BASIC RESEARCH IN SLEEP AND ANESTHESIA AIMS TO UNDERSTAND THE BRAIN MECHANISMS GENERATING STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND STATE-DEPENDENT ALTERATIONS IN AUTONOMIC CONTROL.1 Neural systems that evolved to generate natural sleep are postulated to be preferentially involved in mediating anesthetically induced losses of waking consciousness.2 Neurotransmitter-receptor systems known to be important for ...

Dissociative disorders, includingDissociative Identity Disorder have largely been reported from North America. To date only one case has been reported from South Africa. This article presents case histories of five South African black patients who were diagnosed with various dissociative disorders. Three were diagnosed with Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified ( Dissociative Psychosis)...

INTRODUCTION Procedural sedation refers to the technique of administering sedatives or dissociative agents with or without analgesics to induce an altered state of consciousness that allows the patient to tolerate unpleasant procedures while preserving cardiorespiratory function. Procedural sedation and analgesia is a core competency in emergency medicine and a daily part of emergency departmen...

Anesthesia arguably provides one of the only systematic ways to study the neural correlates of global consciousness/unconsciousness. However to date most neuroimaging or neurophysiological investigations in humans have been confined to the study of γ-Amino-Butyric-Acid-(GABA)-receptor-agonist-based anesthetics, while the effects of dissociative N-Methyl-D-Aspartate-(NMDA)-receptor-antagonist-ba...

BACKGROUND Dissociation, defined as a disruption in usually integrated mental functions, is found not only in DSM-IV dissociative disorders, but also in post-traumatic stress disorder and eating disorders. Dissociative phenomena are also common in the general population, and may reflect a constitutionally determined cognitive style rather than a pathological trait acquired through experiencing ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Because of their dreamlike character, authors have speculated about the role that the sleep-wake cycle plays in dissociative symptoms. We investigated whether sleep loss fuels dissociative symptoms and undermines cognitive efficiency, particularly memory functioning. METHODS Fifty-six healthy undergraduate students were randomly assigned to an experimental group (n =...

Ketamine is a widely used dissociative anesthetic which can induce some psychotic-like symptoms and memory deficits in some patients during the post-operative period. To understand its effects on neural population dynamics in the brain, we employed large-scale in vivo ensemble recording techniques to monitor the activity patterns of simultaneously recorded hippocampal CA1 pyramidal cells and va...

Dissociative attunement is a profound rhythmic encounter in therapeutic treatment. Attunement is a synchronized awareness of implicit knowing that is nonlinear and bidirectional. Empathically attuned clinicians are like microtonal tuning forks. They resonate with a variety of emotional pitches and will resonate with nuanced shifting of emotional tone. This resonance is the basis of dissociative...

Background and objectives: Dissociative disorders remain relatively controversial diagnoses in British psychiatry. The aim of the current paper was to assess Northern Irish psychiatric patients with complex clinical presentations for dissociative disorders. Method: Twenty patients meeting operationally defined criteria for psychiatric complexity were blindly assessed by a psychiatrist in a diag...

Dissociative phenomena are common among psychiatric patients; the presence of these symptoms can worsen the prognosis, increasing the severity of their clinical conditions and exposing them to increased risk of suicidal behavior. Personality disorders as long duration stressful experiences may support the development of dissociative phenomena. In 933 psychiatric outpatients consecutively recrui...