I'm sorry to hear about your accident and hope you're getting plenty of support in your recovery.

Total disruption

Most people who've had a severe head injury have little or no memory of the event that caused it. This is probably because the nervous and chemical processes of the brain that make and store our memories are totally disrupted by the injury, so are unable to 'write down' anything in the brain's memory centres immediately after the trauma.

This may include events that happened just before the accident as well as the event itself, and there may be a gap of hours or days before the brain recovers sufficiently to start storing memories again.

So the problem isn't that you have memories of the event you can't access, but that your brain never stored the information in the first place.

As a result, it's unlikely that anything, whether hypnosis or other psychological techniques, will ever be able to tell you what happened.

This is frustrating for people who feel a powerful need to understand what happened and why, and there may also be legal reasons for wanting to find out the facts.

Even so, vague memories do sometimes return with time (although this is unlikely to happen nearly a year later, as in your case). If you want to exhaust every possibility, hypnosis may be worth a try. I'm not aware of any real scientific evidence that it can help to recover memories after a head injury, but it's claimed that in a hypnotic state you may reveal things otherwise suppressed by stress and horror.

Make sure you go to a trained hypnotherapist who's registered with one of the regulating bodies, such as the General Hypnotherapy Register. Your GP may also be able to refer you to one locally.

Keep a reasonable degree of scepticism about the claims made and any 'memories' you do recover, as these can't be proved to be definite (the whole area of recovered memories has come under a lot of criticism).

Finally, if the whole thing seems to be going nowhere, don't waste any more money on it.

Further help

You might want to ask yourself whether there's any other way to deal with your unresolved issues.

For more help and information dealing with your head injury, contact Headway.

This article was last medically reviewed by Dr Trisha Macnair in April 2008