unreal. by megan mazza

unreal.

unreal. By Megan Mazza

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to Catie, Frank, and Drew for the time you three spent flipping through these pages, letting me know that I was on the right track. And to the remarkable people whose words have brought this book to life, thank you, for letting us in.

Depersonalization Disorder occurs when you persistently or repeatedly have a sense that things around you aren’t real, or when you have the feeling that you’re observing yourself from outside your body. Feelings of depersonalization can be very disturbing and may feel like you’re losing your grip on reality or living in a dream. Many people have a passing experience of depersonalization at some point. But when feelings of depersonalization keep occurring, or never completely go away, it’s considered depersonalization disorder. Depersonalization disorder is more common in people who’ve had traumatic experiences. Depersonalization disorder, or DPD, can be severe and may interfere with relationships, work and other daily activities. Treatments for DPD include medications and psychotherapy. 1

Derealization: Where depersonalization focuses on one’s sense of self, derealization focuses on one’s sense of his or her surroundings. Sufferers often describe the sensation of derealization as being in a dream-like state where the environment seems unreal, foggy or hazy. 2

1. Mayo clinic. (2011, July 07). Retrieved from http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/depersonalization/DS01149 2. About: Panic disorder . (n.d.). Retrieved from http://panicdisorder.about.com/od/symptoms/a/DeperDereal.htm

“And because nothing seems real, it’s hard to connect with the world or the people in it because they’re not there. You’re not there.”

-Adam Duritz Lead singer of Counting Crows

ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX SEVEN EIGHT NINE TEN

Bill 14 Nin 20 Jayden 28 Sandy 36 Ryan 44 Justin 50 Philip 58 Jackie 66 Moni 74 Anon. 82

The Book. After I was diagnosed with depersonalization disorder in 2009 I did some online research desperately trying to learn more about this new demon. I was not very successful in my attempts; all of the information that I came across consisted of things that I already knew. What I did find was a self-help website for people struggling to deal with both depersonalization and derealization. My mind was blown by how many people were active on this site, yet there was still so little information out there in the open about these conditions. I escaped the nightmare of depersonalization in 2010 and had no intentions of looking back, until now. I returned to the self-help site and asked around for people who would be willing to help me with this project. Ten people were willing to open up to me, and those ten people deserve credit for the content of this book. I have realized how lucky I was to have recovered from this disorder, because not too many people do. The purpose of this book is not to suddenly raise awareness for depersonalization or anything like that. My only aim is to share the stories of the ten people who have let me into their minds these last two months. Their stories appear exactly as I received them, word for word, and in chronological order. The photographs are my own and reflect my interpretations of the stories.

I know what this disorder is doing to you, and I know how these symptoms are making you feel, but I want you to know that you are real and you are here. -M.M.

Chapter One

Bill, 57

March 12, 2012

At 17, I became intoxicated

on cannabis with disastrous results. At the time, I can remember

thinking â&#x20AC;&#x153;I have lost my sense of selfâ&#x20AC;?. I felt like I could be living in a dream, or a movie. I no longer felt like I was the center of my universe. I also suffered derealization for a period of time. My confusion segued into my first episode of major

depression. I suffered insomnia and heavy anxiety.

I was very ill for a few months following this trauma. I was

seen by a neurologist and given an Electroencephalogram (EEG). Since I was a minor, my parent acted as a go between for myself and the doctor.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;I no longer felt like I was the center of my universe.â&#x20AC;?

I was told by my parent

that my EEG was normal “but one lead was off”. My parent told me that my

only option was psychiatric care, and she begged me not to seek it due to expense. 40 years later, I solved the riddle of what transpired during my cannabis intoxication. A few minutes after smoking, I felt a strange movement of my stomach, and a burning sensation followed by an ascending smoky flushing that rose through my chest, neck, and head. I went into a trance-like state, and the left side of my head became cold/numb/tingly. Over the next 3 minutes, my trance deepened until it seemed like I was pulsing in and out of consciousness. Then the “tingles” slowly marched to the left rear of my head. I felt a strange tensing in my head, followed by a convulsing electrical shock sensation. With the shock, my vision contorted drastically, (things appeared to zoom away as if at a far end of a tunnel). This tensing/shocking repeated itself on four second intervals, for perhaps two minutes. What I just described is a complex temporal lobe seizure. My mother had lied to me at 17. My EEG was never normal. She did not believe in psychiatry. She believed my trauma was related to a shameful incident in my youth where I was left unattended in the family vehicle for an hour and a half, before figuring out how to unlock the door. I was hit in the left side of the head when I crossed the street to look for my parents. I also had an MRI with a protocol that examined my temporal lobes. I do have “punctate T2 signal anomalies” in my left temporal lobe. These T2 anomalies are suggestive of lesions in the connective white matter in my temporal lobe. The MRI report suggests that they are not highly unusual for a person of age 57, but I know these lesions are a result of my seizure at age 17, because I lived a life of symptoms.

