[Improvingdaily]

Backstory:

Basically i’m a 14 year old, female, and i’ve tried smoking weed maybe 3 or 4 times before this one situation, all times being completely fine although my highs were pretty bland and i didn’t really feel much. This one time on september 25th, i had maybe 1/3 of a joint and i absolutely had the worst panic attack of my life on it. All the classic dpdr symptoms, i honestly thought i was dead/dieing. I got myself home and to be honest the next 2 weeks i was fine, basically forgot about all this. October 13th is where it all unraveled, i was in class to no real stress as i remember, however 25 minutes into the lesson i remember freaking out, panic attack number 2, that unreal feeling really came upon me with this feeling of heat like a full body rush, worst day of my life. Ever since then it’s seemed to get worst.

Symptoms:

Terrified of going/being insane
Objects very 2d, no depth behind them
Other people and myself seem unreal
Time goes by very quick/too slow.
High anxiety on some days, none existent the next
Feel like i’m just not ‘here’ or really ‘there’
Perspective on life has fully changed completely, (main reason i’m terrified i’m crazy)
Own voice and body is unfamiliar
Existential thoughts to the max, anything you could think of
Can’t focus not concentrate
Definitely very low moods, unhappy
Terrified of loosing reality (aware it is impossible)
Terrified of death/unknown
Constantly feelings like i’m high
Family/friends feel really distant, like i don’t even know them
Lack of motivation
Loss of interest in basically everything

What to do?
Right now i’m honestly getting worse as i feel, i’m constantly terrified of going insane, sometimes i honestly believe it’s already happened. I want my old life back however i cannot remember how that would even feel like. Constantly i have to remind myself that i am ‘doing this’ right now and that i’m actually ‘here right now’ which normally ends in my heart racing. Currently i do take cbt at cahms (for anxiety) however very unsure how much that’s going to help based on other peoples experience. I don’t know where to go next, i’ve been suffering this for a good month and a half and honestly that is enough for me. The fear of psychosis and schizophrenia is honestly taking away my life. I can’t enjoy basic things that i should be doing in my current stage of life. I honestly used to have the mindset of ‘i don’t care’ and ‘id do anything’ but right now that’s flipped 180. I can’t get this dpdr off my mind and i say to myself each day ‘i hope it’s just dpdr’ because deep down if i realise that it is, i guess it would keep the fears away as much as i can. I’m so loosing touch with reality. Nothing feels real anymore, I try to go outside and I some days can however i don’t want to get to the point where i genuinely lack the ability to tell ‘life’ and ‘made up’ because right now everything seems fake and unreal. I can’t grasp other people have a perspective, even tho i know they do.

Questions for either recovered or recovering:

What does it feel like in the recovery stage?
Any recommendations for recovery? (acceptance and ignorance already aware of)
Do you see reality the way you did pre dpdr?
Does this sound like a case of something else, maybe not dpdr?
Did you manage to drop the existential thoughts?
Is the dpdr fully gone?

Thank you so much if anyone takes their time to reply to this, it would honestly mean the world as i really need some reassurance right now, being 14 it’s really hard to take in, sorry if this seems like one waste of a time, it’s a hell of a big deal in my eyes.

-

 

[35467]

I can see that you live in the UK. You could try to contact people related to the Unreal charity. https://www.unrealuk.org/peer-support

 

[Improvingdaily]

I can see that you live in the UK. You could try to contact people related to the Unreal charity. https://www.unrealuk.org/peer-support

haha good assumption, how’d you get that however thank you for the reply

 

[Chip1021]

Well, based on the information you presented in your post, it seems like a pretty clear-cut case of DP to me.

I don’t have much good advice for recovery, as I haven’t figured that one out yet, but with respect to your fears of psychosis or schizophrenia, maybe I can help.

Schizophrenia is just a word. It’s a label that psychiatry constructed to attach to a certain experience/behavioral pattern. Whatever you are experiencing is what you are experiencing. At the moment, you are labeling that experience DPDR. But the label you attach to that experience does not change it. There is no need to concern yourself with “developing” psychosis or anything else.

The best I can recommend for you atm is to do whatever is necessary to distract yourself from these thoughts that you find difficult to cope with. Find something engaging and hyperfocus on that for awhile. If your condition is purely anxiety-fueled, that might be enough for it to go away, or for it to be significantly reduced in intensity.

 

[Trith]

Well, based on the information you presented in your post, it seems like a pretty clear-cut case of DP to me.

I don’t have much good advice for recovery, as I haven’t figured that one out yet, but with respect to your fears of psychosis or schizophrenia, maybe I can help.

Schizophrenia is just a word. It’s a label that psychiatry constructed to attach to a certain experience/behavioral pattern. Whatever you are experiencing is what you are experiencing. At the moment, you are labeling that experience DPDR. But the label you attach to that experience does not change it. There is no need to concern yourself with “developing” psychosis or anything else.

The best I can recommend for you atm is to do whatever is necessary to distract yourself from these thoughts that you find difficult to cope with. Find something engaging and hyperfocus on that for awhile. If your condition is purely anxiety-fueled, that might be enough for it to go away, or for it to be significantly reduced in intensity.

