In a sense, the experience presupposes certain notions of how the self is meant to feel. That question may be why the phenomenon has attracted a lot of interest from philosophers. Like words, can a sense of self be broken down into arbitrary, socially-constructed components? Have you ever played that game when you repeat a word over and over again until it loses all meaning? It’s called semantic satiation. It might be the implications of the numbing, as opposed to the actual numbing itself, that cause the most distress. Please prescribe me something to cry.’” Have you ever played that game when you repeat a word over and over again until it loses all meaning? “A mother comes to me and says, ‘My son is in prison, I received a letter from him. ![]() Elena Bezzubova, a Russian psychoanalyst who treats people with depersonalization in California, calls it a painful absence of feeling. These numbing effects mean that it’s commonly conceived as a defense mechanism Hunter calls it a “psychological trip switch” which can be triggered in times of stress.ĭr. You might become less empathetic your pain threshold might increase. Research suggests that areas of the brain that are key to emotional and physical sensations, such as the amygdala and the insula, appear to be less responsive in chronic depersonalization sufferers. While depersonalization can be a symptom of anxiety and depression, it can also occur on its own. “People often think it is just to do with depression,” she tells me. Elaine Hunter, a clinical psychologist working at the Depersonalization Disorder Clinic in London, U.K., says that it’s frequently misdiagnosed. But for roughly 1 to 2 percent of the population, it becomes persistent, and distressing. It can happen when you’re jet-lagged, hungover, or stressed. Studies carried out with college students have found that brief episodes are common in young people, with a prevalence ranging from 30 to 70 percent. People say they feel as if they’re in a movie, as if they’re a robot,” Medford says.Ĭhances are that you may have experienced it fleetingly. It’s not a psychotic condition the sufferers are aware that what they’re perceiving is unusual. “It’s like I’m too aware of certain larger aspects of reality,” as a patient says in Feeling Unreal by Daphne Simeon and Jeff Abugel. It’s characterized by a pervasive and disturbing sense of unreality in both the experience of self (called “depersonalization”) and one’s surroundings (known as “derealization”) accounts of it are surreal, obscure, shrouded in terms like “unreality” and “dream,” but they’re often conveyed with an almost incongruous lucidity. Nick Medford, a neuropsychiatrist and researcher at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School in the U.K., tells me. “It’s a disorder that’s not actually that well-studied,” Dr. "A mother comes to me and says, 'I received a letter from my son in prison. ![]() If Leary’s psychedelic rewrite of the Tibetan Book of the Dead teaches you “how to break free from personality into new realms of consciousness,” this book seeks to reverse the effects. Earlier this year my doctor prescribed me a cognitive behavioral-therapy manual called Overcoming Depersonalization and Feelings of Unreality. Though it can be triggered by drugs, it often occurs on its own, and it’s a fairly terrifying experience. What doctors call “depersonalization” is somewhat beyond the power of words to convey, but it corresponds loosely to what Timothy Leary might have been talking about when he came up with ‘ego loss’ in the 1960s-minus the psychedelic drugs and the feelings of being gloriously at one with the world. Like I was experiencing life in the third person. My memories, experiences, and feelings-the things that make up my intrinsic sense of “me-ness”-projected across my mind like phantasmagoria, but I felt like they belonged to someone else. I was sitting on a train and all of a sudden I felt like I’d been dropped into someone else’s body. The first time I can remember feeling like I didn’t exist, I was 15.
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