Regards, Bill

Chapter Two

Nin, 21

March 13, 2012

I don’t like to write down

my thoughts because it doesn’t really help much. But maybe this time I will

get it over once and for all. Father, I want to start off by thanking

you for being there for me and I still love you. Even though I have sinned by not fully trusting you I will still follow you. Father when I think back to how it all started I can’t believe how horrifying it was for me. When I could hear my heart pound as I slept, I knew there was something wrong. When that movie The Rite almost gave me a panic attack, I knew this wasn’t me. I should have never smoked father, I shouldn’t have, but

I did and now I’m left with this.

“I knew there was something wrong. I knew this wasn’t me.”

But of course

at the time, I didn’t think anything of it, I just thought it was like drinking and it goes away. Well, either way I can’t change the past, I just don’t want to be like this forever, father. After Edgar scared me about having panic attacks I surely had them for almost a week straight; I was suffering from paranoia. I blame the weed. After the panic attacks things didn’t seem the same. Things around me felt overwhelming, foggy, dark, as if I stepped into a void, a realm of fear and darkness, I couldn’t take it. I was living in complete fear. Fear of myself. Fear of how I was feeling. Everyone told me it’s all in my head, that I made it up and I believed it. But even so I knew these feelings were too much for me to be making it up. I had to tell my parents, I couldn’t do it alone. Everyone thought I was crazy but knew my parents would love me no matter what. I told them and my dad was furious. Took away my phone and called up Mondo to yell at him when my dad asked who all was there. My dad trusted Mondo.

For almost two weeks

I isolated myself and tried to do it alone, no friends on Facebook, no

help.

My mom tried so hard to make me happy, she watched movies with me and on and off I would feel good then I wouldn’t. I

couldn’t grasp what was going on in front of me.

Nothing felt the same or felt right. Discomforting is the root of it all.

I know there’s something majorly wrong

with me. You know I’m not the kind of per-

son to stress, father. I’m a carefree person and I have you to thank for that. Why are these feelings consuming me like quick sand? My mom prayed for me, my dad prayed for me, and so have pastor and people from church, yet nothing took it away father. I was scared for my life, for my mind. Thinking about it now I can’t believe how scared I was. Things seemed vast, and in my best efforts I did all I could to push these feelings and these thoughts aside, but the shocks of fear and the heart pounding came anyway. I tried so hard to come back to being normal, I tried so hard to feel comfortable in my life again that I detached me from me. I went from fear of panic attacks to fear of weed to fear of psychosis to fear of the devil being in my head to fear of losing comfort in my life to fear of not being who I am. All these stages I went into and the last one is a tough one. I’ve forgotten who I am, and when I look in the mirror I don’t feel like it is me. I don’t feel like I’m in my body and I am always aware of what I say and how I act so I feel like an observer to myself. I have no peace of mind let alone joy and happiness like before. My whole thought process has completely changed and I don’t know where I am. I remember who Nin used to be and how I use to feel and this person now…isn’t her. I can hardly say much without me feeling like an outsider looking it. That doesn’t bring me peace, I feel disconnected with myself and everyone around me.

I feel like Nin died

and I’m some other spirit trying to come in and replace her going off her memories.

Even in class I feel outside my body and empty, not grounded with who I am. I feel like I got lost in an abyss for years and im trying my best to come back to reconnect with everything. I lost interest in everything, I feel like nothing matters, as if I don’t exist. I felt like I lost my place in the world. I talked to a psychologist at school and she hardly helped. I found out on my own about DR and DP, I don’t know if I made it worse or better for me but she confirmed I had it. I cried almost every day for the past month going on two months now father, I don’t know how long this will last. My mind isn’t at rest or at peace. Sometimes I feel like dying but I know that’s cowardly and how can I say something like that knowing others suffered so much more. Father I don’t know how much more of this I can handle. I feel like I get worse instead of better. Even when I don’t dwell my brain is so empty as if it’s been wiped clean of everything. I don’t even know what I use to think or how I use to feel. I feel lifeless. This will be my final story father because I don’t want to a take a trip to the past anymore and I want this to all be forgotten and dead. I find no pleasure in this chapter in my life what so ever.

Chapter Three

Jayden, 21 March 14, 2012

From as far back as I can remember

I have always had rare

occasions of short deper-

sonalization episodes, which lasted generally no longer than a minute. One of the first ones I can remember was when I was very little, probably around 10 years old, at a soccer practice. I also remember always being a worry-wart growing up, being more

anxious than the average person. I always worried about things like, â&#x20AC;&#x153;What if someone in my family gets

cancerâ&#x20AC;? or something terrible happening to a loved one. Going to elementary school and high school was something that I always enjoyed, I had playing

lots of close friends growing up, I loved skateboarding, snowboarding, mountain biking,

guitar and just hanging out with my friends. I was always happy.