Well every word is a label, but they still mean something. I think when people worry they could have psychosis it's because they are afraid they might get worse, which is quite rational in and of itself. Like when you have the symptoms of a cancer it's normal to worry. But the main thing is that worrying one has psychosis (or "going crazy") during a DPDR episode is extremely frequent and according to posts on the forum it is very frequent among people who never reported a psychosis diagnosis. So it looks like it is a frequent symptom to think one has psychosis when it's actually not true. So having the feeling that one has psychosis isn't a good sign that one has psychosis.

 

[Chip1021]

Well every word is a label, but they still mean something. I think when people worry they could have psychosis it's because they are afraid they might get worse, which is quite rational in and of itself. Like when you have the symptoms of a cancer it's normal to worry. But the main thing is that worrying one has psychosis (or "going crazy") during a DPDR episode is extremely frequent and according to posts on the forum it is very frequent among people who never reported a psychosis diagnosis. So it looks like it is a frequent symptom to think one has psychosis when it's actually not true. So having the feeling that one has psychosis isn't a good sign that one has psychosis.

Yes, I pretty much agree with everything you said here (except when you said that falsely believing one has psychosis is a “symptom;” it’s just a false belief).

The point I was making in this post was that worrying about psychosis (or “going crazy”) is a product of how we talk about things. We have been trained to fear psychosis as a “break from reality,” where we lose control over ourselves, which I find to be absurd. After all, what is dreaming if it is not a “break from reality”? Or when we are reading a good book and imagining a scene that is not actually existing? I know the experience of psychosis is a bit different, but We break from reality all the time whether we acknowledge it or not, and then we interpret and respond to those experiences in a variety of ways.

I am currently experiencing something disturbing and uncomfortable and I would like to change that experience. If DPDR is the best label for that experience, it is good to know that so I can find ways to change, or at least cope with, this experience. And if psychosis is the best label for this experience, then so be it.

There are people out there, believe it or not, who actually kind of like their schizophrenia, or at the very least, they prefer being schizophrenic to not being schizophrenic. These are the people who we say “lack insight or reality testing” in order to justify changing them without their consent or against their will. Those who agree with their doctors and the treatment plan are the ones who have gained insight into their condition. I find it appalling and inexcusable that we do not understand that we are speaking dispositively here, and are creating a culture where we make people terrified that they are just going to start “going mad” and losing control over their own behavior because they have lost insight into their own mental state.

Sorry I went a bit overboard there, and I wasn’t accusing you of any of these claims either. I’ve just been extremely bothered lately by how I perceive that psychiatry creates the very conditions by which we are encouraged to interpret all manner of phenomena through the myopic prism of health and disease.

 

[leminaseri]

Yes, I pretty much agree with everything you said here (except when you said that falsely believing one has psychosis is a “symptom;” it’s just a false belief).

The point I was making in this post was that worrying about psychosis (or “going crazy”) is a product of how we talk about things. We have been trained to fear psychosis as a “break from reality,” where we lose control over ourselves, which I find to be absurd. After all, what is dreaming if it is not a “break from reality”? Or when we are reading a good book and imagining a scene that is not actually existing? I know the experience of psychosis is a bit different, but We break from reality all the time whether we acknowledge it or not, and then we interpret and respond to those experiences in a variety of ways.

I am currently experiencing something disturbing and uncomfortable and I would like to change that experience. If DPDR is the best label for that experience, it is good to know that so I can find ways to change, or at least cope with, this experience. And if psychosis is the best label for this experience, then so be it.

There are people out there, believe it or not, who actually kind of like their schizophrenia, or at the very least, they prefer being schizophrenic to not being schizophrenic. These are the people who we say “lack insight or reality testing” in order to justify changing them without their consent or against their will. Those who agree with their doctors and the treatment plan are the ones who have gained insight into their condition. I find it appalling and inexcusable that we do not understand that we are speaking dispositively here, and are creating a culture where we make people terrified that they are just going to start “going mad” and losing control over their own behavior because they have lost insight into their own mental state.

Sorry I went a bit overboard there, and I wasn’t accusing you of any of these claims either. I’ve just been extremely bothered lately by how I perceive that psychiatry creates the very conditions by which we are encouraged to interpret all manner of phenomena through the myopic prism of health and disease.

thumbs up

 

[Trith]

Yes, I pretty much agree with everything you said here (except when you said that falsely believing one has psychosis is a “symptom;” it’s just a false belief).

The point I was making in this post was that worrying about psychosis (or “going crazy”) is a product of how we talk about things. We have been trained to fear psychosis as a “break from reality,” where we lose control over ourselves, which I find to be absurd. After all, what is dreaming if it is not a “break from reality”? Or when we are reading a good book and imagining a scene that is not actually existing? I know the experience of psychosis is a bit different, but We break from reality all the time whether we acknowledge it or not, and then we interpret and respond to those experiences in a variety of ways.

I am currently experiencing something disturbing and uncomfortable and I would like to change that experience. If DPDR is the best label for that experience, it is good to know that so I can find ways to change, or at least cope with, this experience. And if psychosis is the best label for this experience, then so be it.

There are people out there, believe it or not, who actually kind of like their schizophrenia, or at the very least, they prefer being schizophrenic to not being schizophrenic. These are the people who we say “lack insight or reality testing” in order to justify changing them without their consent or against their will. Those who agree with their doctors and the treatment plan are the ones who have gained insight into their condition. I find it appalling and inexcusable that we do not understand that we are speaking dispositively here, and are creating a culture where we make people terrified that they are just going to start “going mad” and losing control over their own behavior because they have lost insight into their own mental state.

