Knowra Dissociative amnesia Dissociative amnesia Dissociative amnesia is an inability to recall important autobiographical information, usually linked to trauma or stress and too extensive to be ordinary forgetting.
Autobiographical memory : Memory for events and facts from one's own life. The information affected is personal history, rather than memory in general.
Ordinary forgetting : The commonplace failure to retrieve information that remains available to memory under some conditions. Clinical dissociative amnesia exceeds the lapses expected in everyday forgetting.
Dissociative fugue : A dissociative amnesia presentation involving travel or bewildered wandering, sometimes with confusion about identity. This is a named presentation in which memory loss accompanies unexpected travel or identity disruption.
Post-traumatic stress disorder : A disorder following trauma characterized by symptoms such as intrusive memories, avoidance, and heightened arousal. PTSD often involves intrusive recollection, whereas dissociative amnesia centers on inability to recall information.
Dissociation : A disruption in the usual integration of consciousness, memory, identity, emotion, or perception. The disorder is classified among dissociative conditions because memory access is disrupted.
Episodic memory : Memory for personally experienced events situated in time and place. Gaps in recollection of life events are often described in episodic terms.
Differential diagnosis : The process of distinguishing conditions with overlapping symptoms. Clinicians assess neurological, substance-related, and psychiatric explanations before diagnosing dissociative amnesia.
Dissociative identity disorder : A disorder involving distinct identity states and recurrent gaps in recall of everyday events or personal information. Its memory gaps occur within a broader pattern of identity disruption.
Retrograde amnesia : Loss of memories formed before an injury, illness, or other onset. Both involve missing past information, but dissociative amnesia is not attributed to brain injury.
Semantic memory : Memory for facts and general knowledge, independent of personally experienced events. It helps distinguish personal-event gaps from loss of general knowledge.
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