“I had a lot of close friends growing up. I was always happy.”

In the later years of high school

I got to that age where my friends and I started to party and

drink. I had smoked weed a couple times but I never liked it. The reason being that what I thought was a “bad trip” was actually depersonalization. Now before you jump to any conclusions I actually didn’t get depersonalization from weed, although I did get short episodes when I smoked I always returned to my normal state, and it wasn’t until years later when I really developed the constant state of depersonalization. Something that I think is important to finding the underlying problem of why I am in the state that I’m in is the way I perceived myself in high school. I was a late bloomer, and I didn’t fully stretch out till my first year of college. So I always was shorter, chubbier and just looked like a little kid throughout high school. It bothered me when I saw girls I thought were attractive with guys that I knew I looked nothing like. I was a virgin all throughout high school, never went out with a girl, and basically I had zero confidence and poor self esteem. After high school I had to figure out what I wanted to get into for school. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to go to school,

the only problem was I simply didn’t know what I wanted to do. My parents interpreted that as my being “unmotivated”. I always enjoyed geology in high school so with not much thought put into it I went to school for Mining and Geology. The schooling for my program is very intense and not the college experience I thought it was going to be. I was still “normal” at this point. However, while studying for finals the first year I noticed I had those short episodes of depersonalization as a result of stress, once again though, I always returned to normal. I then got a full time job at a cabinet shop that I never asked or applied for, it was through my parent’s friends. I didn’t like the job but it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. About six weeks in I remember being stressed out because I had to work a very long day and I just wanted to get out of there and get home. One of the last days I worked there I had another episode of depersonalization, returned to normal, went home and everything was fine. Then one night I was hanging out

with my friend and we were about to go to our friends house and drink when I started to feel kind of tired and thought I was maybe coming down with a flu. I decided to stay in and get some rest. I woke up the next morning on a Saturday and everything felt off. I couldn’t really comprehend what didn’t feel right, but I just knew something didn’t feel right. I went to work and I remember looking around and I just felt off. I thought I was just burnt out so I quit the cabinet job and kept my other job where I only worked one day a week at a gas station. This new feeling that had overcome me wasn’t going away and I kind of just kept pushing it off, telling myself that everything was probably fine. Because it was the summer I was drinking quite a bit, drinking 3-4 times a week. Not getting really drunk, but getting a good buzz on. As bad as it sounds the only time I felt “normal” was while I was drinking. It took me a couple of months to find out that what I was experiencing had a name, which was depersonalization. Even though everything looks and feels “weird” I continued living my life as “normal” as possible. About six months in or so I started developing worse anxiety and really started fearing the possibility of going crazy. Even to this day, I am absolutely terrified that what if all of this is the onset of the development of schizophrenia. All the anxiety and fear made my DP worse, and the problem is that these kinds of things fuel the DP fire. It became a viscous circle. So why did not only me but all the other DP sufferers end up in this state? I believe we are all predisposed to DP for several reasons: we are overly anxious people, highly sensitive people, lower self esteem, worriers, intelligent and over analyzers.

Jayden

Chapter Four

Sandy, 21 March 15, 2012

I recovered 100%

COMPLETELY from DP/DR in April 2011. I went to a psychiatric

hospital on March

28th and was there for a week. On the fourth day, I was sitting on my bed very depressed when I decided that I wanted to go wash my hands in the bathroom. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know what happened...I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know what triggered it, but I SWEAR to you... All of a sudden, I felt like something purged out

of my soul. If you have ever seen the movie Freaky Friday with Lindsay

Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis, it is kind of like that earthquake scene where they get back inside their own bodies. It was a remarkable, astonishing, and truly indescribable moment.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;I felt like something purged out of my soul.â&#x20AC;?

I felt like something came out of my soul.

I looked around and sure enough, my DR was

gone. GONE. I could see everything clearly. That veil/transparent sheet that had remained in front of me had gone away completely. And my body...It felt so light. Not this heavy sensation that I used to get. I felt euphoric, I felt peaceful, I felt GRATEFUL. I felt like God had finally answered my prayers. The next morning, (Saturday), I reported to my doctor that my DP of 14 months had completely gone away and if it was possible to go home that day as I felt fine enough to leave. He said it would not be a good idea to leave right away because he said it was important for my mind to get used to that ‘’safe’’ feeling I had achieved and to let my body get adjusted to this new state. So I stayed till Monday. The day I left the hospital and came home, I decided to go for a walk in the park. I kid you not, as I began walking, I noticed just how bright and beautiful everything looked around me. How vibrant and full of life I felt. The world looked like a lollipop and I just wanted to taste it! Again, I was so thankful to have come back to ‘’reality’’ and really started believing in God once again. I wanted to get a tattoo of a representation of Him on my arm to remind me that He is always there. I began functioning again like a normal person (showering, leaving the house, etc).

