Dissociative amnesia

 Amnesia means inability to remember. Amnesia may appear as a psychological escape from stress. But it may be a symptom in many organic diseases also. Dissociative amnesia has been defined by DSM IV – TR as a disturbance in one or more episodes of life or inability to recall significant events.

How would you differentiate between the amnesia caused due to actual brain damage and due to psychological causes? Of course neurological investigation would give you the first lead. But there are other functional differences as well. When amnesia has an organic basis usually you will find that the person is unable to remember all or most of the recent or remote past, or is unable to retain newly acquired information. 

Contrarily in Dissociative amnesia, the person is unable to retrieve selective portions of personal history and that forgetting is not explained by biological causes. This usually happens following some stressful condition. The information is not permanently lost. These can be retrieved by hypnosis, narcotic analysis and sometimes spontaneously.

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