What is Dissociative Amnesia?

People with dissociative amnesia experience gaps in their memory, ranging from minutes to decades. Memory loss is often centred around traumatic or stressful events like accidents, abuse, and deaths in the family or combat. While the memories vanish from conscious awareness, they still remain stored in the mind and may resurface later.

Types of dissociative amnesia

There are two main types of dissociative amnesia – localized and selective. Localized amnesia involves forgetting circumstances surrounding a specific traumatic event. Selective amnesia refers to a wider loss of important autobiographical information from one’s life. In rare cases, complete loss of identity and life history may occur, which is known as dissociative fugue.

Common triggers include overwhelming stress, trauma, acute psychiatric distress, and situations or thoughts that unconsciously remind the individual of past trauma. When faced with threats to psychological integrity that the mind cannot cope with, it ‘walls off’ those memories.

Diagnosis

Clinicians use interviews, medical records and collateral sources to establish episodic memory gaps incompatible with normal forgetting. Head injury, seizures, dementia, substance abuse and other medical causes must be ruled out. Other dissociative symptoms may co-occur, such as depersonalization or identity alteration.