Here is the very sad part,

but I feel like if I have shared all this so far, I have to be honest:

About 3 weeks after I had recovered, I noticed that I began feeling like a ‘’Mindless Drone.’’ There is no better way to describe it other than that. I was feeling very robotic and slightly depressed, but I kind of shrugged it away. Several days later, I noticed that I began experiencing very severe out of body sensations. Like I had totally left my body. At this point I was very alarmed and knew that something was wrong. Long story short, things kept getting worse and worse, and I totally relapsed again. When my DP/DR first started, I began with really terrible DP. I had never experienced anything like it. I wanted to commit suicide it was so bad, and after seeing my pain and agony, my psychiatrist decided to prescribe me Risperdal to keep me from going completely nuts.

At this point, I don’t know what made me relapse or what triggered me back into this horrible state. I don’t know if I will recover any time soon, but I am thankful, that for 3 weeks, I lived in complete happiness. I think I deserved it. That is all for now.

Chapter Five

Ryan, 29

March 16, 2012

Mine came from

taking a medicine for my reflux disease. This medicine is called Reglan. Unbeknownst

to me, due to lack of my doctor telling me about it, this drug is an anti-psychotic. It shuts down acid production in your stomach basically by slowly rotting away your dopamine and serotonin receptors. I ended up having severe panic attacks and depression after taking this medicine for 45 days. I was very suicidal in the beginning, even ended up in the psych

ward for a couple of days. After my anxiety settled down some, I knew that something still just didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t feel right.

“I knew that something still just didn’t feel right.”

After doing some research

on the internet by typing in the search box “I feel like I live in a dream”, I

came across depersonalization and it described what I was going through to a T. That was 7 months ago. I have had some times when I thought I was on my way to recovery just to wake up the next day and be worse than I was. I hope it doesn’t last forever. I have taken several medications and all they do is just make the DP/DR worse. I’m so glad that you made it to recovery. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy. Some things that I have done to help it are exercising vigorously everyday, I quit smoking cigarettes, I quit drinking, I try to eat healthy and try to get as much sleep as I can. I also make sure that I force myself to do things outside of my comfort zone. Ryan

Chapter Six

Justin, 30 March 16, 2012

I can remember the day

it started. December 2, 2009. I just got to work after a fantastic three day

thanksgiving weekend. As soon as I got to work everything seemed a little strange, a little off. After about five minutes I experienced a huge panic

attack. Now I have had panic attacks for the last 10 years but nothing like the one I was

experiencing at that moment. It took about 20 minutes for the panic to go away and I went about working again. The next day at work I just knew things werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t the same. Everything felt different. I felt weird, as if my arms were not attached to my body. It felt as if I was in an alternate

universe or something. 51

â&#x20AC;&#x153;...everything seemed a little strange, a little off.â&#x20AC;?

I called out of work

the next day and went to the doctors. I got prescribed new medications ( I and got a

one month leave from work. Needless to say I never went back. Two days later I went to the emergency room. I didn’t know how to explain it and the doctors took blood samples, EKG’s and a few other test. The bill was through the roof. The doctor said I was fine everything came back normal and I was just anxious. I knew that wasn’t true. I have had anxiety and this was far beyond that. So I went home. For the first month of DP/DR I was completely hysteric. I paced back and forth, cried, prayed, and just wondered what was going on. My panic attacks were non stop and it felt like I was out of control and nothing was going to be able to help me. About 2 months after I first got DP I found a website and realized what I had. So many people had the same symptoms as me and it gave me relief. I felt like maybe I could overcome whatever this was that I had. My main symptom was feeling like I wasn’t really there. My vision was completely messed up like so many others with DP. It felt like my arms weren’t really mine and that I could not control them. One of the most frustrating symptoms was my memory. I couldn’t remember anything. I couldn’t remember my favorite songs, things that happened yesterday, and so on. The one thing I’m thankful for not having are the existential thoughts. I was not going to let myself think about the universe and how it works because in mind it doesn’t matter. So after I found the website I started doing research on everything I could find. What helped people, what supplements people were using. So I tried it all. I probably bought over 2,000 dollars worth of vitamins and supplements that people said helped them out. I would do research for hours and hours trying to find something to fix my problem. After about 6 months I kind of got used to the DP/dr. It was always there. No matter how much I socialized or didn’t think about it, it was always there. After about a year or so things seemed to be getting better until may 2011. That’s when It hit me with full force. It came back so strong and I was completely lost and confused. The only thing going through my mind was “oh no not this again”. After about a week and plenty of calls to my doctor they scheduled me in. I was given Effexor. I’m not going to say it was a wonder drug but I will say it completely took my DP away for 2 weeks. But It was short lived.

