# FORTY YEARS of DP



## jnsx (Feb 13, 2010)

Hello, My name is Jerry and I've had DP since 1971. Drug induced. I may be one of the oldest here. I hope this doesn't discourage you. Yes life is hard with DP almost impossible at times. However I have had many very good things in my life also.

Forty Years of Depersonalization;
With a Twist
2010

I may have always had a touch of depersonalization from a young age or at least a disposition toward it.Born in northern Vermont in 1950. I started first grade at four years old in a one-room schoolhouse without plumbing. I was a shy and reserved child, and remember not being comfortable attending school, a school phobia, but would rather be outside studying the bees or ants and playing in streams The teacher, knowing my hesitance to attend, would sometimes stop at my house and bring me to school in the morning. After a while I settled down and enjoyed learning. I also liked going to Sunday school.

We moved into town when I was entering third grade and went though the school phobia thing again. This eventually dissipated and I made and enjoyed having friends. I wasn't comfortable doing such things as oral book reports.

In high school I did ok, but was somewhat of a under achiever. Indifferent, was the word entered on my report card. I was more comfortable with one or two persons than being in a group.

I had a number of different jobs after graduation; I found that I had trouble working with the public or work where I had to be directly in sync with others. I felt nervous and panicky. However I was capable of working with others in informal settings or behind the scenes on my own.

In my last year of high school 1968, the hippy and drug culture arrived in Vermont. We had been previously primed for it of course, with music, TV and other forms of media. The drugs first came via college students retuning from Boston (Harvard) and back to the land hippies from urban areas (see: April, 1972 Playboy magazine article: Taking Over Vermont).

Now I was out of school, and with all this new excitement in the air, naturally I fell right in the thing.

That summer was one of socializing and partying with local and summer kids, daily arrivals, of back to the land urbanites who were starting communes, plus others who were hitchhiking around.

We were invited to the communes, and had our astrological charts done, learned about I Ching and ate experiments in organic cooking. Most of the people in the communes were a few years older than us and from urban cultures. My friends and I were more interested in the pop version of the hippy stuff. The commune people seemed to have radical politics on their minds. Today some of them are in state government.

The next summer I attended Woodstock, which was quite an experience. There were a few persons around us having bad trips, we had to hold them down and talk them down because they were unprepared for the intensity of that experience. Their outlook on life probably would never be the same. I was starting to realize the alternative culture wasn't any better then the old one. Earlier on, the desire was to seek God and transcend materialism. This was apparently changing, now it seems people were using drugs just as a frequent recreational activity.

That winter I went to northern New Hampshire to work at a large resort in the mountains. The cultural changes hadn't reached that part of the world yet, at least directly. I guess in a semi unconscious way I wanted to escape back to the old world again and be around people that were my age but hadn't been exposed to the "New Age".

However I found that by now it was an intricate part of me. It was hard to relate to others any other way. It had seared my conscience. As in my youth, I was out of touch with the world. It was going to get worst though.

Now moving ahead a couple of years, I was back in Vermont, living on a dairy farm of a friend, not to do farm work but electrical work on his house. 
I was hanging out with old friends, and returned to old behaviors. Sometimes I would fake it and not inhale. It wasn't so much I needed or wanted the drugs either, but I felt the power of peer pressure and the momentum of the times-and I thought I was so independent and above such things at the time. Now that I'm much older this behavior seems stupid, reckless and contradictory, which it was.

One day the friend with the farm asked me if I would like to ride over to Norton, Vt. and attend a party that evening at Earth Peoples Park, a large commune that was deeded to God, There was a band from Boston playing that night named, A Real Good F**k.
I said ok.

We arrived in the early evening, I had a few beers and then the band began to play. They played well and everyone was starting to have fun. I remember talking to a guy about the "New Day" that was coming and I commented that I didn't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. He gave me a puzzled look. About then the pot was being passed around. If only I hadn't inhaled this time! A few minutes later all hell broke lose. I was catapulted into another dimension. I went into a total state of fear; my consciousness was altered beyond description. Everything seem unreal and sinister, time was distorted. My perceptions of the world changed completely. This was far worse then the problems I described as a child, a 1000% worse! It's likely the pot was laced with something like DMT or ketamine. I had taking LSD a few times in the past. LSD as powerful as it is didn't rival this.

