Dissociation

What it is

A disruption in the normally continuous experience of memory, identity, perception, or the sense of being present in one's own body and surroundings.

It is DIMENSIONAL, not a switch. The low end is ordinary and nearly universal — missing your exit because you were thinking, losing an hour in a book or a film, arriving somewhere with no memory of the drive. Most people experience that. It is not a disorder and it is not a sign of one.

The high end is clinically significant, is strongly associated with trauma history, and is assessed by a clinician over time — never by a single questionnaire and never by a web page.

How it borders what we do measure

It borders things this battery does measure. Absorption — sustained imaginative involvement — overlaps with dissociation at the low end and is NOT the same construct. Neither is expectancy uptake. Scoring high on either says nothing about the clinical end.

What clinicians use

Clinicians and researchers screen with the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES-II), 28 items.

It is widely used, freely available for research and clinical use, and it is a SCREENING instrument — it does not diagnose. Even in clinical hands a high score is the start of an assessment, not the end of one.

Why we are not going to give you one

• Base rates decide it, not caution.A screener's positive predictive value collapses as prevalence falls. The MMSE runs at 86.3% PPV in a memory clinic and 34.5% in the community — same instrument, same cutoff, only the population changed. An open web page is the lowest-prevalence population there is, so most positives would be false ones, handed to people with no clinician in the room.
• The permission is scoped, and a public page is outside it.The DES-II is made available for research or clinical use. A public self-administered page is neither of those things, whatever the fee is.
• The result would have nowhere to go.A number about dissociation is only useful to somebody who can act on it. We do not interpret results — see /exams/who-says — so we would be handing a person a frightening number and a referral we could have given them without the number.

Consult your doctor before changing anything you do, take, or stop taking, and bring this record with you. It is written to be handed to a clinician: it states what was measured, how, when, and against which reference group, so that someone qualified can interpret it. We do not interpret it. If something here worries you, that is a conversation with a clinician and not with this page.