I had severe side effects

from the Effexor and had to quit. And then it came back, worse then ever. I

was a wreck worse then before. I walked everyday for hours and hours in my backyard, just trying not think. The doctors put me on drug, after drug, after drug. I

probably have tried over 15 different medications. The way I feel

is that I’ll try anything that might help. So it has been 8 months since then and I do feel better but my vision is worse and I feel like I’m disappearing into thin air sometimes and that nothing seems real. Not even me. I am currently on Lamictal 200mg and over 10 different vitamins and supplements. I got to a psychiatrist once a month and health specialist also. I work out and eat healthy. I pray every night and sometimes cry myself to sleep. I don’t know why this has happened to me and I’m really scared about the future. I am worried about how I am going to make it in life and almost feel as if my life is over. I am 30 years old and realize I took my life for granted. I would give anything to feel normal again. I would give my right arm, feet, whatever. No joke. I have tried everything. Medication, vitamins, supplements, mediation, exercise, socializing, etc. You name it I have done it. I wouldn’t wish this for anyone and maybe one day I will find relief but until that day I’m going to keep searching.

Chapter Seven

Philip, 244 March 17, 2012

Up until the tail end

of my junior year of college I felt pretty

good about life.

I felt healthy, I was

doing well in school, I loved my studies, was active in the local music community, had good relationships and a wonderful group of friends, had a great student job, and just generally felt like I was doing a lot of stuff and doing it all pretty well. And I really was doing a lot, always

busy, always running around, definitely not getting as much sleep as I should have

been, and sometimes even working graveyard shifts while keeping up with my normal schedule. Then I made a series of choices that would completely change

my life. 59

A buddy of mine

had brought pot brownies to school and I naively (with almost no prior drug experience; I

smoked weed maybe a total of 5 times before this and never felt like I achieved any sort of high) ate one. I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into. After about 30 minutes I started feeling pretty strange. I had just stepped out of class into a bright, sunny, spring afternoon in the park blocks, and I had about an hour before a scheduled shift at work. The colors and lights were so vibrant it was overwhelming, and my vision seemed as if it was patchy and flashing in patterns. This was also the first time I experienced the unreality and “dolly zoom” effect referred to in descriptions of derealization, which basically has lingered ever since. I hated it, I wanted to come down and return to normal, I couldn’t stand feeling out of control, and it felt like the closest thing to a panic attack I had ever experienced. My friend called into work for me and I stumbled to her apartment feeling out of my mind and passed out on her couch. Like many of the experiences I have read, it’s like I never came down from the high. It seemed like it permanently altered my vision. Everything felt like it was a dream and was “staticy”, light was overwhelming (just extreme light sensitivity, making reading), and my depth perception was severely out of whack (seems zoomed in and two dimensional). I just decided to play the waiting game, hoping it would eventually just subside and I would return to equilibrium. As we all know, it didn’t fix itself . Since then I have bounced around to different doctors in the area trying to find a solution for both my visual/mental issue and my digestive problems that seem directly related to antibiotic use. I still finished college, and performed well enough, but I can’t say I learned much that year and mentally, physically, and emotionally I felt like I was deteriorating the whole time. I was just so close to finishing and I intended to see it through. I also went through a terrible relationship that caused a lot of stress. After I graduated I took some chill time, stayed single for a year until meeting my current partner recently, worked, took a class here and there, and played music, which due to feeling uncoordinated and out of it was actually becoming more frustrating and depressing than fun and theraputic, but I was in an active band and I was committed regardless of how I felt.

“It’s like I never came down from the high.”

I also tried

to make headway on my health issues but I didn’t have any luck. I saw several specialists and got my

eyes and gut checked out but to no avail. I also had a bunch of scary blood tests for serious conditions (gotta love waiting for those test results). Of course, I checked out. During the period after graduating I was in and out of depression and had a lot of uncertainty concerning goals, and still felt like I was continuing to deteriorate as time went on.

