Depersonalization Community
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Depersonalization Overview
Depersonalization
Derealization
Depersonalization and Derealization involve similar consciousness states, although psychiatric literature discusses them as two different symptoms. The major distinction is that the first is a distorted awareness of self, while the second is a distorted perception of the physical environment. Often patients experience both, simultaneously or alternately. These states of mind are accompanied by an obsessive need to self-monitor, to observe the self moment by moment. The sufferers describe an inability to experience their own lives while stuck in chronic self-observation (also feeling that identity is disappearing, or has already vanished).
Trying to Tell Others
Anti-anxiety and/or anti-depressant medications often reduce the experience of unreality by reducing obsessive thinking and incapacitating fears, but may not completely eliminate depersonalization and derealization states. Further efforts by patients to describe their increasing detachment may motivate the doctor to increase medication in an effort to reduce what sounds like a rapidly growing depression.
Normal Dissociation
Over time (and reinforced by obsessing over the original experience) the mind seems to develop a habit of re-invoking the symptom/neurological reaction. The patients usually become convinced that the way out of their nightmare lies in focusing more and more inward, relentlessly self-observing for any sign of returning reality. But like a child's straw finger puzzle, the harder one tries to pull free, the tighter grows the trap. | |
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