Insight explores Amnesia, and looks at how memories define us and what happens when we lose them. Watch at 8:30pm. Tuesday June 8 on SBS and On Demand.
Cathy Harding, a mother of three from NSW, startled awake one day utterly confused.
It was 2015, and she was in hospital but wasn’t sure why. She thought she recognised the man beside her as being her husband, but she couldn’t be sure.
He had a strange beard, and her children looked older than she’d remembered.
In the days that followed, every morning, when Cathy woke up, it was to the same confusion: where was she and why did her family look so different?
Cathy was unaware she’d collapsed at work after suffering a mental health breakdown. She was rushed to hospital and later diagnosed with dissociative amnesia – a rare form of memory loss triggered by a traumatic event, where a person can forget not only their past, but also their identity.
Cathy and her family on a trip to Disneyland. Source: Supplied
In Cathy’s case, even though she’d collapsed in 2015, her brain and memories would reset every morning back to 2012.
“It’s like that movie, 50 First Dates," Cathy told SBS Insight. “I would go to sleep, and I would wake up … confused and it would start the process again.”
During this time, Cathy was unable to form new memories, so anything she remembered that day would be forgotten the next morning as her brain reset to 2012.
Cathy’s neuropsychiatrist, Matthew Macfarlane, describes Cathy’s brain shutting down as a coping mechanism.
“[When] there's too much going on and the negative emotions and stress becomes too much, then … some people can react by shutting various parts of their experience down,” Matthew said. “So, when we talk about dissociation it's about turning off parts of our experience and turning off parts of our identity … and that includes memory.”
Fortunately Cathy is now able to make new memories again and is working part-time, but she still cannot remember those five years between 2012 and 2017.
