[Memory alterations in post-traumatic stress disorder].

Abstract

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a disorder that develops following the experience of a highly stressful event, which involves a confrontation with death or the threat of death, serious injury or sexual violence. It is characterized by symptoms such as intrusions, avoidance and hypervigilance. According to the literature, PTSD is associated with an imbalance between a privileged memorization of the emotional and sensory aspects of the traumatic event and a failure to memorize the contextual aspects. That is why PTSD is now considered a memory disorder whose effects extend to several components. In this review article, we focus on how PTSD affects long-term memory. The first part describes the long-term effects of PTSD on episodic memory with emphasis on the difficulties in encoding certain elements of the traumatic event and their consequences. These difficulties may be manifested in the narration of the trauma, with a discourse of the traumatic event lacking in contextual details. They may also lead to reliving and generalizing the fear to other contexts, whether they are related to the trauma or not. The second part of the article discusses how PTSD affects autobiographical memory and has consequences for the construction of identity and the perception of the past, present and future of people with this disorder. Autobiographical memory, which plays a key role in the storage of past personal memories as well as in identity formation, shows several forms of disruption induced by PTSD. First, a decrease in contextual details associated with memories of the personal past is observed, meaning that people with PTSD tend to remember their past experiences less accurately. Second, a propensity to project the future in a more negative and unpredictable manner is evidenced, related to a feeling of uncertainty about the future in PTSD suffering individuals. Finally, alterations in the encoding of present events due to the disruptive effects of post-traumatic stress symptoms during the encoding process are also identified.