Sorry I went a bit overboard there, and I wasn’t accusing you of any of these claims either. I’ve just been extremely bothered lately by how I perceive that psychiatry creates the very conditions by which we are encouraged to interpret all manner of phenomena through the myopic prism of health and disease.

(Sorry I'm in the train with a lot of time in my hands so I wrote a lot)
This is perhaps a vocabulary problem, but I don't see why being a "false belief" would mean it is not a symptom. As far as I understand the definition of a symptom is just a consequence of a disorder, and I would tend to think that if I don't have such false beliefs before the disorder and then I have false beliefs during the disorder then the false beliefs would be a symptom of the disorder. Or perhaps the false beliefs could be pre-existing, but they would cause suffering only when the disorder is there. But I've had a different experience than that. When I had strong DP I was afraid of being schizophrenic, then it decreased and at the same time I had the impression I was giving up on this schizophrenia idea, for the reasons I mentionned above. I thought I had outsmarted it. But two years ago I had one more episode that was stronger than usual, and that idea came back nonetheless (and who knows, maybe I do have a tendency for psychosis?). Same with my mood disorder. When I am high I feel like everybody loves me and I am awesome, and when I am low I feel like nobody loves me and I suck. They are both false beliefs (except for here where everybody loves me!) but they happen like that only during these episodes and I don't hold them outside of these episodes. To me they are symptoms, at least in this case.
But I find it strange that tendency to think that if it is in the realm of beliefs then it is "not in the real world" as someone here said, or "not a symptom" as you said. There is a lot of implicit reasoning here that I don't get because these things don't really make sense to me. Beliefs are not necessarily something we have control over, and they are as real as suffering or emotions. For me there is no dichotomy between what the mind has no control over and things that we would have full control over, because it is "us" and it is only the product of our decision making. There is no such thing for me, there is always an interplay between what we can do and decide to do and how our mind and the world react to what we do, which we can observe and act accordingly and adapt. Of course if I get evidence that something simple is true/false it can affect my belief in a straightforward way. And changing beliefs can help and has helped me for different things. But at the same time it is not always that simple from my experience.
Also in several of your comments I see that you prefer to deconstruct things a lot, kind of to say that concepts are empty or something like that. That diagnoses are just labels, or this kind of thing. I had a phase for some years (and it's maybe not over) where first I tried to intellectualize a lot and kind of try to understand everything, to kind of feel that I was mastering my mind and the environment, which probably brought me a feeling of safety. Like if I could find a big description of the world that would summarize what I think of it, and kind of be right about it, then I would not really be threatened and feel safe because I would have a good model in my mind of how the world works and I would be right forever (I'm almost not exagerating). But then I gradually realized this was impossible in more and more situations, and that impossibility was threatening, and then I fell in the opposite direction, my new description of the world was that there is no description of the world and I would refuse any of it. So my new way to be right about things was that it was impossible to be right about things. And depending on the field I was talking about I had a tendency to have all or nothing beliefs, either I had a kind of rigid model to explain things, or there could be no model at all. But in a sense it was just another attempt at having a model of the world that doesn't threaten me and where I am sure I will be right again.
Anyway, for me there is no "this is what I feel whatever the label, DPDR or psychosis". If someone doesn't care about diagnoses that's fine for them. But DPDR and psychosis have precise meanings, and they are not interchangeable as we want. But yes, there is a split from reality both in psychosis and in dreams but in dreams it's not a problem and in reality it can be. Like if you believe you can fly in your dream maybe you will have a nice dream, but if you believe you can fly in reality maybe you will die. So it's very different. We can't say that it happens in dreams too and we accept it so why not accept it in reality too and voilà! If you start to believe you are chased by mind reading aliens or the fbi and they want to kill you you will have a very bad time and that's very serious. It's not just a matter of how we view mental illness. But then sure, there are indeed people with schizophrenia who have enjoyable symptoms. There are psychiatrists who just want to give medication because illness isn't normal and they want people to be normal and they don't listen to what patients say, and I have met a psychiatrist like that. But there are also psychiatrists who genuinely want to help people and do listen to them. There are also patients who are suffering and don't want to take medication but it's a sort of delusion that is part of their illness and when they are forced to take their medication they thank the therapist in retrospect for taking them out of it. So it would be easier if it was more simple and we could have more simple opinions about it, but it's not. Anyway, I don't think schizophrenia is a fake problem invented by psychiatrist to force some happy people to be more normal. This does happen but simplifying all the problem to that thing is a dramatic simplification.
It reminds me of someone who said that sex addiction is just an excuse for some perpetrators who don't want to take responsibility for their actions, so they believed that sex addiction did not exist. But sex addiction does exist and some people do use it as an excuse to escape their responsibility. Both of these things can be true at the same time. We cannot say that sex addiction doesn't exist just because it makes it simpler to blame some people. And in the same way schizophrenia is a real illness that causes a lot of suffering and requires treatment for a lot of people and we cannot deny that just because it makes it simpler to blame the psychiatrists strategy, even if it is to blame sometimes. I don't think that people who are afraid of having schizophrenia are picturing the "good schizophrenia" where you are all happy in your delusion, but rather the very common schizophrenia where your life becomes a real nightmare. When you have voices insulting you in your head all day long the problem isn't that you are afraid of losing insight in your own mind, you cannot summarize the problem like that. If you go on support groups for people having schizophrenia they report seeing shadows chasing them and threatening them, seeing gore images, feeling that some organization is after them to kill them, there is nothing enjoyable about that.
Anyway, I think that one other big thing that frightened me a lot with that schizophrenia idea was that if I have too strange experiences all the time I won't be able to relate with others and others won't be able to relate with me, that's the thing about splitting from reality. So that fear was rather a fear of loneliness. I wanted to stay in the real world with my friends, kind of. And I wanted to have experience of the real world and not the matrix. I want to learn things about what is around me for real and not some imaginary world that no one will relate with. By the way for me it helped me once to try to transcribe what I was feeling into a text, it was a kind of story/poem, and it helped me dissolve a lot of that fear at the time, because it looked like if someone would read it they would understand a bit what I was going through, even if no one did. So anyway, it was also a fear of loneliness rather than simply a fear of losing insight over everything. And I think that loneliness was very real.

