[Guest]

Hi there, I'm back after months of being away from this forum...I've tried to follow Janine advices on focusing outward and I can tell you that it works!
When I was feeling derealized/depersonalized I tried to concentrate my attention on a specific object (a lamp for example, or a pen) or I called some friends and talked with them...I discovered that, at least for my specific case, turning my attention to something else made my dp almost gone away.
These are the good news; the bad news are that my OCD seems to be worsened now that DP is nearly gone away! I'm now struggling with these specific symptoms:

-Days passing too fast, like last week feels like it was 5 minutes ago...and sometimes I cannot concentrate on people faces and they become somewhat distant (those are the only dp symptoms left I think)

-Sensation of not caring about anyone, even family

-Free floating anxiety 24/7

-The worst: illogical thinking, and by illogical I mean nonsensical crap...because I fear schizophrenia and madness above anything else, I always had stupid thoughts in order to torture myself that I was becoming delusional...well, the moment I've realized that I could think stupid thoughts about ANYTHING, this symptom became much more worse than ever, so for example I can think stupid crap like there's an unicorn under my bed and then freak out that I'm becoming delusional!
Tonight I'm going to a barbecue party with my friends, and I was anxious because I was already expecting something like "Oh, now of course I'm going to think some illogical crap like always"...in fact, when one of my friends said "I'm sure we'll eat like pigs tonight!" I thought that maybe they're going to cook ME on the barbecue :roll: Ok, I feel ridicoulous on posting this and I'm even laughing right now, but when I thought that crap, I felt like "Why, why I thought this, normal people don't think these things, now the only thing that is keeping me from reaching delusions is that I don't believe the thoughts yet!"

Janine and the others, what do you think about these symptoms? Can DP+OCD produce these states or this is something worse,like sz?
Thank you! Grazie!

Tau

 

[peaceboy23]

Hey Tau. I can sympathize with you, seeing as how I have dp and OCD and I also can convince myself I am becoming delusional. I am wondering if maybe what Jeanine and others have talked about is coming up here. That our dp and dr are covers for deeper issues and feeilngs that we are hiding (at least I think this is what some peopel have been talking about, as Homer Simpsons says, paraphrasing, "i have a history of missing the point of things like that.) NOT saying that you have been hiding schizophrenia or something liek that with your dp/dr, but perhaps now that your dp/dr is getting better, other issues that you haven't been dealing with are coming up, ready to be dealt with. I think maybe now you can start dealing with these other things, especially with the help of a psychologist, because you are obviously a strong person for fighting against dp/dr!

 

[peaceboy23]

When I was feeling derealized/depersonalized I tried to concentrate my attention on a specific object (a lamp for example, or a pen) or I called some friends and talked with them...I discovered that, at least for my specific case, turning my attention to something else made my dp almost gone away.

How exactly did you go about doing this, Tau? Seeing how part of my problem is that recently when I get dp'd i keep thinking about my thoughts and my brain and think i'm going to go crazy and i feel like i'm floating away into insanity and fear, and all that fun stuff, i need some good distractin techniques. Even watching tv doesn't help completely because htat fear and dp is floating behind me in my head. It is so hard to describe these states in words, but hopefully people understnad. By focusing on an object, do you mean just looking at a lamp and thinking "this is a lamp" or more studying the lamp, "it has flowers on it, its' white, it has a lightbulb, etc.?" I'm looking for any help i can get here, because i just had another horrible day of "Losing" my mind, constantly obsessing if i'm giong to get the horrible fear/crazy state again, having it come up again, fighting it, blah blah blah. Thanks for any help you can give me!

 

[Guest]

Thank you for your reply, Peaceboy! I'm already seeing a psychologyst but as I show improvement on the DP side, OCD issues become stronger, so I don't really know what to do, because now that I can obsess about anything it has become a nightmare!
When I talked about focusing on an object, I meant studying it in all its particulars...for example: it's red, it has some decorations on it etc.
Alternatively, I have to force myself to do things like going out with friends, and then I actually enjoy these situations and my DP, and even 90% of my obsessions, go away; for example, the famous barbecue party of yesterday evening has been a success...I never thought for a moment something in regard to myself being grilled on the barbecue :roll: Even anxiety went away after a few minutes...it's so strange.
I hope you'll feel better soon, Peaceboy!I completely relate to your feelings of floating away and into insanity, I had them too!They'll go away, I promise. Try to live your life at its fullest even if you're freaking out...I know it's difficult, I had to do this for 3 months before I began to see that my DP was fading!But you can succeed! By the way, have you ever had stupid thoughts like mine? It's the last symptom that really bothers me and I don't know how to stop thinking crap for everything I see/hear/feel.
Be strong, you can do it! Ciao!

