I watched this documentary last night (8.10) on Five Life. Channel 5 have been running the ‘extraordinary’ people series for a while, about people who have or are suffering with an illness (generally) and how it affects their life.
Last night’s documentary was about a man, David Fitzpatrick, 25, who had suffered a Psychogenic Fugue, a severe amnesia that left him with no memory at all. He was missing for four days, days which he spent in hospital as an ‘unknown male’. He was given maps to look at in the hope he would have a vague recollection of somewhere, and after several days he felt he recognised one street, which turned out to be where his football coach lived. This then led to the beginning of his road to meeting people from his past again, and trying to piece things together.
Having only lost his emotional memory (ie, not his physical memory, so he could still walk, talk etc.), he set about reconstructing his memory by speaking to those who claimed to be his family and friends. The most important point I took from this though, was that David felt that he had no identity, as without any memory of where he had been and who had been a part of his life, he felt like he was a ‘no one’. Tangible evidence (found by means of an old school photo, school reports and so on) helped him to understand that he HAD once been ’someone’. An interesting point raised by his old school master was that our memory lies in our soul and heart, and thus creates our ‘being’. Without memory, identity cannot be grasped.
David had to learn to trust people who felt like total strangers to him: his friends, his mother, his brother. As he listened to their stories relating to his own past it emerged that his past had not been a good one. His friends described him as someone who had been “an arse-hole, a piss-taker”, and that he had been a heavy drinker for a long period of time following the breakdown of his relationship with his partner, and losing the child he had to her. David found it frustrating to ahve to recreate bonds, to have to find his place in society again, as a friend, son, father etc.
At the same time he developed a sense of excitement and relief that, although the emerging past is painful, he feels he has a unique opportunity to live his life again, and to be able to re-define his identity. He has new goals, and wants to be someone who is more responsible, has a stable job, can spend time with his daughter and can be free from things that prevented him from living his life previously. Is this something everyone would want? To be freed of past memories so that you can start afresh? “Memory makes us who we are but it can also trap us in the past” … David’s fugue gave him a “fresh start”: “I’m back at zero…I can start now“.
I think the most relevant (to my thoughts at least) point mentioned was in the description of all that had been pieced together about the time between David’s fugue and him arriving in hospital. Much of those four hours is unaccounted for, but the narrater describes it simply as “David had left his wallet, and his identity, in his friend’s boot”. He had literally dumped who he was. The fugue was a reaction to severe stress and mental breakdown, and restarted his memory. Had he not dumped his wallet, for example, would the effect of the fugue been less severe? Would having not been “unknown male”, but a named person with a certain sense of identity coming from the contents of his wallet, have lessened the effect of the amnesia? These are all medical questions which I am in no way qualified to answer (!) but it does shed light onto the things we need to make us feel ’somebodies’.
David now wears a pendant, engraved with his name, date of birth and telephone number, in case he suffers another fugue and his memory, once again, is totally erased.
