What Is Depersonalization?
When I suffered from general anxiety disorder one of the strangest things I went through was dealing with a condition known as depersonalization. When I first started suffering from this condition, after experiencing panic attacks and general anxiety, I had no idea what was going on. I thought I was going mad.
Depersonalization makes you feel completely cut off from reality, as if there is a pane of glass between you and the world. The best way I could describe my experience of depersonalization is if you imagine you are standing on a beach and watching everyone else drift away on a boat: when I was with friends that’s how I felt, like I was stranded alone and they were slowly drifting away.
Other sufferers talk about “living in a dream” and feeling “unreal”. It can be hugely debilitating, and in some cases it can be so extreme that sufferers feel like they’re experiencing a “living death”.
Personally, it was never so awful for me, but it did cause me a huge amount of worry and fear about getting on with my life in a normal manner. I would sit in pubs trying to talk to friends but feel like they were a million miles away. It felt like my whole life was something I’d just dreamt up. I once said to my therapist, that it felt like I was going to wake up one day, and find that the last few months had been all in my imagination – like that famous episode of Dallas when we discover the whole previous series was a dream!
Depersonalization is now recognised as a condition that affects thousands of people around the world, but a few years ago it was relatively obscure. The reason it’s difficult to find someone who knows about DP (as it is shortened to), is that it’s hard to know if someone is suffering from it, because they seem perfectly normal to a non-DP sufferer. I would often be hanging out with my friends and feeling completely detached, but they wouldn’t know because only I was experiencing the disconnect in my mind.
It’s unclear what causes this issue of perception that lies at the heart of DP. For me, I decided that I had to change my focus and use constant distraction techniques to combat the condition. Over time, I was became more and more adept at this, and was able to finally put the whole thing behind me.
I do think of my life as pre-depersonalization and post-depersonalization. I don’t think I’ve been quite the same since – but the key thing is, I lead a normal life now.