Tau

 

[kchendrix]

I completely relate to the OCD stuff.. Intrussive thoughts, and Songs come to mind that repeat in your head like a tape recorder, and then these thoughts etc... make you think your are going crazy or will slowly drift to the edge of insanity.. that this is the time.

Well it hasn't happened yet. What I have learned that If we can lessen the fear from the thoughts the thoughts die down. The more anxious I get the more OCD I have.

Last night my two pregnant daughters were out to a concert and they became lost .. The whole while I am trying to communicate with them their cell phone was dropping out. My OCD spun wildly as I worried about them, A song kept playin over and over in my head. So with OCD the more anxious the more ocd... If we try and remember the thoughts as noise and meaningless noise, the fear is less, the OCD is less. I am not real good at this yet but I can see that it does work.. The more you tell yourself not to think about a Pink Elephant , the more you will think about it. Tell your self oh it is just one of those garbage thoughts and it will loose importance.

 

[Guest]

Hi there Kchendrix! Thanks for your reply and for your advices, my thoughts are proportional to my fear of becoming schizophrenic: the more I fear craziness, the more my DP is strong and my OCD thoughts tend to be absurd...of course, my fear is always the same: if I don't believe them, they're obsessions, if one day I'll lower the guard and believe them, they'll become delusions and I'll be mad.
Regarding your "juke-box" running into your head, I think I've found an article that will surely help you! :wink:

Joan Arehart-Treichel
From Psychiatric News, Volume 39, Number 10. p. 24
? 2004 American Psychiatric Association

If patients experience musical hallucinations, it might indicate that they need an SSRI, not an antipsychotic, because such hallucinations appear to be most common in obsessive-compulsive disorder patients.

Back in 1953, there was a musical called "Call Me Madam." One of the songs from the musical went like this: "I hear music and there?s no one there, I smell blossoms and the trees are bare. . . ."

These acoustical and olfactory experiences were supposed to be fantasies provoked by falling in love, but musical hallucinations really do exist. They have been noted in persons with hearing loss, in some elderly people, and in some individuals with abnormalities in the temporal lobe (auditory cortex) of the brain. And they are probably also more common among psychiatric patients than previously thought, suggests a new Israeli study published in the February Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

A decade ago, Haggai Hermesh, M.D., a senior lecturer in psychiatry at Tel Aviv University, and his coworkers conducted a preliminary survey that led them to suspect that psychiatric patients sometimes experience musical hallucinations. They decided to undertake a study to further explore this possibility. Their subjects were 190 consecutive adult outpatients at an urban mental health center in Israel. The outpatients had bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, or social phobia. None of the subjects had significant hearing loss or known brain damage.

The researchers interviewed the subjects with a short structured interview they had designed called the Geha Short Interview for Musical Hallucinations (GSIMH). The GSIMH examines lifetime occurrence of musical hallucinations, with an emphasis on a false perception of music rather than merely thinking about music, humming to onself, or recollecting music. The researchers found that 51 of the 190 subjects (27 percent) experienced musical hallucinations.

The investigators then looked to see what distinguished subjects who had experienced musical hallucinations from those who had not.

One distinguishing factor was the age of onset of symptoms. The age of onset was four years earlier in subjects reporting musical hallucinations. However, the duration of mental disorders, as well as the level of general education and musical education, were similar between the two groups.

The researchers then assessed whether musical hallucinations were more prevalent in subjects with certain kinds of mental disorders. What they found was that only 26 percent of subjects with schizophrenia had ever experienced musical hallucinations, compared with 41 percent of subjects with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In fact, OCD subjects were found to have experienced musical hallucinations to a much greater degree than had all of the other diagnostic groups combined.

The investigators then explored the relationship between musical hallucinations and OCD. They looked at the prevalence of musical hallucinations in subjects without OCD, with a sole diagnosis of OCD, and with OCD plus one additional psychiatric diagnosis.

They found that there was an increase in the prevalence of musical hallucinations from a rate of about 20 percent in subjects without the disorder, through 30 percent in subjects with the disorder, to more than 50 percent in subjects with the disorder plus one comorbid diagnosis.

Thus, musical hallucinations appear to be fairly common among certain psychiatric patients, and especially among OCD patients, Hermesh and his colleagues concluded. While their study included no healthy control subjects, a study by Montreal psychiatrist Martin G. Cole, M.D., and colleagues, and reported in the May 2002 International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, suggests that the prevalence of musical hallucinations in the general population is much lower?around 3 percent.

