Rebecca on TF1: what psychological disorder is the heroine played by Anne Marivin suffering from? – News Series on TV

Last Thursday, TF1 launched the broadcast of Rebecca, her new detective series adapted from the English fiction Marcella, Worn by Anne Marivin, she follows an inspector, who, 6 years after having abandoned the hunt for a serial killer and left the police , decides to return to work to escape the depression which gnaws at her and keeps her away from her husband and her children.

Back in The Criminal, she investigates a series of murders and is convinced that the killer is the one she had not been able to stop 6 years ago. She will then embark on his hunt.

While Didier Le Pêcheur’s new creation seems classic in appearance, Rebecca actually suffers from dissociative amnesia, which causes memory loss that disrupts her work. She will then have to reconstruct her past piece by piece to discover the terrifying event that triggered her neurosis and may have led her to kill …

What is dissociative amnesia?

Dissociative amnesia is a psychiatric disorder very often used in movies and series, which results in an inability to remember certain information. This syndrome, which really exists, is often induced by stress or significant trauma.

The person is suddenly unable to remember any experiences, situations or events they had before the trauma. In the case of Rebecca, the character is subject to blackouts during which she does not control her actions and where she puts herself, and the others, in danger.

If this scenario spring is very often used in fiction (Memory in the skin, Memento to name a few), it remains a very marginal trouble. A study published in September 2017 in the journal Brain, reports only 53 cases examined between 1990 and 2008 at St Thomas’s Hospital in London by Prof. Michael Koperman and his colleagues.

And like Rebecca, they observed that some patients suffered from blackouts lasting from a few hours to several days. Unlike the other people they had observed, memory loss here does not encompass long periods of their life, but rather a specific incident.

Through their analysis of dissociative amnesia, the doctors found that a long-standing depression, family, relationship or financial problems, or employment problems were factors that caused this disorder.

Depression and family problems are two factors that apply in Rebecca’s case. We guess over the episodes that the trigger, which according to the researchers must be emotionally intense, is a family drama introduced in episode 5, the exact circumstances of which will be learned at the end of the season.

Find Rebecca every Thursday evening from 9:05 p.m. on TF1. The entire season 1 is already available on Salto.