The American Psychiatric Association, together with other leading mental health organizations, recently released a warning about the dependability of a forgotten traumatic event that's later remembered, formally identified as 'delayed memory.'
In connection to this warning, Scientific American posted the question of, if adults claim to have abruptly recalled traumatic events from their childhood, are such memories likely to be exact?
The said article specified that his question is the basis of 'memory wars' that have stirred psychology for many years now. More so, the validity of this so-called buried trauma, is turning up as a point of argument in court cases, as well as in movie and television story lines.
Such disbelief is based on a body of research that shows memory is not dependable and that simple manipulation in the lab can make people believe they have had encountered something that never occurred.
A number of prominent cases of recovered child abuse memory have turned out to be untruthful, stimulated by overenthusiastic therapists.
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A study specified that number of prominent cases of recovered child abuse memory have turned out to be untruthful, stimulated by overenthusiastic therapists.
Dissociative Amnesia
Psychotherapists specializing in treating adults who are survivors of childhood trauma contend that lab experiments are not ruling out the probability that some delayed memories adults are recalling are factual.
Trauma therapists proclaim that abuse encountered early in life can overpower the central nervous system, leading children to split off a hurtful memory from conscious awareness.
They maintain that such a psychological defense mechanism, also called 'dissociative amnesia,' turns up regularly in the patients they encounter.
Tensions between the two positions have frequently been trapped as an argument between hard-core scientists on the fake or false-memory side and therapists who are in clinical practice on the delayed-memory side.
Nevertheless, clinicians who do research as well, have been publishing peer-reviewed investigations of dissociative amnesia in leading journals for tens of years already.
Common Symptom of PSTD
Since the 1980s decade, dissociative amnesia has been listed as a common symptom of PSTD in every edition of the DSM or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, the diagnostic bible of psychiatry.
This condition has been supported not just by psychiatric case studies but also by dozens of studies that involve victims not just of child abuse, torture, natural disaster, wartime violence, and kidnapping, among other trauma.
Meanwhile, false-memory advocates have cautioned that the use of leading questions by study investigators might need a false recollection.
In connection to this, MRI studies done over the last 20 years have shown that PTSD patients who have dissociative amnesia display decreased activity in the amygdala, a region of the brain that regulates the processing of emotion.
More so, the studies exhibited increased activity in the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that regulates planning, concentration, as well as other executive functioning skills.
On the contrary, Post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD patients who reported no lapse in their memories of trauma during the study showed increased activity in the amygdala and decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex.
PTSD, according to Mayo Clinic, is a mental health condition stimulated by a frightening event, either through personal experience or by simply witnessing it.
How PTSD Patients Respond to Trauma
This study entitled, Large-Scale Functional Brain Network Architecture Changes Associated With Trauma-Related Dissociation, and published in the American Journal of Psychiatry specified that PTSD patients who have dissociative symptoms like amnesia and depersonalization, a group composed of 15 to 30 percent of all PTSD patients, shut down emotionally as their response to trauma.
According to psychiatry professor Ruth Lanius, also the director of the PTSD research unit at the University of Western Ontario who has done a lot of MRI studies added, children may try to detach from abuse so they can get rid of intolerable emotional pain, which can lead to forgetting an experience from many years ago.
Dissociation, Lanius elaborated, involves a psychological escape when it is not impossible to escape physically.
False-memory investigators stay skeptical though, of these brain-imaging studies. Legal psychology professor Henry Otgaar, from Maastricht University in the Netherlands, said, intact autobiographical memories are unusual if ever, repressed.
Otgaar, who's also co-authored over a hundred academic publications on false-memory research and who frequently serves as an expert witness for defendants in cases of abuse, also said, brain studies offer biological evidence just for the claims of patients reporting memory loss because of dissociation.
There are many substitute explanations, he explained, for such correlations, for instance, retrograde amnesia in which forgetting takes place because of a brain injury.
Related information about trauma and brain is shown on mediaco-op's YouTube video below:
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