Creating Lasting Recovery from Dissociative Amnesia

Dissociative amnesia is markedly different from simple amnesia, which is brought about by disease or injury. In simple amnesia, missing memories have been damaged or destroyed by trauma to the brain; in dissociative amnesia, your memories are still intact, but you’re unable to recall them—though they often eventually surface on their own.

Dissociative amnesia is most likely a subconscious way of coping with overwhelming stress or trauma—often, the kind associated with war or natural disasters, or with an internal conflict, such as guilt over past behavior. The primary symptom is the inability to recall personal information or past experiences, which may create intense anxiety, confusion, or depression. Your lost memories could be entirely centered around a specific event, period of time, or person; in rare cases, you may be unable to recall your entire life history.

Not all memory loss is equal. Within dissociative amnesia, memory loss may take any of multiple forms:

• Localized amnesia: Inability to recall certain events during a certain time. If you have no memory of an event in your past, you most likely have localized amnesia. This is the most common form.
• Selective amnesia: You can recall some parts of a certain event, though there are gaps in your memory.
• Systematized amnesia: You’ve forgotten everything about an entire category of information, such as a specific person or location.
• Continuous amnesia: You’re unable to remember new events as they occur.
• Generalized amnesia: You can’t remember anything about who you are. Your life history and your personal information are a blank. This form of amnesia is, thankfully, very rare.

Sometimes dissociative amnesia can lead to the creation of a fugue state, in which your confusion about your lost memories leads you to travel away from home and create a new partial or complete identity.

If you suspect you have dissociative amnesia, a first step in the diagnostic process is receiving a physical examination. Your doctor will perform tests to rule out brain injury, illness, sleep deprivation, or side effects from substances such as medication, drugs, or alcohol as the underlying cause. These tests may include blood and urine tests, brain imaging, or electroencephalograms to record brain activity and search for anomalies. If no physical cause of your amnesia is found, you’ll be referred to a mental health professional for evaluation.

A psychiatrist or psychologist will interview you, conduct a thorough professional evaluation of your mental state, and compare your symptoms against criteria laid out in the DSM-5. The following symptoms should exist for a diagnosis of dissociative amnesia to be reached:

1. You’re unable to recall personal information or past events as a result of trauma or stress. This lack of recollection must be inconsistent with normal forgetfulness.
2. Your symptoms cause you distress or impede you in your personal or professional life.
3. Your symptoms can’t be explained by an existing medical condition or substance use.
4. Your symptoms can’t be better explained by another dissociative disorder, a stress disorder, or a neurocognitive disorder.

If the mental health professional to whom you’ve trusted with your diagnosis is able to positively compare your symptoms to the criteria established by the DSM-5, you may be diagnosed with dissociative amnesia, whereupon you can begin to receive appropriate treatment.