 

[marduk]

Hi
Since I have recovered from one long term case and also one more short lasting episode I would have a few hints for you
1. If your symptoms fluctuate a lot it could offer you a clue with what maintains it. To me the biggest things were anxiety and constant focusing on the symptoms, it might be similar for you.
2. Identify your anxious thoughts that maintains the symptoms and anxiety. For example you mentioned that you are terrified that you are going insane,thats one anxious thought that only does you harm. I also used to have catastrophic interpretations of the symptoms and it is quite common but its a big thing holding back your recovery. Try to see the dpdr as a coping mechanism for stress\trauma rather than a sign of brain damage or madness.
One final recap

1.Lower your anxiety
2. Keep yourself busy and try not to obsess about the feelings, this is were acceptance is helpful
3. Identify your negative thoughts and catastrophic Interpretations of the feelings and try to see them In an nonthreatening way.
These are the main things that helped me recover and i believe that these steps could be helpful for most sufferers. The recovery process is very gradual but if you stick with this i am sure you will see some progress.

Marduk

 

[Chip1021]

(Sorry I'm in the train with a lot of time in my hands so I wrote a lot)
This is perhaps a vocabulary problem, but I don't see why being a "false belief" would mean it is not a symptom. As far as I understand the definition of a symptom is just a consequence of a disorder, and I would tend to think that if I don't have such false beliefs before the disorder and then I have false beliefs during the disorder then the false beliefs would be a symptom of the disorder. Or perhaps the false beliefs could be pre-existing, but they would cause suffering only when the disorder is there. But I've had a different experience than that. When I had strong DP I was afraid of being schizophrenic, then it decreased and at the same time I had the impression I was giving up on this schizophrenia idea, for the reasons I mentionned above. I thought I had outsmarted it. But two years ago I had one more episode that was stronger than usual, and that idea came back nonetheless (and who knows, maybe I do have a tendency for psychosis?). Same with my mood disorder. When I am high I feel like everybody loves me and I am awesome, and when I am low I feel like nobody loves me and I suck. They are both false beliefs (except for here where everybody loves me!) but they happen like that only during these episodes and I don't hold them outside of these episodes. To me they are symptoms, at least in this case.
But I find it strange that tendency to think that if it is in the realm of beliefs then it is "not in the real world" as someone here said, or "not a symptom" as you said. There is a lot of implicit reasoning here that I don't get because these things don't really make sense to me. Beliefs are not necessarily something we have control over, and they are as real as suffering or emotions. For me there is no dichotomy between what the mind has no control over and things that we would have full control over, because it is "us" and it is only the product of our decision making. There is no such thing for me, there is always an interplay between what we can do and decide to do and how our mind and the world react to what we do, which we can observe and act accordingly and adapt. Of course if I get evidence that something simple is true/false it can affect my belief in a straightforward way. And changing beliefs can help and has helped me for different things. But at the same time it is not always that simple from my experience.
Also in several of your comments I see that you prefer to deconstruct things a lot, kind of to say that concepts are empty or something like that. That diagnoses are just labels, or this kind of thing. I had a phase for some years (and it's maybe not over) where first I tried to intellectualize a lot and kind of try to understand everything, to kind of feel that I was mastering my mind and the environment, which probably brought me a feeling of safety. Like if I could find a big description of the world that would summarize what I think of it, and kind of be right about it, then I would not really be threatened and feel safe because I would have a good model in my mind of how the world works and I would be right forever (I'm almost not exagerating). But then I gradually realized this was impossible in more and more situations, and that impossibility was threatening, and then I fell in the opposite direction, my new description of the world was that there is no description of the world and I would refuse any of it. So my new way to be right about things was that it was impossible to be right about things. And depending on the field I was talking about I had a tendency to have all or nothing beliefs, either I had a kind of rigid model to explain things, or there could be no model at all. But in a sense it was just another attempt at having a model of the world that doesn't threaten me and where I am sure I will be right again.
Anyway, for me there is no "this is what I feel whatever the label, DPDR or psychosis". If someone doesn't care about diagnoses that's fine for them. But DPDR and psychosis have precise meanings, and they are not interchangeable as we want. But yes, there is a split from reality both in psychosis and in dreams but in dreams it's not a problem and in reality it can be. Like if you believe you can fly in your dream maybe you will have a nice dream, but if you believe you can fly in reality maybe you will die. So it's very different. We can't say that it happens in dreams too and we accept it so why not accept it in reality too and voilà! If you start to believe you are chased by mind reading aliens or the fbi and they want to kill you you will have a very bad time and that's very serious. It's not just a matter of how we view mental illness. But then sure, there are indeed people with schizophrenia who have enjoyable symptoms. There are psychiatrists who just want to give medication because illness isn't normal and they want people to be normal and they don't listen to what patients say, and I have met a psychiatrist like that. But there are also psychiatrists who genuinely want to help people and do listen to them. There are also patients who are suffering and don't want to take medication but it's a sort of delusion that is part of their illness and when they are forced to take their medication they thank the therapist in retrospect for taking them out of it. So it would be easier if it was more simple and we could have more simple opinions about it, but it's not. Anyway, I don't think schizophrenia is a fake problem invented by psychiatrist to force some happy people to be more normal. This does happen but simplifying all the problem to that thing is a dramatic simplification.
It reminds me of someone who said that sex addiction is just an excuse for some perpetrators who don't want to take responsibility for their actions, so they believed that sex addiction did not exist. But sex addiction does exist and some people do use it as an excuse to escape their responsibility. Both of these things can be true at the same time. We cannot say that sex addiction doesn't exist just because it makes it simpler to blame some people. And in the same way schizophrenia is a real illness that causes a lot of suffering and requires treatment for a lot of people and we cannot deny that just because it makes it simpler to blame the psychiatrists strategy, even if it is to blame sometimes. I don't think that people who are afraid of having schizophrenia are picturing the "good schizophrenia" where you are all happy in your delusion, but rather the very common schizophrenia where your life becomes a real nightmare. When you have voices insulting you in your head all day long the problem isn't that you are afraid of losing insight in your own mind, you cannot summarize the problem like that. If you go on support groups for people having schizophrenia they report seeing shadows chasing them and threatening them, seeing gore images, feeling that some organization is after them to kill them, there is nothing enjoyable about that.
Anyway, I think that one other big thing that frightened me a lot with that schizophrenia idea was that if I have too strange experiences all the time I won't be able to relate with others and others won't be able to relate with me, that's the thing about splitting from reality. So that fear was rather a fear of loneliness. I wanted to stay in the real world with my friends, kind of. And I wanted to have experience of the real world and not the matrix. I want to learn things about what is around me for real and not some imaginary world that no one will relate with. By the way for me it helped me once to try to transcribe what I was feeling into a text, it was a kind of story/poem, and it helped me dissolve a lot of that fear at the time, because it looked like if someone would read it they would understand a bit what I was going through, even if no one did. So anyway, it was also a fear of loneliness rather than simply a fear of losing insight over everything. And I think that loneliness was very real.

