This Critical Issues column is adapted from a chapter to appear in Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders: DSM-V and Beyond, to be published by Routledge. It appears here with the kind permission of the book’s editors, Paul F. Dell and J. A. McNeil. This column proposes a view of dissociation as a set of characteristics, including information-processing tendencies, that can be organized in...

Dissociation was one of the roots of the nosopoetic construct "schizophrenia", and a link seems to exist between psychotic and dissociative phenomena. We explored the relationship between dissociation and schizoidia as defined by the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES) total score and the schizoidia subscale of the Munich Personality Test (MPT), respectively. The study comprised 43 outpatients...

Aviolent behavior during sleep includes a broad range of behaviors: self-mutilation, sexual assault, murder attempt, murder and suicide. The violent behavior during sleep (VBS) can be directed to other subjects, to objects, or to self (1). Recently, Ohayon et al (2) reported violent behavior during sleep as 2 % of the population. They found that night terrors, daytime sleepiness, sleep talking,...

Dissociation is the psychological aspect of stress response. It is an adaptive reaction to a stressor on a short-term basis but can be maladaptive if underor overutilized and comprises the partitioning of consciousness, ranging from barely to rigidly partitioned. Current means of measuring dissociation focus primarily on DSM-IV-TR Dissociative Disorders and do not sufficiently account for adapt...

Little is known about the types of mental health treatment that are most effective for psychogenic non-epileptic seizure (PNES) patients who have high rates of comorbid post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and dissociation. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) has proved to be effective in the treatment of PTSD, anxiety states, dissociative symptoms and somatoform disorders. Th...

BACKGROUND In this study, we explored the ability of the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES) to catch detachment and compartmentalization symptoms. PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS The DES factor structure was evaluated in 768 psychiatric patients (546 women and 222 men) and in 2,403 subjects enrolled in nonpsychiatric settings (1,857 women and 546 men). All participants were administered the Italia...

The 20-item Somatoform Dissociation Questionnaire (SDQ-20; Nijenhuis, Spinhoven, Van Dyck, Van der Hart, & Vanderlinden, 1996) evaluates the severity of somatoform dissociation. The SDQ-20 items were derived from a pool of 75 items describing clinically observed somatoform dissociative symptoms that in clinical settings had appeared upon reactivation of particular dissociative parts of the pers...

AIM Dissociative symptoms are often found in psychiatric patients and have been implicated in psychotic trauma. We aimed to explore dissociative tendencies in psychiatric patients including dissociative disorders (DDs), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), eating disorder (ED), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by using the Dissociation Questionnaire Japanese version (DIS-Q-J). METHOD...

Self-destruction behaviors in adolescents constitute a serious mental health problem, with approximately 80% of suicidal thoughts and attempts present in adolescents struggling with a psychiatric disorder [1,2]. Depression, substance use, borderline personality traits and dissociative symptoms or disorders have been identified as the major proximal risk factors for selfdestruction behaviors in ...

Three cases of dissociative disorder presenting with catatonia are described. Catatonia is generally believed to be associated with schizophrenia. However, many other conditions are also known to cause catatonia. A brief review of literature is provided. All the cases improved rapidly with a few ECTs. This report aims to highlight the presentation of dissociative disorders with catatonia. It al...