I decided to start exploring the next step at school (post-bac and grad programs), and within the first few weeks I started feeling utterly insane and bipolar (for the first time ever) so I dropped everything to focus on my health and maybe actually figure out my problems rather than try to keep pushing myself into oblivion. I also saw an alternative MD who believes I have a yeast overgrowth called Candida, caused by antibiotic use, which isn’t widely accepted in the medical community but reportedly causes a whole host of problems, and I am pursuing an elimination program currently but so far haven’t noticed much improvement. I also discovered DP/DR, and this forum, just a couple of weeks ago. I really identified with what people were saying about DP/DR (for me, more DR), really more than anything I have ever found regarding how I feel in my head and how I see and perceive the world. I knew the brownie incident did something to me, but I had no idea, surprisingly, that other people were out there with similar experiences. I am seeing a psych for the first time ever this week at an anxiety treatment center who claims to treat DP/DR. I’ve also begun to examine my past and upbringing to try and gain some understanding of my potential predisposition to DP/DR, and it does make sense, as I am an only child from somewhat of a dysfunctional family, and both of my parents are truly ridden with anxiety. Joined a gym too, which I am loving. Trying to build up my self-worth again, and doing everything I can to not stagnate or fall back, which is proving to be really difficult sometimes. Phil

Chapter Eight

Jackie, 28 March 19, 2012

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve lived with transient dissociation

since I was nine years old. After a few traumas and

chronically unstable

home environment I was able to dissociate at will by 16 years old and continued until I was 20. By that age the periods got worse and I was less in control of them. I chalked it up to after effects of extreme substance abuse. One day I fainted. I woke up on the floor of a grocery store disoriented. Everything was foggy and surreal. The doctor said I had post-concussion syndrome and sent me off with a note saying I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t work for a few days.

After two days

of taking it easy and waiting for the bizarre feeling to subside, the thoughts hit. It felt like meet-

ing the wizard behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz. The abstract frailties of life hit me. What makes us real? Why are we here? Human life suddenly became insignificant, wasteful and parasitic. I considered things like the monetary system, the journey of consumer products, the influence the media had on the masses. Moments later I had my first panic attack. I’d constructed an image of myself that I was without emotion, fear, conscience. In that moment I realized I was human and I’d never been so terrified. In the months to follow I would develop panic disorder, agoraphobia, hypochondria and anorexia. For two years I lived like that - in fear of everything, going to doctors and hospitals convinced I had some life threatening condition. I eventually met a psychotherapist whom with CBT (Cognitive Behavioral therapy) and a cocktail of drugs cured me of those disorders, with the promise the DP/DR would dissipate in time. By the time I realized it wasn’t, he had retired. For 6 years I lived in survival mode. A cycle of getting a job, quitting it, going to day programs, group therapy, even being committed to a hospital once. No care provider had ever heard of persistent DP/DR.