Wow, you weren’t kidding when you said you wrote a lot! I apologize that I won’t be able to respond adequately to everything you had to say (it was a bit rambling and difficult to follow at times), but I’ll try my best.

I don’t deny that my tendency to deconstruct everything comes in great part from my frustration with my own condition and my desire to understand my experiences all these years. After all, that’s common whenever we are struggling with severe problems.

But it’s also a consequence of my lifelong propensity to understand as much as possible about this universe that I’ve been thrust into. Because I understand humans to behave teleologically, whenever someone asserts a claim, instead of asking myself the simple “true/false” question, I ask myself instead “what goal are they trying to accomplish by saying what they are saying?”

One of the rarely discussed issues with psychiatry has to do with the fact that it is simultaneously a branch of medicine and a branch of the law. What is the goal of medicine? To understand, diagnose, and treat diseases. What is the goal of the law? To prescribe, proscribe, or control human behavior. They are two very different institutions with different objectives, different languages, and different epistemological underpinnings and methodologies. So whenever anybody, on this forum or elsewhere, is talking about their problems using the language of psychiatry, i always ask myself, is this expression a purely descriptive statement about an experience? Or is it prescriptive justification for social control?

I have noticed that psychiatry has a terrible success rate in treating these problems, and while some of that poor track record is undoubtedly due to the fact that these issues can be intractable, I think a major part of the problem has to do with how poorly psychiatry conceptualizes them.

I don’t know about the rest of the people on this forum, but I’ve been diagnosed with about a dozen “mental illnesses” over the last 25 years, and because I was pressured to “listen to the doctors”, I stupidly allowed them to play Guinea Pig with my brain chemistry, because there are dozens of treatments out there, so one of them has to work, right? And while I’m probably a lost cause, I’ll be damned if I just let everybody else blindly follow their doctor’s orders, or the results of the newest scientific study, without scrutinizing what is being said and why.

It distresses me greatly when I go on mental health forums and hear from people who had extremely promising lives, then experienced some stress or a set back, went to see a psychiatrist, was diagnosed with depression, are told that “there is no cure, and you will need to be on this medication for the rest of your life,” and now have adopted this identity and talk about how proud they are that they took a shower for the first time in a week. I suppose it hits hard because I was one of those people.

Perhaps my scepticism sometimes devolves into a bit of cynicism, and I try to be aware of that when I can. But I have to say that almost everything that every (organic) psychiatrist has ever said to me has sent my bullshit meter spinning, yet I failed to listen to it because I told myself, he is a doctor, he is a scientist, so even though this makes no sense to me, it must be true. And I beat myself up every day for that.

