mental illness????

[lucyshandbag]

if someone really believed something had happened to them, but it really hadn't, and they thought they were getting flashbacks of this thing that didn't even really happen, could that be due to a mental illness?? i know LSD makes you hallucinate and then you can get flashbacks of that hallucination, but what else could cause this?

[Scarlett]

I think that you can often imagine that things happened to you that didn't- for example when a dream is SO vivid you swear that the feelings you get because of it are genuine.Or sometimes you may have heard something and visualised it so vividly at the time that you end up thinking you were there/ it happened to you. I have a memory of being in infants school, in the corridor, sat on a big furry lion, reading, and seeing my grandad (who was a taxi driver) walk up the corrodor with the headmistress. I KNOW this happened to me. However, I have obviously shared this story a long time ago, as my sister SWEARS this is HER memory and not mine! How do we know whose memory it really was? We don't. But one of our brains is tricking us!!

[pjm007]

Deja Vu.

[t_veiga]

It's a case of your left and right brain miscommunicating, it's a common occurence, you'll know it as De Ja Vu, I rememeber reading this is one of Dr.Robert Winstons The Human mind books.... well worth a read.
it's not a serious problem unless it happens all the time

[Headtime]

There is also a condition called 'false memory syndrome'.  Where some people remember childhood abuse (for example), when it never actually happened.

More info here;

http://www.fmsfonline.org/

[Lillabet]

In short - yes it could possibly be due to a mental illness. Hallucinations and delusions are symptoms in a number of mental illnesses. However it isn't the only cause.

It could be drug induced - such as in the case of LSD flashbacks

It could be deja vu

It could be a spontaneous incorrect or false memory - the example scarlett gives is an example of this - we misremember details both significant and insignificant. If you ever look at eyewitness testimony from any sort of crime you'll find huge discrepancies between people's memories and descriptions. Even when they have all been focussing on remembering accurately.

It could be a false recovered memory where the recovery has been induced by a third party. The psychologist Sheila Loftus did some really interesting work on the way we can influence others judgements and memories. Such as showing people video of a car crash and asking some 'how fast was the car going when it hit the other' and sometimes changing hit for 'smashed into' the latter group estimated the car to have been going much faster. The subtle word change had an effect.

there have been cases where false memories - sometimes of serious abuse have been recovered usually after some form of 'therapy'

Finally - sometimes we forget things until something reminds us of them. Genuine memory recovery is also a possibility