What did dpdr first felt like? Or how does it feel in general/how do you know you have it? I wonder if someone has the same experience as I do: sometimes I feel like my body is so soft, like I don't weigh at all and I start panicking but the only thing I can do is to close my eyes and wait for it to pass. Fortunately it does pass. There's another symptom which lasts for so long, actually I think that I've been living like that for 2 years - everything seems like a hologram, even I feel like that. I see everything but it's just like my eyes and brain are constantly zoned out. Anything that surrounds me is just so weird. I haven't got my driving licence yet because I don't feel like driving with this condition.
How do you know you have dpdr?
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You'll know you have it:
With me, it's like being numbed down...no emotion, no concept of time and just an overall feeling of spaced out.
Disconnection and a sense of no feeling to anything.
I can look at a tree, and I intellectually know it's a tree...but no connection to it.
No depth in thinking.
Bleak.
Ominous.
2d looking....
And just bleh.
Sometimes it's a little better, but it fluctuates.
I also have some tinnitus with mine.
I can only speak for myself, but that's just my definition of how it feels.
With me, it's like being numbed down...no emotion, no concept of time and just an overall feeling of spaced out.
Disconnection and a sense of no feeling to anything.
I can look at a tree, and I intellectually know it's a tree...but no connection to it.
No depth in thinking.
Bleak.
Ominous.
2d looking....
And just bleh.
Sometimes it's a little better, but it fluctuates.
I also have some tinnitus with mine.
I can only speak for myself, but that's just my definition of how it feels.
I mostly know it by strange sayings like "everything looks like a hologram." This is distinct form psychosis because you're saying looks like, indicating you still have contact with reality and know everything isn't a hologram. Sometimes when my depersonalization was intense I'd feel like a balloon.
It's different for everyone really, but for me I can feel a disturbance in my senses. The world feels totally different to how it felt before. Things don't look or sound the same, and I can feel disconnected from myself and the world around me. I also constantly feel anxious, like I'm waiting for something bad to happen and it's hard to concentrate. It's hard to explain, but for me that's how I know I have dp/dr. For someone else it might feel totally different, as everyone experiences it in their own way.
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Reality feels “off”, you have horrible anxiety and can’t fix it. This is how I discovered I had it.
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Disturbance in the senses...
Things sound different like amplified or something.
Thought I was the only one with intensified hearing.
It's difficult to know for sure. I don't agree with "you will know" - not always!
I noticed certain symptoms as soon as it started - I had light sensitivity and trouble with taking in views. Also brain fog. I am glad I wrote them down - I recommend you do the same.
What made it really click for me was when I read a few lists of DP/DR symptoms. I could relate with many of them. At that point it did click in my head and I was sure I had it.
Over the months since then I have had moments of doubt but at the end of the day this is a difficult thing to describe. I'm sure enough.
You should look at many lists of symptoms. A problem with DP/DR's online presence is there's no centralized resource that tells you what it is. You'll carve out a more detailed picture of it and then you'll have a better idea whether you have it.
I noticed certain symptoms as soon as it started - I had light sensitivity and trouble with taking in views. Also brain fog. I am glad I wrote them down - I recommend you do the same.
What made it really click for me was when I read a few lists of DP/DR symptoms. I could relate with many of them. At that point it did click in my head and I was sure I had it.
Over the months since then I have had moments of doubt but at the end of the day this is a difficult thing to describe. I'm sure enough.
You should look at many lists of symptoms. A problem with DP/DR's online presence is there's no centralized resource that tells you what it is. You'll carve out a more detailed picture of it and then you'll have a better idea whether you have it.
I think it's not entirely true. Losing touch with reality is an element that helps identify psychosis, but it doesn't necessarily happen about everything or all the time. A friend of mine has schizophrenia and had DPDR episodes during psychotic episodes and he knew DPDR wasn't real at the time. That being said, I have yet to see someone on the forum who has DPDR and is afraid to have schizophrenia and eventually gets a schizophrenia diagnosis. The first two, all the time, the last one, I have never seen this in my life (Oh well, actually I have had a preliminary diagnosis for schizoaffective disorder, but it changed into light autism later on, and that psychiatrist was really not the best, I am still waiting for my first delirium at 38).
That's true. A psychotic person doesn't have to believe their perceptual changes are true. But it's widely considered important for a "true" diagnosis of psychosis that a person doesn't know what's real anymore, i.e., they think the hallucinations might be real, they're delusional such as thinking people can read their thoughts, etc. I can't speak for all the psychiatrists in the world but I think schizophrenia is often diagnosed tentatively. They want to be able to catch schizophrenia in its prodromal stage because their data suggest doing so is important to patient outcomes.
It might seem logical to be waiting to become psychotic because you have a diagnosis of schizophrenia but I wouldn't recommend thinking like that. Have you ever been fully psychotic even once, and for more than a few days? Don't lose sleep over the possibility of losing your mind just because you have a diagnosis. The more contact with mental health services we have, the more potentially misleading diagnoses we acquire.
I've also been tentatively diagnosed with autism and then they removed the diagnosis, and I've been unofficially diagnosed schizotypal. Schizotypal is a personality disorder so insurance and the government aren't always willing to treat it.
Indeed, they say that when they do a before / after scan of the brain they see significant shrinkage during the first psychotic break. A lot of people aren't the same after the first one, so it makes sense to try to prevent it. I will still be careful if things start to get weird because you never know. But for now I had various treatments for two years and the result is that I feel my working memory hasn't come back fully, a year after stopping treatments. So I also don't want to do anything just preventive.
For the autism thing I am not 100% confident in it, but at least it's based on things that predate my dpdr. And the advantage is that doctors take me a little more seriously, who knows why, I can apply for disability at work and also I will get to try cognitive remediation that might be relavant.
For the autism thing I am not 100% confident in it, but at least it's based on things that predate my dpdr. And the advantage is that doctors take me a little more seriously, who knows why, I can apply for disability at work and also I will get to try cognitive remediation that might be relavant.
Yeah, the schizophrenia diagnosis seems much scarier and more stigmatized than autism spectrum. A schizophrenia misdiagnosis in particular is scary because it implies to the patient that they're about to go off the deep end.
About the brain shrinking, are you familiar with the concept of a nervous breakdown? I think the term is fairly old and refer to a psychiatric break that doesn't involve "true" psychosis. Since getting depersonalization I've wondered if nervous breakdowns can have similar deleterious effects on the brain as psychosis. My personal experience tells me yes. The interesting and hopeful thing about anxiety is that anxious people usually want to return to a state of calm, maybe with the exception of obsessive delusions, whereas people with depression or psychosis are sometimes very insistent on staying dysfunctional. They'll argue incredibly strongly for the very beliefs that are keeping them unwell, which I guess is just a normal human behavior but in mental illness it can become supercharged. This also leads me to wonder if the psychoanalytical theories that entire populations can contract mental illnesses, like a society becoming delusional, have any merit.
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