I lived in limbo;

~~~ not crazy enough to commit suicide, but too crazy to live. I tried in vein to relate DP/DR to

cognitive therapy, but I couldn’t grasp how cognitive techniques could control a conceivably physical illness. My general practitioner prescribed me Dexedrine. This led to a sever addiction and medically induced bipolar disorder. Never the less it kept me going for a while. When the addiction became too much, I came off the pills and got on the waiting list for yet another psychotherapist.

“In that moment I realized I was human, and I’d never been so terrified.”

After eight years

of chronic, 24/7 DP/DR I was convinced no one could help me. Three days after my 28th

birthday I sucked up my self-pity and endeavored to his office. Amazingly, he was familiar with this condition. He was even treating two other patients. He taught me how my thoughts are causing this condition. We identified the thought process and created a CBT program to challenge it. I haven’t even been seeing him for a year now and I have extended periods free of DP/DR. It wasn’t a magical, life altering moment when it happened. I just suddenly realized one day, “Hey, I feel alright.” I figured if I was free of it for even a second, I could be free of it for good. I stopped viewing it as a crippling condition and instead as a valuable tool to tell me when my thoughts swing out of control. Changing 28 years of habitual thinking doesn’t happen overnight. It happens slowly and consistently, with dedication and mental acrobatics. I still have bad days, I still struggle, but for the most part, I’m fine now.

Chapter Nine

Moni, 17 April 3, 2012

I guess if I start

at the start I’ve had DP as long as I can remember. I grew up in a violent

violence isn’t so much what affected me. I think the fact that my

home, but the

mother was simultaneously the only person I loved

and trusted, and the one person who abused and told me she hated me the most, made her the most powerful person in my life. I would describe the relationship as me grabbing onto her for

dear life and her trying to throw me off. She

was bipolar so sometimes she was okay but a lot of the time she flipped and as a child I couldn’t comprehend that she was angry at me for internal reasons, I just didn’t know what I had done but knew I deserved

the rage and hate. 75

â&#x20AC;&#x153;I would describe the relationship as me grabbing onto her for dear life, and her trying to throw me off.â&#x20AC;?

I remember the first time

I felt the onset of DP. I was maybe 4 or 5, and I lay in bed listening to my

mother and father in a screaming match. Then, I couldn’t hear a thing, and the room was dark and kind of blue like the moonlight was aimed into my window. I closed my eyes, still very much awake, and felt like I was floating above my body. I then felt like the body that no longer belonged to me was inflating or made out of strange unearthly materials, like my limbs were huge dense metal objects. This happened on and off for many years. Also, I would look at myself in the mirror and not recognize myself. With childish innocence I would mention to friends at school “isn’t it weird when you look at yourself in the mirror too long and don’t see yourself anymore?” And no one ever related to what I was saying. As a child though, I just really wasn’t connecting the dots. It was just how I felt and I assumed it was how everyone else felt too. I have almost no emotion or empathy left nowadays. It helps in some ways, I do well with logical thinking, reasoning, writing factual essays at school. But things like creative writing, which I used to relish, are now long gone from my skill set. My attention span is quite short and I leave my own mind when I am being lectured, even if it is a friendly lecture or criticism from a peer or teacher. This started when my mum would lecture me every morning and night. The first time I ‘switched off’ and left my body I was standing in front of a mirror with my mum brushing my hair. It had a particularly tough knot in it and she started to calmly say, “You are a bitch you know. Very useless. When I was your age I was cooking dinner, how old are you, six? Six and you can’t even look after yourself” I had begun to cry but my mother gave me one of those ‘looks’ and my brain just stopped being in the moment. I felt like I swapped places with the reflection and was watching the event happen from inside the mirror.

Now, when I look back

on painful memories, I am not experiencing them, but am merely an observer

of them. I watch myself being yelled at, being hit, and having other things done to me. Life, even in the present, feels like a play. I am often frustrated that others cannot see what I can, the truth of the world, and the insignificance of man kind in the grand scheme of things. I get distracted easily and space out often. I have a constant internal monologue, spoken by someone who is not me. Then, there is the me that I truly am. Also, there is the me that used to live in this body but has left and I have taken her place, in her body. I still do not see ‘myself’ in the mirror. I avoid human interaction, e.g. skipping school, turning off my phone, deleted Facebook, to cap my frustration and strange experiences and thoughts, but sometimes I have a sudden burst of emotion that I need to let out by doing something reckless with another person, e.g. drugs, sex, doing anything my parents have told me not to I often watch people and think I can control them. The world seems so unreal that I forget or don’t care if my actions have consequences because everything will just keep turning. I’m more afraid of long life than I am of sudden death.

Chapter Ten

Anonymous, 21 April 23, 2012

I consider myself fortunate

to experiencing it full

enough to have experienced brief periods of depersonalization prior

force. It’s almost like I got a small taste of what I’d be in for later on. I think that’s how I was able

to handle it.

I was an athlete

and played sports all year round in high school, so I never had much time for a social life.

Not to mention I had two very overly protective parents who could make me feel guilty for just wanting to get out of the house for an hour. After I graduated I looked back on the last four years and felt like I had been deprived and I was determined to not let that happen in college. To say I acted recklessly would be an understatement. I drank constantly, smoked often, and probably had more sex than any 18 year old should. Eventually my conscience caught up with my behavior and I started experiencing overwhelming periods of anxiety. I dealt with the anxious feelings because I knew I could; anxiety was nothing new to me. I don’t remember details of what caused it, but towards the end of my freshman year my anxiety turned into something a bit more disturbing. First, I started lucid dreaming. The fact that I could lucid dream was not disturbing, it was actually an awesome experience. But the way it happened was off-putting. I was experiencing wake-initiated lucid dreams, which is basically when you go directly from a waking state to a dream state, completely skipping the sleep part. I remember laying in my bed next to my boyfriend one day, listening to Radiohead. I started seeing things, but then remembered that my eyes were closed. I knew that I was dreaming but I was still completely aware of my surroundings. As time went on I continued to lucid dream, but slowly I began to confuse my dream state and my waking state. Some days I’d feel like I was neither awake or asleep and it scared the hell out of me. But then the next day I would feel normal again. I know now that I had been experiencing derealization, but not persistently. Following the lucid dreams and derealization were panic attacks. If you’ve never had a panic attack, you are a very fortunate person in that regard. I wasn’t necessarily surprised by the panic attacks. I mean, there I was at the end of my freshman year, trying to survive the semester with passing grades, while trying to ignore the feeling that I was floating around in a dream every other day. I felt abnormal. Then I had my first out of body experience. I don’t remember what day of the week it was, but it was night time and it was

