Psychiatric patients often complain of forgetfulness. From the perspective of psychiatrists, forgetfulness is a mental abnormality. In fact, amnesia can be categorized into objective amnesia and subjective amnesia, the former is mostly complained by family members or peers, and the latter is generally felt and complained by the patients themselves. Objective amnesia, in essence, is the main symptom of organic mental disorders, especially dementia due to various causes. Of all dementias, this memory impairment is most common and typical in Alzheimer’s disease, commonly referred to as senile dementia. Such patients tend to have other manifestations of other impaired central nervous system functions, such as disorientation and impaired social functioning. Of course, if vascular dementia is caused by cerebrovascular disease, patients also have positive neurological signs such as hemiparesis and sensory impairment. Such “forgetfulness” is strictly a symptom covered by the psychopathological definition of “forgetfulness”. Subjective amnesia is a common complaint in patients with non-organic mental disorders, especially anxiety and depression, and is a frequent problem for psychiatrists. According to the psychological division of memory activities, it is generally believed that memory includes four components: recognition, retention, recollection and recall. Recognition is the process of repeated perception of what is currently being experienced in order to form a relatively solid temporary link; retention is to retain the impression of what has been experienced in the brain for a longer period of time; reconceptualization is to be able to confirm that one has experienced something when re-experiencing it; and recollection is to be able to make the traces of the memory of what has been experienced by one’s own self active again and present them to one’s conscious mind when needed. Anxiety and depression sufferers usually refer to “forgetfulness” as the difficulty of recalling things they have experienced or the difficulty of achieving the level of clarity they desire. The forgetfulness they complain of comes in two forms. One is the inability to remember and the other is the inability to remember. The so-called inability to remember means that it is difficult to remember what was experienced at that time or before, i.e., it is difficult to fulfill the two parts of memory, namely, “recognition” and “retention”. According to my personal observation, the symptoms of forgetfulness or inability to remember of these anxious or depressed patients who complain of “inability to remember” are related to two factors. The first is related to their illness: most studies have found that patients with anxiety and depression suffer from various forms of cognitive impairment, including significant memory loss. Secondly, it is related to the adverse effects of therapeutic drugs, especially the adverse effects of taking benzodiazepine anti-anxiety drugs, and the shorter the half-life of the drug, the greater the effect on memory may be. For example, foreign scholars have found that the very short half-life drug triazolam, patients taking the drug after waking up from sleep have significant paracrine amnesia, that is, they can’t recall some of the things that happened after waking up. Therefore, this aspect should be considered when using benzodiazepines for anti-anxiety. The so-called memory is difficult to accurately or clearly recall things previously experienced, mainly related to the “recollection” part of memory. As far as I can see, those who have “trouble remembering” complaints are also mostly patients with anxiety and depression. Their difficulty in remembering is also related to two factors. On the one hand, there is a disease effect, and the impaired cognitive functioning of these patients in anxiety and depression is still one of the causes, i.e., the patients have poor attention span. When engaging in activities that require a clear memory, the process of “recognizing” is impaired due to inattention, and the subsequent “retention” is inevitably unclear. This phenomenon can be likened to taking a photograph: inattention is equivalent to the inability of the camera to “focus” when taking a photograph, and the lack of clarity of the impression left by the memory is equivalent to the inability of the camera to focus to take an unclear picture. Another factor related to the inability to remember is also one of the manifestations of the disease: some patients with obsessive-compulsive symptoms or depersonalization symptoms have the measurements of “perfection” and “flawlessness” for their own memory function, and they seek for the completeness of the details when recalling a certain thing that they have experienced. When they recall something they have experienced, they seek completeness and clarity of details. When they feel that their recollections are somehow “unclear,” they become anxious that they have missed key aspects of their experience. These patients tend to stereotypically recall the details that they think they “can’t remember”, which becomes a typical obsessive-compulsive symptom – obsessive-compulsive verification behavior. In psychiatric practice, it is important to carefully distinguish subjective amnesia from objective amnesia, but there is a relatively sharp distinction between the two, and doctors generally do not make mistakes. However, carefully distinguishing the difference between “inability to remember” and “inability to remember”, and analyzing their related factors to make reasonable treatment, is a test of a psychiatrist’s clinical skills.