onno van der Hart. "The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma." In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Source: Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine, Published December, 2002 by the Gale Group

The Essay Author is Rebecca J. Frey PhD.

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Reviewed: 04/2006