I’m sorry, this post turned out longer than I was expecting, and I’m not sure how much of your post I actually responded to here. I’m sure all this thinking and analyzing isn’t helping me with my problem; but then again, the “go out and do things you used to do” method is worse. Every time I’ve tried that, I just end up in the psych ward where I receive more brain damage in an attempt to cure my diseased mind.

 

[leminaseri]

Wow, you weren’t kidding when you said you wrote a lot! I apologize that I won’t be able to respond adequately to everything you had to say (it was a bit rambling and difficult to follow at times), but I’ll try my best.

I don’t deny that my tendency to deconstruct everything comes in great part from my frustration with my own condition and my desire to understand my experiences all these years. After all, that’s common whenever we are struggling with severe problems.

But it’s also a consequence of my lifelong propensity to understand as much as possible about this universe that I’ve been thrust into. Because I understand humans to behave teleologically, whenever someone asserts a claim, instead of asking myself the simple “true/false” question, I ask myself instead “what goal are they trying to accomplish by saying what they are saying?”

One of the rarely discussed issues with psychiatry has to do with the fact that it is simultaneously a branch of medicine and a branch of the law. What is the goal of medicine? To understand, diagnose, and treat diseases. What is the goal of the law? To prescribe, proscribe, or control human behavior. They are two very different institutions with different objectives, different languages, and different epistemological underpinnings and methodologies. So whenever anybody, on this forum or elsewhere, is talking about their problems using the language of psychiatry, i always ask myself, is this expression a purely descriptive statement about an experience? Or is it prescriptive justification for social control?

I have noticed that psychiatry has a terrible success rate in treating these problems, and while some of that poor track record is undoubtedly due to the fact that these issues can be intractable, I think a major part of the problem has to do with how poorly psychiatry conceptualizes them.

I don’t know about the rest of the people on this forum, but I’ve been diagnosed with about a dozen “mental illnesses” over the last 25 years, and because I was pressured to “listen to the doctors”, I stupidly allowed them to play Guinea Pig with my brain chemistry, because there are dozens of treatments out there, so one of them has to work, right? And while I’m probably a lost cause, I’ll be damned if I just let everybody else blindly follow their doctor’s orders, or the results of the newest scientific study, without scrutinizing what is being said and why.

It distresses me greatly when I go on mental health forums and hear from people who had extremely promising lives, then experienced some stress or a set back, went to see a psychiatrist, was diagnosed with depression, are told that “there is no cure, and you will need to be on this medication for the rest of your life,” and now have adopted this identity and talk about how proud they are that they took a shower for the first time in a week. I suppose it hits hard because I was one of those people.

Perhaps my scepticism sometimes devolves into a bit of cynicism, and I try to be aware of that when I can. But I have to say that almost everything that every (organic) psychiatrist has ever said to me has sent my bullshit meter spinning, yet I failed to listen to it because I told myself, he is a doctor, he is a scientist, so even though this makes no sense to me, it must be true. And I beat myself up every day for that.

I’m sorry, this post turned out longer than I was expecting, and I’m not sure how much of your post I actually responded to here. I’m sure all this thinking and analyzing isn’t helping me with my problem; but then again, the “go out and do things you used to do” method is worse. Every time I’ve tried that, I just end up in the psych ward where I receive more brain damage in an attempt to cure my diseased mind.

Wow, you weren’t kidding when you said you wrote a lot! I apologize that I won’t be able to respond adequately to everything you had to say (it was a bit rambling and difficult to follow at times), but I’ll try my best.

I don’t deny that my tendency to deconstruct everything comes in great part from my frustration with my own condition and my desire to understand my experiences all these years. After all, that’s common whenever we are struggling with severe problems.

But it’s also a consequence of my lifelong propensity to understand as much as possible about this universe that I’ve been thrust into. Because I understand humans to behave teleologically, whenever someone asserts a claim, instead of asking myself the simple “true/false” question, I ask myself instead “what goal are they trying to accomplish by saying what they are saying?”

One of the rarely discussed issues with psychiatry has to do with the fact that it is simultaneously a branch of medicine and a branch of the law. What is the goal of medicine? To understand, diagnose, and treat diseases. What is the goal of the law? To prescribe, proscribe, or control human behavior. They are two very different institutions with different objectives, different languages, and different epistemological underpinnings and methodologies. So whenever anybody, on this forum or elsewhere, is talking about their problems using the language of psychiatry, i always ask myself, is this expression a purely descriptive statement about an experience? Or is it prescriptive justification for social control?

I have noticed that psychiatry has a terrible success rate in treating these problems, and while some of that poor track record is undoubtedly due to the fact that these issues can be intractable, I think a major part of the problem has to do with how poorly psychiatry conceptualizes them.

I don’t know about the rest of the people on this forum, but I’ve been diagnosed with about a dozen “mental illnesses” over the last 25 years, and because I was pressured to “listen to the doctors”, I stupidly allowed them to play Guinea Pig with my brain chemistry, because there are dozens of treatments out there, so one of them has to work, right? And while I’m probably a lost cause, I’ll be damned if I just let everybody else blindly follow their doctor’s orders, or the results of the newest scientific study, without scrutinizing what is being said and why.

