Too shameful to remember: a 17-year-old Chinese boy with psychogenic amnesia.

A case of psychogenic amnesia in a 17-year-old Chinese boy is presented. The case is unusual in that the amnesia lasted as long as six weeks without any pseudodementia or fugue. The patient can be best understood from the abnormal sick role and the communication models of hysteria. The family was preoccupied with physical illness and relied on non-verbal rather than verbal language in communicating distress and negative emotions. Shame was the central psychodynamic aetiology; it was too shameful for the patient to talk about or withdraw himself from the predicaments in which he was trapped. Preceding the onset of amnesia he had suffered from multiple conversion symptoms for seven months. His message and predicaments not understood, he was unnecessarily investigated and treated by numerous doctors, making matters much worse. The prices paid included five hospital admissions, countless consultations at accident and emergency departments and with general practitioners, and an appendectomy for a normal appendix.