This study has some clinical implications, Hermesh and his colleagues believe. For example, they said, "Identification of musical hallucinations raises the likelihood of obsessive-compulsive disorder with or without other comorbid mental disorders as opposed to a psychotic disorder. Additionally, musical hallucinations, especially when meeting criteria for an obsession (i.e., musical obsessions), may justify initiating a psychopharmacologic trial with an anti-OCD agent (e.g., an SSRI) rather than an antipsychotic agent."

"We are currently further analyzing our data to get a good psychopathological description of the phenomenological structure of the experience of musical hallucinations," Ruth Isseroff, D.Sc., a neuroscientist and one of the study?s authors, told Psychiatric News. "In other words, we?ll try to address the question of whether the majority of this musical misperception meets the criteria for true hallucinations or criteria of obsessions. We?re also looking at possible differences in this musical experience between OCD patients and other psychiatric patients as well as normal individuals, especially those with a high level of musical education. We intend to submit this article for publication within the next few months."

Hope this can help! Ciao!

Tau

 

[kchendrix]

Yeah mine I don't actually hear it in my ear it is like when a non ocd person gets a tune stuck in there head but it is more persistant.... I also can change the song on my own... which is weird... But if I am busy I never have it , When I first wake in the morning until I get out of the shower and get busy with my day.. OCD is what they told me ..... Interesting article.

I don't believe that you will go mad from letting your guard down, I do think that is the only way to get out of this stuff. Constantly monitoring isn't going to keep you from going mad, That would mean you had some type of magical power to run madness off.... I think the amount of Anxiety is directly proportionate to the amount of ocd also...

Good Artcile thanks again
KC

 

[Guest]

I know you actually don't hear music from outside your head...but I posted the article because even if you actually hear music, it would be characteristic of OCD and not of another scary disorder.
Regarding my "letting guard down", I know that mine are obsessions but I always have to say to myself "Don't believe it, don't believe it" even if I know they're not logical and I don't believe them. I fear delusions so much, I don't know if actually I fear the thoughts themselves or (and I propend for this hypothesis) I fear madness and so the thoughts become scary! Do you think that strange thoughts like mine are "normal" for OCD people? Because I've always thought OCD revolves around washing hands or the fear of hurting someone.
Thank you!

Tau

 

[kchendrix]

Hey thanks, yeah I was a little confused about the hallucination thing but now I get what you mean.

Go to this site http://www.ocdonline.com/

Check out what this guy has to say.. The OCD isn't always what you see in the movies.... There are those of us who have the obsessions with compulsion. He explains.... When in high anxiety I might be obsessing on certain thoughts or intrussive images or whatever, but don't have a compulsion to relieve it. As you will see on his site he suggests how to take care of OCD>... Check it out...

thanks
kc

 

[Guest]

Hello!
I'm new here and I can strongly relate to this thread......
I suffered through some drug-induced derealization and depersonalization a couple of months ago, but when it faded I was left with pretty unpleasant OCD. Tonight a bad OCD episode led to a small dissociative relapse, and even before the dissociation tended to come in response to anxiety-inducing or obsessive thoughts.
'Pure-O' OCD is exactly how you describe it.. recurring thoughts that you know are irrational but which cause you intense anxiety anyway. The fact that the thoughts keep returning is often what makes them so scary but the fact that they generate anxiety is what also flags them, I guess, as important to the mind.
I'm still trying to figure out how to get over this one .....

 

[peaceboy23]

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is the best way that I've found to deal with OCD...i've always been more of an obsessor than a compulser, which makes it more difficult to treat, i think, but it can be done. However, I still get stuck in the obessions, and it's hard to get out of them sometimes...however, as i've mentoiined, my therapist isn't a CBT therapist, so that could be part of the problem. For a good book on OCD, check out Dr. Rappaport's (can't remember her first name) book "The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing." It helped me so much when I was first dealing with OCD. It also helped in an odd way...when it was written, they were just at the beginning of studying OCD intently, and medications were very young, and just between then and now, the difference is amazing...gives me hope that things just keep getting better, treatment wise.

 

[Guest]

Remember, nearly everything you learn about mental illness from the general media is likely to be a TINY portion only at best, and entirely wrong at worst. Think of a subject you know lots about (music, or science or whatever your particular bent is). Then read some "public mainstream" articles about the topic. Scary, ain't it? THAT is the equivalent of what you've learned about mental illness from just being a "general public" reader. The majority of it is entirely PR generated (written by public relations writers who are being paid by particular clients to promote specific ideas and then pass off their PR "news" stories as general interest to the reading populace). That is simply HOW the world works. Point is, whatever you THINK you know about psychiatric OCD is probably mostly PR generated, resulting from the drug companies' interest in OCD symptoms from the early 1990's when Prozac was first approved to treat the condition. At that point, general articles began appearing, ALL OF THEM referring to OCD as ALWAYS a biological disorder (which is ridiculous, but I will still get angry responses here because that is what the public has been strongly led to believe and they now say "but it's TRUE. Everyone knows that now." No. Everyone doesn't. But those are the loudest voices and the ones being funded, so the rest of us usually just shake our heads and remain silent)

