#reduplicative paramnesia

─── REDUPLICATIVE PARAMNESIA 〃

reduplicative paramnesia is the delusion that a place, and sometimes a person, has been duplicated, relocated, or exists in more than one identical version at the same time, despite clear evidence to the contrary.

What is Delusional Misidentification Syndrome?

Delusional misidentification syndrome (DMS) is an umbrella term for a collection of delusions that involve misidentifying a person, object, place, body part, or the delusional person themselves.

DMSs are associated with neurological trauma, dissociation, and schizophrenic disorders.

Types of DMSs

DMSs typically involve misidentifying one of three things: the self, the other, and/or the place.

The self: These delusions involve the misidentification of the person themselves, or a part of their body.

The other: These delusions involve the misidentification of other people, pets, or objects.

The place: These delusions involve the misidentification of places or locations.

The Self

Mirrored self misidentification is the delusion that the person's reflection is someone else.

Syndrome of subjective doubles is the delusion that the person has a double (doppelgänger / clone) of themselves acting independently.

Cotard('s) delusion / syndrome is the delusion that the person, or parts of their body or organs, are dead, dying, or don't exist. Most people with this delusion have severe depression.

Clinical lycanthropy is the delusion that the person has turned, or is turning, into an animal. It can be considered a type of reverse intermetamorphosis.

The Place

Reduplicative paramnesia is the belief that a place or location (or, rarely, an object, person, or part of the body) as having been copied, existing in two places at the same time, or moved to a different location. Most case studies involve people reporting the hospital they are in is in their home town, when it isn't. "Paramnesia" is commonly called déjà vu.

The Other

Capgras delusion is the delusion that someone close to the person, such as a friend, family member, or a pet, has been replaced with an identical imposter.

Fregoli delusion is the delusion that other people are actually the same person in disguise. Capgras and Fregoli delusions often co-exist.

Intermetamorphosis is the delusion that other people can change their appearance and personality at will, pretending to be the person they are basing themselves off.

Delusional companion syndrome (DCS) is the delusion that objects (often stuffed toys) are sentient, and have their own sense of self, wants and needs.

What can be done for a person with DMS?

Option 1: Nothing. Psychotic people can live happy lives without any intervention!

Option 2: Therapy. This can include either accepting the delusion / going along with it, or trying to change it. It can be used in combination with pharmacotherapy (medication).

Option 3: Pharmacotherapy. Antipsychotics and other medication can help reduce symptoms. It can be used in combination with talk therapy.

A few days after admission to the Neurobehavioural Center, orientation for time was intact, he could give details of the accident (as related to him by others), could remember his doctors' names and could learn new information and retain it indefinitely. He exhibited, however, a distinct abnormality of orientation for place. While he quickly learned and remembered that he was at the Jamaica Plain Veterans Hospital (also known as the Boston Veterans Administration Hospital), he insisted that the hospital was located in Taunton, Massachusetts, his home town. Under close questioning, he acknowledged that Jamaica Plain was part of Boston and admitted it would be strange for there to be two Jamaica Plain Veterans Hospitals. Nonetheless, he insisted that he was presently hospitalized in a branch of the Jamaica Plain Veterans Hospital located in Taunton. At one time he stated that the hospital was located in the spare bedroom of his house.

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Amazing how common reduplicative paramnesia is in my dreams (see the dream where the Red Square of Moscow is in Germany). I always chalked it up to my fascination with geography… some inherent cartographical feature of my imagination, or the fact that I’m always looking at maps—Alex is often impressed by my ability to identify countries on a map, even small obscure ones. “How do you have such detailed knowledge of the Balkans??” The Yugoslav Wars, of course. Mark Twain once quipped: “God created war so that Americans would learn geography.” (You know, some time ago I was accepted to a Geography PhD program and nearly became a Marxist geographer.)

I would say that maps, usually hypermaps, appear in about 60% of my dreams. I’m always toggling between the ground view and the aerial view, trying to work out how it is possible that a location I know to be in one spot on a map has moved to another. In my Sunflower book I write, “We look at our mental map together, dragging the topography telepathically with our neural lace appendage, like Google Maps of the future. … Am I in the Midwest? I thought this was New York. But the world is such that the Midwest and New York are the same thing, as the storm compresses space and collapses the distance through geographic folding.”

Sno (1994) suggests that Delusional Misidentification Syndromes (DMSs) exist on a continuum, from normal -> slightly abnormal (mild) -> abnormal (severe; delusional).

In this diagram he shows that Cotard's delusion exists as a severe form of depersonalisation, and reduplicative paramnesia as a severe form of déjà vu. "Differentiation is based on the severity of the disturbance of reality testing."

We can assume that this can apply to other forms of DMSs; for example delusional companion syndrome (DCS) might exist on a spectrum from animism to DCS.

NEW FIC, LET'S GO!

Reduplicative Paramnesia

Summary:

As Quackity found himself momentarily laying still, regretting his life choices he heard an ominous creak. He couldn’t move fast enough to get out of harm's way as something snapped behind him. He thought that would be the end of him. While he was falling, time felt infinite.

He had time to regret following Dream there. He had time to imagine Tubbo looking sadly at yet another empty grave. He had time to imagine Fundy’s face dropping at the news that yet another parental figure of his abandoned him with no explanation. If he survived, he promised himself that he would drop this absurd mission he got himself into and he would go back home.

Some god up in the sky must have heard him because he landed with a wet squelch on a pile of soft but putrid material.

It was even darker in there, but he had cleaned up the aftermath of a war for enough time to recognize what the stench was even without any visual hints. All around him were piles and piles of rotting corpses.

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Reduplicative paramnesia: a false memory or delusion characterized by the subjective certainty that a person has been duplicated.

Or following Dream back to his base Quackity ends up in a death factory full of Tommy clones

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