How common would you say it is for dpdr to last for years

Trith said:

When you have a problem that is really annoying and you learn that some people can have it for years, I think it is perfectly normal to worry that this might happen to you too. This isn't just the case for DPDR. I am not sure it can be useful for recovery, butit seems like an at least normal worry.

Then, my feeling is that most people recover after a short time. Given it can take some people years to have a diagnosis or even just learn about the name of DPDR, I think it is safe to say that there are probably a lot of people who have it for a short time and don't even report it online like here. People who have had it for a long time are more visible, first because they are around for a longer time, and second because they have had more chance to meet a diagnosis or self-diagnosis.
For simplicity, let's say you have 90% chance for your DPDR to last 2 months, and 10% chance for it to last 5 years. So for the second group, it lasts 30 times longer, so people from the second group will stay around and post or be active for 30 times longer (assuming they stay active all the time, for simplicity), so you still have a lot of chances to meet them. A quick calculation shows that if you then meet 10 active people on this forum, statistically more than 7 will be from the second group, ,if you use these probabilities. That's survivorship biais ( Survivorship bias - Wikipedia )

The other thing is that people can have vastly different levels of suffering caused by DPDR. My subjective impression is that most of the time, if it is really bad it won't stay for long (or at least it has little chance to stay that bad for a long time).

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Trith said:

When you have a problem that is really annoying and you learn that some people can have it for years, I think it is perfectly normal to worry that this might happen to you too. This isn't just the case for DPDR. I am not sure it can be useful for recovery, butit seems like an at least normal worry.

Then, my feeling is that most people recover after a short time. Given it can take some people years to have a diagnosis or even just learn about the name of DPDR, I think it is safe to say that there are probably a lot of people who have it for a short time and don't even report it online like here. People who have had it for a long time are more visible, first because they are around for a longer time, and second because they have had more chance to meet a diagnosis or self-diagnosis.
For simplicity, let's say you have 90% chance for your DPDR to last 2 months, and 10% chance for it to last 5 years. So for the second group, it lasts 30 times longer, so people from the second group will stay around and post or be active for 30 times longer (assuming they stay active all the time, for simplicity), so you still have a lot of chances to meet them. A quick calculation shows that if you then meet 10 active people on this forum, statistically more than 7 will be from the second group, ,if you use these probabilities. That's survivorship biais ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias )

The other thing is that people can have vastly different levels of suffering caused by DPDR. My subjective impression is that most of the time, if it is really bad it won't stay for long (or at least it has little chance to stay that bad for a long time).

Click to expand...

leminaseri said:

this is the biggest mistake someone can make when it comes to imagining recovery. look recovery does happen approximately like this:

you live with the condition and deep in your brain this disorder is burned in. you carry on with your life, all the time with the symptoms. then the next stage comes. here you know that you have still symptoms, but they dont bother you anymore at all. real life problems becomes more and more priority. the thoughts in your head do circle more and more about daily stuff. but here, yet you have your symptoms. i think this stage is very important. if you get here in my opinion, even though you still have symptoms i would consider you as 75% recovered. stage three is, you begin to notice that everything becomes like you used to. the real joy and sense of beauty and love. the emotions become so strong you can not even walk straight out. you get tremor like sensations because of this „new“ emotions. the adaptation is pretty hard to this state. it is like a whole new thing. the last stage is to get this new state of mind to an usual and automatic thing. real life problems conquered already your thoughts completely. the amount of thinking about dpdr became maybe once per month. this was my way out of dpdr once but again, i did relapse and almost everybody i see here or somewhere else can not recover from the second episode. it makes me sometimes very hopeless but i almost accepted this as my new me, and my new life. others did maybe recovered differently but that was my own experience

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Trith said:

I don't know for sure what is causing my DPDR. I do have a little mood disorder, but it has been very mild lately, and its intensity has never been correlated with DPDR. I can't say it isn't related though. I am also relatively anxious in nature, but same here, it isn't correlated in intensity with DPDR.
And I don't know what can be key to recovery, but indeed, for a lot of people apparently letting go and being distracted can do it. Maybe people have different ways of coping with or compensating some problems and maybe DPDR is just a part of their coping mechanism. If everybody's system is different, then what works for one person will not necessarily work or be enough for another person. Anyway, people seem to have different things that help them or that make DPDR worse, so one can imagine that the solution will also be different. But for sure, I have never seen existential questions being part of recovery, they are more on the side of the problem.
But yes, some thoughts feel like problems too. Not long ago someone posted an article about the role of self-scrutiny on DPDR symptoms. For sure, at least in the past, I have been afraid of my emotions or thought processes that were causing me a lot of troubles, partly because of that mood disorder. It was very important for me to control this or check it. But if self-scrutiny causes inner problems on its own, then it can be a viscious cycle. So according to that logic, yes, letting them be to the best of our ability should help. But there is theory and practice.

Oh and if my DPDR was gone I think I would go outside, walk in many places and enjoy my five senses, and I would spend more time with people. But doing the same thing as I am doing now would already be great without (or with less) DPDR.

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