Individuals with DA are unable to remember important information, and the loss of memory is too extensive to have occurred through normal forgetting. As with other mental disorders, the forgetting must be extensive enough to cause clinically significant distress or impairment, and it must not occur because of a more extensive mental disorder, a physical disorder or trauma, or the effects of drugs. The memories lost are usually of stressful events, as of battlefield experiences.  It is important to distinguish between DA and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Diagnoses of DA have increased in recent years, especially cases of alleged forgetting and later recovery of incidents of sexual abuse. In these cases, it has been difficult to separate cases of recovery of genuinely repressed memories from cases of false memories produced during treatment.

In cases of genuine DA, memories are sometimes recovered after the individual is removed from the stressful situation that produced the amnesia. For example, within days after the battle is over, the soldier may recover his memories of what happened. In other cases, supportive therapy that includes having the patient free associate about events that preceded the lost experiences may help in memory recovery. The same medications that are useful in treating anxiety or depression may be helpful temporarily for patients with dissociative disorders.

Individuals with DA, as well as those with most other Dissociative Disorders, tend to be more suggestible, and thus hypnotizable, than most people. Partly for this reason, hypnosis is also used fairly frequently in therapy designed to assist with the recovery of memories. Therapists must be careful in cases of possible sex abuse not to suggest memories to a patient in therapy, lest false memories be produced or genuine memories not be admissible in court. 

Visit the Dissociative Disorders web page produced by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.