If you do not look sick, he may not believe that you are sick in spite of swollen lymph nodes or other obvious warning signs. Some women have female doctors because they are afraid of this diagnostic bias. It is true that more women than men have somatoform disorders, so women who seek medical help for any condition involving subtle symptoms have to be afraid of being diagnosed as psychiatric patients instead of getting their medical needs met. The main idea is to look sick if you are sick, be as specific as possible about your symptoms, and keep those hot pink high heels in the closet. The dissociative disorders are some of the most dramatic psychiatric disorders, and therefore have captured the attention of the public through books and movies.
Dissociative amnesia can occur in response to intolerable stress.
Semantic memories such as memory for facts not of a personal nature also remain intact. In an age when we are obliged to show some form of ID before doing a variety of activities, it is hard to remain ignorant of your own past unless someone steals all of your IDs also. A more severe form of dissociative amnesia is amnesia with fugue. Fugue means running away and assuming a new identity because you have no memory of your recent past. The best case study that I ever read was in a previous abnormal psychology textbook.