Obsessive Thinking can LOCK YOU INTO ALL KINDS OF SYMPTOMS like Dp and Anxiety and Depression faster and stronger than you would ever imagine. Most of us have terrors of doing "somethign horrible" - either to another person or to ourselves. At some point during massive dp anxiety, we may imagine leaping out a window or racing into traffic....and we terrify ourselves with that thought.

Then we find we MUST think it - in order to CONTROL it and prevent ourselves from actually DOING it. Absurd. Yet, we buy it hook, line and sinker. And that begins the loop that traps us for years.

There is not a CBT tool in the world that can help unless you REACH the POINT where you truly realize:

You cannot win (not the way you want to, anyway)
You must GIVE UP what you really want. You WANT to NOT have the thoughts. You want them to GO away, or to be able to see the illogic in them and no longer be pulled towards them.

You can't have that.

You must, instead, turn away from them WHILE THEY ARE STILL PULLING YOU. That is the piece of reality you resist and resisting it is keeping you in the obsessions. Remember, you cannot WIN the Obsession game the way you want to win it. You THINK you can - you keep hoping you can - you keep waiting for the day when those hideous thoughts stop coming to you. Or you wait for the day when those overwhelming thoughts have no power anymore. WON'T HAPPEN.

You must FORCE your attention AWAY from them while they are still potent and magnetic. And then you can begin to tease apart the underlying fears and thoughts that those Obsessions and Compulsions are standing for.

Peace (but it won't come easy. You have to fight for it)
Janine

 

[Guest]

Great post Janine! I partially know the mechanics of OCD, only two things bother me and make me wonder if I have OCD:

1- Why do I keep centering every obsession on myself, when most OCDers (as far as I know) fear something bad happening to people they love. Why the fears I have are centered on myself?
2- The bizarre thoughts. Why I have so much fantasy?Damn.

Thank you Janine and sorry for my posts which are always so boring, I feel so bad. I don't want to go crazy.

 

[peaceboy23]

Ditto on the great post. My therapist has long told me exactly what Janine was saying, but i kind of suck at it for the most part. My thearpist always says the best way to stop the obsessions is to FOCUS ON SOMETHING ELSE, divert my attention away from it until it goes fades. I think i'm just now finally kind of starting to do that, and it seems to be helping. The hardest part is believing that we can do it, or realizing, as Janine says, that it's what needs to be done. Lord knows that i want to fight the obsessions, but it's true, it really does just make them worse. I am giving them power over me. It's kind of like the bully thing...Bully's feed on our reactions, they like to see that rise out of us....but if we just walk by, as ridiculously hard as it may seem, they lose interest...they may get more aggressive for a while, but eventually they fade away and go on to someone else.

 

[peaceboy23]

Hey Tau...I am similar in the way that my obessions tend to reflect on myself. Most of my OCD tends to revolve around my own things...mostly around illnesses, in a hypochondriachal sort of way, but other things as well. So I'm with you all the way on that one. I also have a lot of bizarre thoughts and fantasies, so dont' worry you're normal in those regards

 

[Monkeydust]

I feel so bad. I don't want to go crazy.

Tau,

I think that above quote is a large part of the issue.

You seem so afraid and preoccupied with the issue of impending insanity that you're almost trying to "second guess" yourself.

It seems as if you're so intent upon not being insane that you're mind's conjuring up new ways to make you think you are. You're mind's so adamantly saying "I'm not insane" that you're OCD side is thinking "what about now?" and putting forth more irritating thoughts.

Like others have said, the only way to get rid of all this is to distract yourself enough so that you don't care anymore.

 

[Guest]

I feel so bad. I don't want to go crazy.

Tau,

I think that above quote is a large part of the issue.

You seem so afraid and preoccupied with the issue of impending insanity that you're almost trying to "second guess" yourself.

It seems as if you're so intent upon not being insane that you're mind's conjuring up new ways to make you think you are. You're mind's so adamantly saying "I'm not insane" that you're OCD side is thinking "what about now?" and putting forth more irritating thoughts.

Like others have said, the only way to get rid of all this is to distract yourself enough so that you don't care anymore.

I think you're right, Monkeydust...and I'm positive I can do it, I can distract myself and let my OCD thoughts flow away. After all, I've done it with DP, I'm sure I can with OCD too. It's just so damn difficult, though.