raining. I was kneeling on my bed next to the wide open window. My boyfriend and roommate were on either side of me trying to calm me down because I was having a panic attack. In the past my panic attacks had always subsided before I had to decide what to do about them. But what happens when the panic doesn’t go away and you can’t escape it? In my case, I left my body. One moment I was feeling the presence of my two friends next to me, and the next moment I was seeing them. I saw myself sitting there, terrified, staring out of the window. I wasn’t moving. I just kept telling myself to “snap out of it.” Eventually, I did snap out of it, but this experience became a common occurrence for me. I dealt with the coming and going feelings of being unreal. I knew that when it did hit, it was only a matter of time before it went away. I knew this because I still had some control at this point. The control I had though was in the form of self-destruction, because I was a cutter. The cutting started when I was 13. The pathetic thing is that I don’t remember why it started, but regardless it continued until about a year and a half ago when I was 19. My family and my close friends knew that I cut, but as long as I could keep convincing them that it had stopped there was nothing they could do about it. To me, cutting was necessary and I guess “normal.” It didn’t disturb me like it did everyone else. I covered it up pretty well, for a while anyway. But in November of 2009 it got significantly worse and I could no longer hide it. I was basically put on suicide watch (no one believed that I didn’t want to die) and was forced to see my psychiatrist two times a week. He told me that if the cutting continued from that point on he would have no choice but to admit me to a psychiatric facility. I knew it’d be close to impossible to hide new cut marks from my parents so I really had no choice but to stop. But we all have our addictions and this was mine. The one tool that I had used to keep myself grounded and bring myself back to reality when depersonalization struck was now being taken away from me.

“To say I acted recklessly would be an understatement.”

I don’t remember

much after that point because that was when the depersonalization became constant.

It remained with me for about seven months straight, without giving me a break. Those seven months felt like one long, never-ending day. The feeling is hard to describe to someone who has never experienced it. But I’ll say that on a “good” day, I just felt high and tired. When I explain this to people they question why I’d ever want to get rid of this feeling, because feeling high is great, right? Well when there is absolutely no reason for you to feel high and the feeling never goes away, it’s not great. It’s traumatizing to say the least. But like I said, feeling perpetually high was a good day. If there are words that exist to explain what the other days were like, I’m not yet aware of them. Part of me desperately wanted to die, but another part of me was terrified that if I died I’d still be left with this feeling. It’s like I knew that it would follow me to the grave or something. This was all I thought about, every second of every day. I couldn’t socialize because seeing people interact with each other made me nauseous. Living at home put me on edge. I didn’t want my parents to know that something was wrong, so I just constantly spoke to myself inside my head. “Just answer their questions, smile and nod, and they’ll leave you alone.” This became the only way I could tolerate human interaction. People were no longer people; they were things, blurs, shadows. I didn’t know why they were there, I just knew that they made me uncomfortable and sick. I felt as if someone or something was testing me to see how many more days of this I could survive. Laying awake in bed every night was terrifying. Every sound, every slight movement made my heart race. Sometimes my arm or leg would move and I’d jump out of fear, having forgotten that I was the one moving them. I rarely felt connected to my body. The split second before I fell asleep every night was the only time I felt safe. Every morning I would wake up and try desperately to go back to sleep. After a certain point I think I gave up hoping that the next day would be different, because I knew it wouldn’t be.

I continued on

with life, because what other option did I have? When I did socialize it was with people who

were as equally disturbed as myself. In May of 2010 I went through a pretty shitty breakup and for whatever reason my mind just did not want to accept it or deal with it. I fell into a state of depression unlike any that I had experienced before. I could deal with depression, and I could deal with depersonalization, but I knew there was no chance of me surviving the two at once. I didn’t eat for two weeks and lost over ten pounds. I wanted to eat, but thinking about food made me throw up. I didn’t leave my room. I didn’t really do anything. I realized one night that if I didn’t find a way out of this then I would have to give up. I didn’t want to. But this life had become so exhausting. The next morning I woke up and felt even worse than I had the day before. I called my mom immediately, before I had the chance to do anything impulsive. All I said was “I need something, now.” She knew exactly what I meant. That afternoon I was started on my first antidepressant medication. It didn’t help any but it at least gave me a reason to stick around in the hopes that it would help, eventually. A week later I was put on another medication and finally noticed a difference. That same week two of my old friends came to my house and dragged me out of my room. They did this again and again. Each day got better. We hung out together almost every night that summer. It was because of them that I was able to feel like a human being again. The depersonalization did not return and the depression and anxiety remained tolerable. I went back to seeing my psychiatrist that summer and he diagnosed me with A.D.D., depression, and depersonalization disorder. He explained to me that the combination of symptoms was enough to make anyone feel they’ve gone off the deep end. I continued with my medications until that fall, when I found out that I was pregnant. A long nine months later I brought a little baby girl into the world and life as I knew it had changed for good. I take life one day at a time and without the help of medications. I still think about what my life was like back then, and I still get scared, but I know I’ll be fine.