It distresses me greatly when I go on mental health forums and hear from people who had extremely promising lives, then experienced some stress or a set back, went to see a psychiatrist, was diagnosed with depression, are told that “there is no cure, and you will need to be on this medication for the rest of your life,” and now have adopted this identity and talk about how proud they are that they took a shower for the first time in a week. I suppose it hits hard because I was one of those people.

Perhaps my scepticism sometimes devolves into a bit of cynicism, and I try to be aware of that when I can. But I have to say that almost everything that every (organic) psychiatrist has ever said to me has sent my bullshit meter spinning, yet I failed to listen to it because I told myself, he is a doctor, he is a scientist, so even though this makes no sense to me, it must be true. And I beat myself up every day for that.

I’m sorry, this post turned out longer than I was expecting, and I’m not sure how much of your post I actually responded to here. I’m sure all this thinking and analyzing isn’t helping me with my problem; but then again, the “go out and do things you used to do” method is worse. Every time I’ve tried that, I just end up in the psych ward where I receive more brain damage in an attempt to cure my diseased mind.

for instance im taking for 1,5 years zoloft already. dont know if it destroyed anything in my brain. i do regret it so much to start with that, even though i resisted so fucking hard on the onset 2020 january to taking meds, because it was utterly non sense to me that one pill should „heal“ my soul. it was an unbearable experience of depression, anxiety, ocd and dpdr, and i started with the meds just from desperation. today im doing much better overall but dont know what to do if i relapse after tapering. i have so many responsibilities atm (work, an engagement with my girlfriend).

the second dumbest thing i could do was tms. oh my god i thought all the time im a bit smarter than the average but no. no one in this world, not me, not a doc or the biggest professor on this world could guarantee me that fucking shit didnt destroy my brain. such a silly thing to try it..

 

[Chip1021]

the second dumbest thing i could do was tms. oh my god i thought all the time im a bit smarter than the average but no. no one in this world, not me, not a doc or the biggest professor on this world could guarantee me that fucking shit didnt destroy my brain. such a silly thing to try it..

I don’t know much about TMS or what it is or what it does, but I feel the exact same way about ECT, except that in my case I actually had it performed on me, basically because I was desperate, was out of ideas, it was suggested to me while I was incarcerated in a psych ward, so I agreed to it thinking, who knows? Maybe I’ll feel better.

I’m not against any psychiatric intervention. In fact, I think it’s a good thing that they exist. I am against the fact that they are either forced or heavily insisted upon for extremely vulnerable people, and that we don’t think very clearly about them.

We are expected to believe that, when nature gives you a seizure, that can be deleterious to the structure of the brain, so we invented anti-convulsants to help raise a person’s seizure threshold to try to prevent future brain damage. But when a doctor gives you a seizure, not only does that not cause brain damage, but it actually heals the brain! Because it’s performed in a nice clean hospital, and the doctor just has that “magical” touch when he turns those dials….seriously, you tell me how that works????

Psychiatrists do have a couple of hypotheses for why ECT works for depression. The first is what I call the “internet modem” hypothesis where, just like when you unplug and replug your internet cable to get it working again, a similar thing happens when you render a person unconscious, then zap his brain with electricity. The second is what I call the “boggle” hypothesis, where during the seizure the person’s neurotransmitters get all jumbled up in his brain and then afterward they just fall back down in their proper place. Seriously.

What I’ve been trying to advocate on this forum the last several days is to think more clearly about what the nature of our problem is, and what reasons we might have to believe that it is the result of an organic medical issue or whether it’s a product of how we are interpreting and responding to life. In the case of DPDR, that’s not a simple question to answer. Is it purely fueled by anxiety and existential thinking? Or is there structural damage at the root of everything that then results in is feeling anxious and thinking very abstractly and existentially?

And when we think about trying a new intervention, we have to ask ourselves, what goal are we trying to accomplish, and is this reasonably likely to help achieve that goal? Instead of asking if ECT works “for depression”, we need to ask, “what does it do to the body? And is it likely to help me achieve whatever goal that I have?” If my goal is to maintain the structural or functional integrity of my brain, ECT is almost certainly not going to help achieve that goal. But if my problem is that I just keep excessively ruminating about how miserable my existence is, and I’m very distressed and having difficulty redirecting my thinking, can ECT help me to achieve the goal of experiencing life more tolerably? It might. How? Because ECT causes brain damage. And those problems I just mentioned are not products of the brain’s, faulty wiring to be corrected, they are activities that we are performing. And because we use our brains to engage in those activities, if the brain is not working optimally, we might be less capable of obsessive rumination. And some people might experience that change as an improvement.

My complaint about referring to a false belief as a “symptom” is not just playing around with words. A symptom is a complaint a person makes about how his body feels, which may or may not point to a structural issue. So when we call believing in false things, or feeling worthless, or thinking about suicide “symptoms”, we start trying to look for the cause of those problems in the body, which is an absurd proposition. And when we create a culture that believes those things are the direct product of a disease entity, people tend to interpret their experience through that prism, which only exacerbates the issue most of the time.

