derealization depersonalization (drpr) is such a weird fucking disorder so i’m gonna describe it as someone that (diagnosed and in treatment) has it (based off my own personal experience! and understanding after years of talking to diff psychs ab it:)
(tw for discussions of wanting to k word oneself, drgs, and anxiety attack(inducing thought spirals))
it’s fully a dissociative disorder so it’s a super weird mix of a traumagenic disorder, an anxiety disorder, and a psychotic disorder. the most common cause of it is trauma caused when the brain was young and spongey (meaning most ppl w drpr also have ptsd) and its way of dealing with the event(s) was to convince itself that it/they weren’t real/actually happening and then since the brain is young and spongey it gets stuck in that at the time useful trauma response long term. so that’s the traumagenic side of it, the anxiety side of it is the constant thought of ‘omg this isn’t real wtf wtf’ or ‘i’m not even fucking real fuckkk’ which lead to anxiety and/or panic attacks. the psychotic (meaning a disorder that causes psychosis) side of it is less on the seeing/hearing things side and more on the Believing things side - the first stage of a psychotic break is detachment from reality which is where drpr kinda sits and the state i was in for about 8+ years until i finally got around to the yanno rest of the steps(always a procrastinater :p)
on the treatment side of things there aren’t a ton of things that are super effective (talk therapy being completely useless a good amount of the time and was in my experience as it was more of an experiential thing than a thought/emotion thing) i have found medication to be helpful tho it take me more than a year to land on sm that worked for my body(i take lamotragine after cycling thru a bunch of ssris to try and treat it) and if that fails to be effective at all the other thing that can help is transcranial magnetic stimulation (tms) which just kinda magnets to stimulate parts of the brain directly (i haven’t gotten it so i don’t know as much ab tms) and sometimes(i.e. very rarely if all else fairs) transcranial electrical stimulation can be a treatment for it which uses electric currents to fuck with(/pos) ur brain activity. tes is also straight up the modern version of electroshock therapy btw. teehee.
anyway i’m sick of ppl saying it’s caused by fucking screen time(i’m looking at u bo burnham)!! mine was caused by the usual suspects then was significantly and permanently worsened by silly silly chemical taking/using (a word of warning to those with dissociative symptoms to NOT fucking do that lmao.) and at my most symptomatic screen time was acc rly helpful as it distracted from anxiety attacks enough to stop the thought spiral and was j the only thing my brain registered as almost ‘real’(my symptoms were heavily on the derealization side of things less so on the depersonalization side of things.) so i thought why not use the classic ‘has a rare disorder so has encyclopedic knowledge of it’ effect to do a lil bit of education
oh yea derealization is the experience of feeling like the world isn’t real only ur consciousness (kinda like ur watching everything on a tv screen u just can’t quite look away from) and depersonalization is the experience of feeling like you urself aren’t real. there is in fact a (pretty significant) difference! (ppl tend to forget this.) anyway i also kinda hate that it’s become common for ppl to use the word ‘dissociating’ when they mean ‘zoning out’ bc it’s a medical fucking term!! doing that waters down its meaning so it no longer conveys the severity of what it actually means. also can ppl PLEASE stop w the whole ‘we live in a simulation’ thing it’s sooo fucking triggering u have no idea
anyway i mentioned how drg usage was involved in my experience - i’ve been straight edge/sober for nearly 4 years(!!) now but mainly because of the specific effect it had on me i’m not like judging. i had my own reasons for going there(being denied any kind of treatment so saw it as my only way to escape things) and i like hate so much p much all ‘preventative’ stuff because it so misses the point. most(in my experience) ppl that are/were (heavy) users are/were doing it for similar reasons to me and alr fucking wanted to d word so saying stuff about ‘that shits gonna k word u’ is fully useless. like i never thought i would make it to this age. i wish ppl would talk ab the immediate effects it can have ON mental illness/health. like i had no fucking clue what it was gonna do to me/my derealization.
