This may not be a General Question - if not, Mods, I apologize, please feel free to move this wherever it’s most appropriate.
One of my friends seems to be having memory lapses - things will happen - she’ll do things - which she wont remember the next day, or she’ll remember things happening that may not have actually occurred. (Recent things - I’m not talking about recovered childhood memories or something).
She hasn’t been drinking or done any drugs when this things happen. She is under a lot of stress, however.
This is difficult to broach with her, because when she say’s “Event X happened and no one believes me.” My first reaction is to believe her, just on principal - it’s just that the evidence suggests that Event X never really happened.
I’m worried about her - she’s a really sweet girl and a really good friend and these incidents seem to be occurring with more frequency.
So - does this happen to other people? Where you don’t remember things happening? (Other than when you’ve been drinking.)
Medical dopers - would these memory “glitches” be considered a normal stress response?
So, when you say memory lapses, do you mean you forget little things like where you left your car keys, or whether you picked up the dry cleaning (ie - thinking you had when you hadn’t), or forgeting major things, like freeking out at your spouse, or remembering being attacked when you may not have been?
alice, I think this is something you should try to make sure your friend takes seriously.
The above is taken from this page and is not intended as a diagnosis but as helpful reminder that you’ve got a red flag waving at you on this issue and it needs attention. Your friend needs to take this seriously and needs to see a doctor who will take this seriously.
One more vote here for “get your friend to a doctor”. There are all kinds of neurological, hormonal, what-have-you, problems that can cause these symptoms, ranging from lead or pesticide poisoning to stroke.
Vitamin B6 deficiency can cause irritability and weakness. When you’re irritable and weak, you have trouble remembering things.
Diabetics can have weird personality swings, due to their fluctuating sugar levels. Both Type I and Type II diabetes symptoms include fatigue. When you’re fatigued, you have trouble remembering things. http://www.diabetes-symptoms.org/
To sum up: You need to stop thinking, “My friend’s uncooperative and weird”, and start thinking in terms of possible organic, physical causes for her confusion.
Get her to a sympathetic doctor who won’t simply hand her a prescription for antidepressants, but who’ll schedule a complete physical workup.
For the record, I wasn’t actually thinking “My friend is uncooperative and weird”.
I was thinking “My friend seems to be having mental lapses which bear a striking resembalence to psychotic breaks.”
She physically attacked her spouse and then had no recolection of it the next day. (He’s much bigger than her, so no one got hurt, thank goodness.)
She believes that she was attacked by two strangers, but has no memory of the event, and there’s no evidence that the event took place.
I’m really starting to worry - I’m pretty confident that she doesn’t have DPD (Disassociative Personality Disorder), but I am worried that something else might be going on. But how on earth do you bring that up? “Friend, I know you think you were attacked, but I think that your cheese may have slid of your cracker instead - please see a Dr.”?
To answer your question – no, the things I forget are not like what your friend forgets. My “symptoms” are things like having to meet a person several times before I remember them, or forgetting things I recently said or heard in conversation.
But I do remember “big” things – travel plans, major events at work, birthdays and holidays, etc. It’s not that I have big chunks of memory missing – it’s just that I don’t recall a lot of detail sometimes.
Also, I don’t pull memories out of thin air like your friend seems to. She seems to have more than memory problems going on – she recalls attacks that never happened, and she attacks her husband without remembering it. Why such violence? More is going on below the surface.
Call your local mental health authority Look on the emergency page of your telephone book or check the government pages and look under MHMR. If that doesn’t work, try family crisis. If you’re not comfortable with any of that, call 911 (or 311, if available in your area). They can refer you to the appropriate authority.
In Texas, each county has an MHMR authority. It may be a branch of the municipal or county government, the state government, or a private contractor. In any case, each county has someone to call. My wife works for the authority that serves Fayette County.
In any case, they can help you. They can suggest ways to intervene, or perhaps there are ways for them to intervene already. For example, if she was attacked, call the police. That will get them involved, even if an attack did not take place. They can then contact the MHMR authority and get them involved (I know – the police call us from time to time to go work with someone they’re not quite sure how to handle.) Using the police in this manner may be tough on your friend (officers are not always as sympathtic as one might hope. If there’s no crime, they’re ready to move on to the next call.) Still, involving the police will get the ball rolling.
