[Fugue and suicide]

Abstract

The existence of dissociative fugue is doubted by many psychiatrists. We describe a 22-year-old patient who traveled about 600 km to Munich during a dissociative fugue and then exhibited an irreversible amnesia for a period of 24 h. There was a severe, clearly understandable conflict in the sense of a subjective stalemate situation which has been described as typical for dissociative fugue. The patient had a labile personality structure with insufficient coping strategies. It was possible to rule out other psychiatric or neurological disorders with sufficient certainty, and simulation was very unlikely. The conflict could not be satisfactorily solved, and the patient committed suicide 5 months later by jumping off a bridge.