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Do you or someone you know express feeling like their life is not their own? As if their essence is detached from their body and the events happening around them feels like a dream? Some people may have these feelings briefly while others express this as a persistent or a frequent recurring state. In the latter, the diagnosis is depersonalization-derealization syndrome (DDS) which can create a feeling of loneliness, isolation, and frustration.<\/p>\n
SYMPTOMS<\/strong><\/p>\n You may experience depersonalization, derealization, or both. Understand that your perceptions aren\u2019t real and having others make you feel unsettled can be frustrating and cause anxiety. When people report temporarily feeling this was it has been shown to follow taking certain drugs (marijuana, hallucinogens, ketamine, MMA), becoming very tired, sleep\/sensory deprivation, or experiencing life-threatening danger. Other situations that can cause a person to experience this disconnected feeling are medical in nature such as seizure disorders. Although there are several reasons to experience temporary disconnectedness, this does not mean a person has the disorder as these things do not cause DDS. The feeling must occur on its own, be persistent or be recurring, makes it difficult to function in daily life, and most likely began during early or middle childhood. (It rarely begins after age 40)<\/p>\n Although there has not been a clear cause, it\u2019s often linked to:<\/p>\n People often have a hard time describing their symptoms and may fear they are going crazy. However, people always remain aware that their experiences of detachment are not real but rather are just the way that they feel. Breathe a sigh of relief and know you will be okay because this awareness is what separates DP\/DR from a psychotic disorder. People with a psychotic disorder do not have this awareness.<\/p>\n Studies have been done on DDS and identified emotional numbing and loss of emotional reactivity as its core feature along with a person having great difficulty in identifying their own feelings. Some of these studies also show a low skin electrical conductance response to unpleasant stimuli that would normally give rise to a response which suggests that suppression of emotional processing results from abnormalities in functioning of the autonomic\u00a0nervous system.<\/p>\n TREATMENT\n
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<\/strong>Treatment is usually long, requiring numerous sessions with a therapist, but there are multiple techniques that can help.<\/p>\n