Adult Psychopathology and Diagnosis by Hersen Michel Beidel Deborah C. Frueh B. Christopher & B. Christopher Frueh & Michel Hersen

Author:Hersen, Michel, Beidel, Deborah C., Frueh, B. Christopher & B. Christopher Frueh & Michel Hersen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118657089
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

Dissociative Amnesia

The diagnosis of dissociative amnesia requires that the memory loss is extensive and not attributable to substance use or to a neurological or other medical condition such as age-related cognitive loss, complex partial seizures, or closed-head brain injury and that the symptoms are not better explained by DID, PTSD, acute stress disorder, somatic symptom disorder, or major or mild neurocognitive disorder (APA, 2013, p. 298). This disorder, formerly referred to as psychogenic amnesia, often presents as retrospective amnesia for some period or series of periods in a person's life, frequently involving a traumatic experience.

DSM-5 lists several subtypes of dissociative amnesia. In localized amnesia, the individual cannot recall any information from a specific period of time, such as total forgetting of a holiday week. Selective amnesia involves the loss of memories for some, but not all, events from a specific period of time. In generalized amnesia, individuals cannot recall anything about their entire lives, and in continuous amnesia, individuals forget each new event as it occurs. Finally, systematized amnesia consists of the “loss of memory for specific categories of information” (e.g., sexual abuse, a particular person). These last three types of dissociative amnesia—generalized, continuous, and systematized—are much less common than the others, and may be manifestations of more complex dissociative disorders, such as DID rather than dissociative amnesia alone.

Lynn et al. (2014) argued that the central diagnostic criterion for dissociative amnesia is vague and subjective in stipulating that one or more episodes of inability to recall important information must be “…inconsistent with ordinary forgetting” (Dahlenberg et al., p. 522). The reliability of judgments of what constitutes “ordinary forgetfulness” is questionable, and what is “ordinary” hinges on a variety of factors, including the situational context and presence of comorbid conditions. A similar point was raised by Read and Lindsay (2000), who demonstrated that when people are encouraged to remember more about a selected target event, they report their forgetting to be more extensive, compared with individuals who are asked to simply reminisce about a target event.

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