Dissociative amnesia is a disorder characterized by an inability to recall important autobiographical information that is successfully stored in memory and ordinarily would be readily remembered. Dissociative amnesia differs from the permanent amnesias due to neurological damage that prevent memory storage or retrieval in that it is always potentially reversible. This is because the memory remains successfully stored.
An inability to recall important autobiographical information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature, that is inconsistent with ordinary forgetting.
The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
The disturbance is not attributable to the physiological effects of a substance (e.g., alcohol or other drug of abuse, a medication) or a neurological or other medical condition (e.g., partial complex seizures, transient global amnesia, sequelae of a closed head injury/traumatic brain injury, other neurological condition).
The disturbance is not better explained by dissociative identity disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, acute stress disorder, somatic symptom disorder, or major or mild neurocognitive disorder.
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| Name | Rater | Description | Download |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES) | Patient | The scale is a 28-item self-report questionnaire measuring dissociation in normal and clinical populations. The mean of all item scores ranges from 0 to 100 and is called the DES score. There are two versions of the DES, there is the original DES, and the second version, the DES-II.[1] See also the DES Taxon Calculator to help differentiate between pathological and normal dissociation. | DES Download |