What the scale is measuring
Most people have had the experience of driving somewhere and arriving with no memory of the trip, or of listening to someone talk while the room seems to pull away. Psychologists call that dissociation: a break in the usual integration of consciousness, memory, identity or perception of the surroundings. It sits on a continuum. At the ordinary end it is daydreaming. At the far end it includes fugue states and the identity fragmentation seen in dissociative identity disorder.
The Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES) was built to place someone on that continuum.
Twenty-eight items, answered as percentages
Eve Bernstein Carlson and Frank Putnam published the scale in 1986 in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. It has 28 items, each describing a specific experience, and the instruction asks how often it happens to you when you are not under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
The answer format is unusual. Rather than a five-point agree-disagree scale, each item is rated on a line from 0% ("never") to 100% ("always") in steps of ten, so there are eleven possible answers. The original version had respondents mark a 100-millimetre line by hand. Carlson and Putnam updated the scale in 1993, which is why the current form is often called the DES-II.
Your score is the average of all 28 answers, which keeps it on the same 0 to 100 scale as the individual items.
Three factors behind the total
The scale is reported as a single score, but factor analyses have consistently found structure underneath. The most commonly used division groups the items like this:
| Factor | Items | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Amnesia | 3, 4, 5, 8, 25, 26 | Gaps in memory that ordinary forgetfulness does not explain |
| Depersonalisation and derealisation | 7, 11, 12, 13, 27, 28 | Feeling detached from your own body or mind, or finding the world unreal |
| Absorption | 2, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20 | Being so absorbed in an activity or daydream that the surroundings drop out |
Absorption is the factor ordinary samples score highest on, and it overlaps with creativity and imaginative involvement rather than pathology. Amnesia and depersonalisation are the two that clinicians watch more closely, because they line up with the diagnostic categories.
Mazzotti and colleagues (2016) ran a confirmatory factor analysis on 3,083 people, 768 of them psychiatric patients, and found a three-factor solution fitting acceptably (RMSEA = 0.036, SRMR = 0.044, CFI = 0.88, TLI = 0.87) with factor reliabilities of .90 for absorption, .74 for compartmentalisation and .84 for detachment. Their item groupings differ slightly from the table above, which is a fair warning that the subscales are less settled than the total score.
Severity bands
| Average | Reading |
|---|---|
| 0 to 11 | Typical of general population samples |
| 12 to 19 | Above the community average, still within the ordinary range |
| 20 to 29 | Noticeable dissociative experiences |
| 30 to 44 | High. Serious dissociative symptoms, possibly consistent with a dissociative disorder |
| 45 and above | Very high. Extreme dissociative experiences, often seen in dissociative identity disorder |
The number that gets cited most is 30. The original authors suggested it as a threshold for recommending further diagnostic assessment, and Carlson and colleagues (1993) used it when screening 1,051 people. Leeds and colleagues (2022) argued it should come down to 12 or 20, on the grounds that a threshold of 30 misses 46% of people who do meet criteria for a dissociative disorder.
That tension is worth understanding rather than resolving. A low cutoff catches more true cases and produces more false alarms. A high cutoff does the reverse. Either way, the DES produces a screening signal, not a diagnosis.
How well it screens
The Carlson and colleagues (1993) study is the clearest evidence on this point. Discriminant analysis across 1,051 participants, and again in a representative subgroup of 883, produced sensitivity of 76% and specificity of 76%, rising to 85% specificity in the subgroup.
The base rates matter more than the percentages. Of the people who scored 30 or above, only 17% actually had multiple personality disorder, as it was then called. Of those scoring below 30, 99% did not. A high score means the question is open, not that the answer is yes.
Reliability
Internal consistency across studies runs from .93 to .95. In a clinical sample, Dubester and Braun (1995) reported alpha of .96 and .97 across two administrations, with total-score retest reliability of .93 and subscale retest figures of .95 for amnesia, .89 for depersonalisation and derealisation, and .82 for absorption. Other studies put four-to-eight-week retest correlations between .79 and .84. The Italian version had an alpha of .90, and the Chinese version .942.
A Rasch analysis by Saggino and colleagues (2020) in an Italian sample of 320 found three items fitting poorly; removing them left a 25-item version with cleaner measurement properties. The 28-item form remains the standard.
Norms
Mazzotti and colleagues (2016) report averages that show how much the score depends on who is answering:
| Group | Mean (SD) | Proportion scoring 30 or above |
|---|---|---|
| General population | 14.63 (11.78) | 10.9% |
| Students | 17.21 (12.08) | - |
| Psychiatric patients | 20.02 (16.29) | 25.0% |
| Borderline personality disorder | 29.60 (18.86) | 46.41% |
| Dissociative disorders | 31.89 (12.02) | 60.0% |
Roughly one in ten people in a general population sample scores at or above the 30 threshold. That is the number to keep in mind when reading your own result.
A shorter relative
The American Psychiatric Association lists a Brief Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES-B) among its emerging measures. It has 8 items covering the past seven days, rated 0 to 4, for a total of 0 to 32, and it can be averaged to map onto a severity scale from none to very severe. If one or two items are missing, the score can be prorated; with three or more missing it should not be computed at all.
Take the test
The CheckPsych version uses all 28 items with the 0% to 100% answer format and takes about 10 minutes. You get an average between 0 and 100, a severity band, and a short reading of the result.
References
Bernstein, E. M., & Putnam, F. W. (1986). Development, reliability, and validity of a dissociation scale. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 174(11), 727-735.
Carlson, E. B., & Putnam, F. W. (1993). An update on the Dissociative Experiences Scale. Dissociation, 6(1), 16-27.
Dubester, K. A., & Braun, B. G. (1995). Psychometric properties of the Dissociative Experiences Scale. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 183(4), 231-235.
Mazzotti, E., Farina, B., Imperatori, C., Mansutti, F., Prunetti, E., Speranza, A. M., & Barbaranelli, C. (2016). Is the Dissociative Experiences Scale able to identify detachment and compartmentalization symptoms? Factor structure of the Dissociative Experiences Scale in a large sample of psychiatric and nonpsychiatric subjects. Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment, 12, 1295-1302.
Saggino, A., Molinengo, G., Rogier, G., Garofalo, C., Loera, B., Tommasi, M., & Velotti, P. (2020). Improving the psychometric properties of the dissociative experiences scale (DES-II): A Rasch validation study. BMC Psychiatry, 20, 8.
Disclaimer: this article and the DES are for general education. The scale is a screening tool, not a diagnosis, and only a qualified professional can diagnose a dissociative disorder. A score above 30 raises a question rather than answering it, and about one in ten people in general population samples score that high. If you are troubled by memory gaps, a sense of unreality, or feeling detached from yourself, talking to a mental health professional is the reasonable next step.