Dissociative Identity Disorder	Depersonalization
Personal Stories of Dissociation	Dissociative Amnesia
Dissociative Fugue	Dissociation Home

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Dissociative disorders are marked by a separation from or interruption of a person's fundamental aspects of waking consciousness (such as one's personal identity, one's personal history, etc.). All of the dissociative disorders are believed to stem from trauma experienced by the individual with this disorder. The dissociative aspect is thought to be a coping mechanism in which the person literally dissociates himself from a situation or experience too traumatic to integrate with his conscious self.

Dissociative Amnesia:

People with dissociative amnesia are unable to recall important information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature, about their lives. The loss of memory is much more extensive than normal forgetting and is not caused by organic factors. Dissociative amnesia may be localized, selective, generalized, or continuous.

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Dissociative Fugue:

People suffering from a dissociative fugue not only forget their personal identities and details of their past lives, but also flee to an entirely different location, often unaware of how they came to be in the new location. Fugues usually follow a stressful event and tend to end abruptly.

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Dissociative Identity Disorder:

A person with DID develops two or more distinct personalities, each with a unique set of memories, behaviors, thoughts, and emotions. At any given time, one of the subpersonalities (alters) takes center stage and dominates the person's functioning. Usually one specific personality, referred to as the host, appears more often than the others.

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Depersonalization Disorder:

Those suffering with this disorder have a distorted perception of themselves, their bodies, and their lives. The person may feel as if he is an automaton or is in a dream. Often the symptoms are transient and occur with anxiety, panic, or phobic symptoms. However, symptoms can be chronic and persist or recur for many years. People suffering with depersonalization often have great difficulty describing their symptoms and may fear or believe the symptoms mean they are going crazy. The patient often feels unreal and may experience the world as unreal and dreamlike.

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