I’ve seen many posts claiming that autoerotic acts (masturbation) caused their DP, but alloerotic acts (with another person) can help cure or treat it. Why should that be? Both acts involve the same or similar changes in the organic physical nature of the body. The difference, it seems to me, is in how we tend to perceive those two acts. Masturbation has a very long history of both moral and medical stigmatization (look up masturbatory insanity, if you’re not easily triggered). And I’ve seen in most of the posts condemning the practice as harmful a view of it as a disgusting and repulsive thing. Could it possibly be that the relationship between DP and masturbation is at least sometimes a product of the anxiety a person feels after engaging in such a pleasureful, though disgusting and distasteful habit? I feel like the same is probably true for many people who experience any problem that psychiatry has labeled the symptom of a mental disease.

I’m not challenging or denying anybody’s experiences here. But I am a firm believer that it is important to understand the nature of a thing before you attempt to manipulate it. I’m also not claiming that I have all the answers. But I do not trust the medical experts when it comes to these issues. It has been clear to me for some time that psychiatry itself had a conflict between helping people with their problems and being accepted by a modern public as “scientific” and “real medicine.” And several decades ago, they resolved that conflict in favor of the latter option. And it’s pretty obvious to me what the consequences of that decision have been.

 

[leminaseri]

I don’t know much about TMS or what it is or what it does, but I feel the exact same way about ECT, except that in my case I actually had it performed on me, basically because I was desperate, was out of ideas, it was suggested to me while I was incarcerated in a psych ward, so I agreed to it thinking, who knows? Maybe I’ll feel better.

I’m not against any psychiatric intervention. In fact, I think it’s a good thing that they exist. I am against the fact that they are either forced or heavily insisted upon for extremely vulnerable people, and that we don’t think very clearly about them.

We are expected to believe that, when nature gives you a seizure, that can be deleterious to the structure of the brain, so we invented anti-convulsants to help raise a person’s seizure threshold to try to prevent future brain damage. But when a doctor gives you a seizure, not only does that not cause brain damage, but it actually heals the brain! Because it’s performed in a nice clean hospital, and the doctor just has that “magical” touch when he turns those dials….seriously, you tell me how that works????

Psychiatrists do have a couple of hypotheses for why ECT works for depression. The first is what I call the “internet modem” hypothesis where, just like when you unplug and replug your internet cable to get it working again, a similar thing happens when you render a person unconscious, then zap his brain with electricity. The second is what I call the “boggle” hypothesis, where during the seizure the person’s neurotransmitters get all jumbled up in his brain and then afterward they just fall back down in their proper place. Seriously.

What I’ve been trying to advocate on this forum the last several days is to think more clearly about what the nature of our problem is, and what reasons we might have to believe that it is the result of an organic medical issue or whether it’s a product of how we are interpreting and responding to life. In the case of DPDR, that’s not a simple question to answer. Is it purely fueled by anxiety and existential thinking? Or is there structural damage at the root of everything that then results in is feeling anxious and thinking very abstractly and existentially?

And when we think about trying a new intervention, we have to ask ourselves, what goal are we trying to accomplish, and is this reasonably likely to help achieve that goal? Instead of asking if ECT works “for depression”, we need to ask, “what does it do to the body? And is it likely to help me achieve whatever goal that I have?” If my goal is to maintain the structural or functional integrity of my brain, ECT is almost certainly not going to help achieve that goal. But if my problem is that I just keep excessively ruminating about how miserable my existence is, and I’m very distressed and having difficulty redirecting my thinking, can ECT help me to achieve the goal of experiencing life more tolerably? It might. How? Because ECT causes brain damage. And those problems I just mentioned are not products of the brain’s, faulty wiring to be corrected, they are activities that we are performing. And because we use our brains to engage in those activities, if the brain is not working optimally, we might be less capable of obsessive rumination. And some people might experience that change as an improvement.

My complaint about referring to a false belief as a “symptom” is not just playing around with words. A symptom is a complaint a person makes about how his body feels, which may or may not point to a structural issue. So when we call believing in false things, or feeling worthless, or thinking about suicide “symptoms”, we start trying to look for the cause of those problems in the body, which is an absurd proposition. And when we create a culture that believes those things are the direct product of a disease entity, people tend to interpret their experience through that prism, which only exacerbates the issue most of the time.

I’ve seen many posts claiming that autoerotic acts (masturbation) caused their DP, but alloerotic acts (with another person) can help cure or treat it. Why should that be? Both acts involve the same or similar changes in the organic physical nature of the body. The difference, it seems to me, is in how we tend to perceive those two acts. Masturbation has a very long history of both moral and medical stigmatization (look up masturbatory insanity, if you’re not easily triggered). And I’ve seen in most of the posts condemning the practice as harmful a view of it as a disgusting and repulsive thing. Could it possibly be that the relationship between DP and masturbation is at least sometimes a product of the anxiety a person feels after engaging in such a pleasureful, though disgusting and distasteful habit? I feel like the same is probably true for many people who experience any problem that psychiatry has labeled the symptom of a mental disease.

I’m not challenging or denying anybody’s experiences here. But I am a firm believer that it is important to understand the nature of a thing before you attempt to manipulate it. I’m also not claiming that I have all the answers. But I do not trust the medical experts when it comes to these issues. It has been clear to me for some time that psychiatry itself had a conflict between helping people with their problems and being accepted by a modern public as “scientific” and “real medicine.” And several decades ago, they resolved that conflict in favor of the latter option. And it’s pretty obvious to me what the consequences of that decision have been.

so well spoken man thumbs up!!👍🏻

 

[Trith]

(i just wrote something super long, but finally i think will rather leave it like this)