[leminaseri]

got dpdr first, after a bad trip from spice (synthetic cannabis). it was very painful back then. i was a 17 years old kid. my life as a teenager were full of uncertainties. i felt very worthless and literally ugly. i didnt like how i looked. i always saw a monster when i looked in the mirror. everyone looked to me more worthy than me. others mothers and fathers loved their children more than mine did me i always thought. my father showed me always love though. i smoked cannabis 2 years long and never had problems with that. my parents didnt agree with my cannabis smoking. and i actully didnt know, why i did that. mostly because it was fun to being high with friends and laughing a lot to unnecessary stuff. i always had a love for music, and when i was high, listening to music was completely different. i could literally enter the land of that song in my head and walk around in it.

anyways. the first time of my first episode of dpdr was completely different to my current episode. but this was something i could discover first when i got my second episode (2020). my biggest challenge was to go outside because of the derealization. the way how the buildings looked outside was threatening to me. i got very frequently panic attacks. all of that stuff was accompanied by the fear of going psychotic. i talked to a doc about my dpdr symptoms and he replied thats the onset of schizophrenia. it wasnt even a possibility for him. i would get certainly psychotic in his opinion. anyways, after 6 months or so my father forced me to go work with him. that was probably the first step to my recovery from the first episode. because i discovered that my life was fun even though i had dpdr symptoms. fun was the main attribute and sense in my life. if i had enough of that, it was okay to have been depersonalized. and that path have gone the most direct route to recovery. my dpdr symptoms were just an annoying side effect of my existence. but it didnt have any power on me. after apx. 5 years i finally found myself at a life, full of exciting stuff and a great social environment. and the symptoms were just not there anymore. and that even didnt give me a special feeling. it was just what it was.

until i relapsed on 2020… other switches turned in my mind. there wasnt any fun more to hold on. just fear and misery. fear of going psychotic.. panic attacks with a very long duration. i always said i had panic attack what lasted constantly for six months 24/7.. this was a completely different beast. it was very very powerful… i think an antidepressant helped me with the fear and depression (im still taking it). but it took my feelings away entirely. even though i can feel emotions in different intensities. sometimes i can cry reeealllyy realllyy deeply and it feels so good always..

man i dont even know what i targeted with this post and im really sorry if i confused you guys who read it.

i thought a lot of possible causes of my dpdr. and a lot things in my biography make sense. repressed emotions. i did that a lot conciously. i just didnt want to feel bad feelings especially at relationsships with women. i got somehow benzos to numb my emotions. drank a lot of alcohol. yes. i didnt want to feel emotions. and ironically, today im here, complaining about to not have the opposite😂
what can be done to pull those fears and emotions back and facing them? what can i do to have the possibility to make my mind sure that it can have emotions. how much of possibility does it have that the ssri numbed me completely?

it is somehow incomplete but my mental capacity is done for now.

thanks for reading

 

[NoDevils]

I put the likelihood that you're "numbed completely" at zero percent. I'm sorry the psychiatrist scared you like that regarding schizophrenia. They did the same thing to me, and their financially corrupt asses threw the entire pharmacy at me, prescribing me every drug they could as rapidly as they could. Not every psychiatrist is like this. You and many of the people here have shown symptoms that look like schizophrenia prodrome. It's important to not let schizophrenia progress past its prodromal stage. However, many depersonalized people have psychiatric breakdowns without going psychotic, and that's why awareness of depersonalization syndrome needs to be more widespread among health practitioners. They shouldn't traumatize their patients with scary and inaccurate prognoses. Even when psychiatrists' diagnoses are accurate, their prognoses are sometimes so bleak they border on psychological abuse.

I relate to most of what you've described in your story on a personal level. The only difference is I'm not sure if marijuana was a trigger in my case and I have the state helping me instead of my father. Are there statistical correlations between marijuana use and depersonalization even if the depersonalization wasn't triggered during a "high"?

 

[Samzone]

I’m so sorry you guys had to go trough that. Having a “professional” confirm your worst fear must be heartbreaking. Like a doctor telling a hypochondriac that they have cancer and are soon going to die. When I first got dp/dr, I went and got myself a psychosis screening and the stupid nurses suspected schizotypal personality disorder. I got so depressed from hearing that, I had no idea what to do with myself.

I had to go see a psychiatrist a few days later for the suspicion and he reassured me that i was not going psychotic, or even schizotypal. His best guess was that I had “social related stress reaction” or something like that. A primary reason was that people who are going psychotic or even schizotypal do not seek help for the condition, especially not by themselves. Other people usually have to seek help for them. That was the first step to my recovery and i was healed a couple of months later. 3 years went by with no symptoms but now I’m sadly back in it 😅

You should read the The Ultimate Guide to Schizophrenia on here if still in doubt. Psychosis attacks your reasoning first, so the fact that you suspect it and fear it proves we are not going insane. Its also the most common fear of dp/dr, so most of us share your pain.