CHENNAI: Movies made over the years have been spreading misconceptions on Amnesia, said Micheal D Kopelman, Professor of Psychiatry at Kings College in London. “It is only in movies that a second blow to head on the already injured cures amnesia,” said Kopelman. “It does not work that way in real life.” Further, unlike popularised in movies, treatment and recovery is only possible for certain stages and cases of Amnesia, said Kopelman delivering the 25th K Gopalakrishna memorial oration.
Dr Kopelman explained the various types of amnesia, including semantic dementia where the patient has problems spelling words or narrating incidents while his memory of an event is intact. Korsakoff's syndrome is caused by chronic alcoholic abuse and anterograde and retrograde amnesia. “In anterograde amnesia, a person has impairment in learning new things while in retrograde, there is loss of existing memories,” he said.
Narrating an interesting case Dr Kopelman had attended to in London, he said that one of his patients who had undergone sex change had his mind reverted to his original gender after he had an attack of amnesia. “A man had his sex changed to woman and five years after the incident he had a retrograde amnesia attack. Following this, he reverted to calling himself a man though he had undergone sex change.”
Delivering the inaugural address, MS Swaminathan, agricultural scientist, said that India as a country faced selective amnesia against growing disparities in society.