[tikobird]

I don't understand why someone has to be diagnosed to know they have Depersonalization Disorder. It's obvious things don't look real and you're outside your body. You might feel as though you're in a movie and your body isn't yours. I've had this for decades. If you have a laptop read a book about it you know what it's called and that you have this. Sorry but with all the ways to find these symptoms on the internet of course I know what it is.

If you enter depersonalization disorder in a Google search there will be an abundance of websites describing DP. Doesn't anyone read or look up information anymore?

 

[Chip1021]

All psychiatric disorders are just observations on a person's thoughts, feeling, behaviors, and subjective reports about their inner experiences. That's all. It's silly that people think you need a doctor to diagnose it. The hardest part of depersonalization, at least for me, was finding the right words that explain how (weird) I feel, etc. though I'm still unsure, it's the best descriptor of the way I feel that I've come across. I mean, "feeling unreal", though accurate is not the first way I would describe my experience. A lot of it is more like "I feel like I don't have an identity or sense of who I am" but trying to google that will just lead to a bunch of emo websites or whatever the devil the kids are expressing as faux anti-conformist-conformist existential angst these days. And no, 15 years of going to doctor after doctor explaining my symptoms, they never mentioned DP to me (it was usually depression, occasionally anxiety, because it takes 4 years of med school and more of residency experience to learn those two words, apparently).

But yeah, it's silly when I hear people say things like "I don't believe you have a mental illness unless you were diagnosed by a doctor". As if the doctor knows how I feel better than I do, all I really need a doctor for is to give me drugs if I want to try them, though in an ideal society I wouldn't even need a doctor for that, but that's another topic to rant about another day.