What are amnestic disorders?

Amnestic disorders are widely defined as a group of conditions that cause memory problems, including the inability to create new memories, loss of ability to access previously created memories or learning difficulties. There are many different specific disorders contained in the category of amnestic disorders that can cause memory problems. These disorders are further divided into subcategories such as anterográdní amnesia and retrograde amnesia. The wide category of amnestic disorders is one of the many defined in diagnostics and statistical manual of mental health disorders or DSM-IV, which includes descriptions of all mental disorders recognized by the medical community at the time of each release.

Amnestic disorders, generally speaking, cause amnesia some forms. Two of the main forms of amnesia are anterograde amnesia, resulting in the loss or limitation of the ability to create new memories and retrograde amnesia that causes the loss of the memories have already beenformed. However, memory is a very complex mental process, and therefore amnestic disorders need to define much more than just two categories. For example, such disorders can affect someone's memory of his own identity, while his memories of facts and information will leave the information. In other cases, amnestical disorder may affect memories before and after the advent of the failure, thus making it impossible to classify one or the other of the two categories.

There are many different causes of amnestic disorders, from trauma or abuse of addictive substances to disease or various psychological causes. The head injury often causes short -term amnesia surrounding the time of what the trauma caused, but serious injuries can lead to more drastic memory problems. Sometimes psychological rather than physical problems cause amnesia. For example, some people are unable to remember the traumatic parts of their childhood suchTheir parents. This form of amnesia is not strictly limited to its childhood - traumatic events in adult life, such as rape or other forms of violent attack, can also be forgotten in some form of amnestic psychological disorder.

Another possible cause for amnestic disorders is the abuse of addictive substances. Amnesia caused by abuse of addictive substances may be acute or chronic, based on the nature of the substances used and for the duration of abuse. For example, consuming large alcohol in one night can result in "outages" and an individual may have problems with comments at night. On the other hand, long -term use of different drugs can keep in mind more long -term effects.