After a while I did come down a little. I remember that night back home I was lying in bed and looking at objects in the room, they appeared to have sinister, unreal, death like qualities but the real horror of it was not just the furniture appearing this way, I and the furniture were one. I felt two-dimensional. 
These experiences are not just imagination or obsessive thoughts, nor are they things that well up from some imagined deep recesses of the mind because of past-unresolved trauma. These things are actually experienced, or more precisely, are your experience!

I was struggling with this hell for a couple of weeks when some friends asked me to go to a banjo contest with them, when we arrived we learned it had been canceled. On the way back my friend pulled out some hash- concentrated THC. I can't believe to this day that I smoked! I saw rays of light come down from the sky onto these tropical plants (in Vermont) and it was as though these plants were communicating with me. I felt so overwhelmed by this disintegration of my being; it felt like I was dying and asked one of my friends to pound on my chest because it seemed like my heart had stopped. They must of thought it humorous. Back in town, my stomach was on fire, I ate a whole package of Rolaids. (repeat) Now that I'm much older this behavior seems stupid, reckless and contradictory, which it was.

I went to my parent's house and hid in my bedroom. I didn't leave for months or maybe years, I couldn't tell. My brain was unable to filter or sort out this sensory overload. I had to paint my room gray because the wallpaper design was vibrating. I would lie on the bed feeling unreal, two-dimensional. Everything including colors seemed dull and void of any goodness, like a living death. The wonderful ordinary things of life became extraordinarily bazaar. I was caught in an existential dilemma. I began to think I had died and gone to hell. I had no way to tell. One day an old friend came to the house, I reluctantly came downstairs to see him. When he saw me his jaw dropped, I was very thin

I know some people will say that this was "ego death". If that's the problem I want as much ego back as I can get. This ain't it. It's much more complex than that. Recently, a person asked me why I didn't want to smoke pot. I said because it made me depersonalized, He said that depersonalization was the best part of smoking. I can't believe he had the same kind of depersonalization I experienced. Most people may get away with marijuana without this sort of problem, but I believe it can cause personality problems and brings misery too those around them. The legalization of marijuana will harm many people. Medical marijuana is just pretence for legalization by the many who are "preoccupied" with it, there are better remedies. I wonder how many persons prescribed medical marijuana by doctors, will become depersonalized? No doubt it will be blamed on something else.

At some point I went to the local mental health clinic, and tried a few medicines that didn't help. Then I tried Stelizine, which took the edge off. At least made it easier to cope. They diagnosed some form of schizophrenia. I began a study of these things. My condition did seem similar to schizophrenia in some ways but there were differences. One was I had too much insight. My core self or soul still seemed quite rational. This was an impossible situation. I had to endure the unendurable.

I was becoming disappointed and exacerbated with Mental Health. I would tell them that I believed my illness had something to do with brain chemistry. They didn't like this, wasn't part of their "religion" it seems. They didn't like me challenging their vague and irrelevant notions. I was willing to work with them at first but I was in a place where I needed a knowledgeable and clear understanding of my dilemma. I awkwardly tried to enlighten them but "Reality" was in their court. I was sick of pretences. At some point, I told them I just wanted some medicine and to hell with their speculations. I was subjected to some hostility after that. Of course they retaliated by entering in my records that I was drug seeking and also "malingering". Their way of saying I was just looking for a free ride. What an insult. I wanted to stop seeing them because they didn't have a clue about what I was going thought. I knew there was no way for them to realize what it was like. It was frightening for me but them as well, they sort of disassociated from the strangeness of it. They were professional in their willful ignorance. It would have been nice to at least have some compassionate support even if they didn't have an honest understanding.

Its funny that years later I became vice president of this organization.

After all this time, my take on any useful values of psychiatry and psychology other than limited help from medications are, entertainment, false hopes-buys time and sometimes-good intentions with common sense.

The role of hallucinogenic drugs really should be looked at a little closer as a causal factor in mental illness. I remember back in the sixties, many of the national magazines and other media sources did articles about these drugs having little or no dangers. 
Perhaps, we under estimate the medias' power of persuasion, even upon the professional sciences.

Going out in public again was three steps forward and two back. I finally made it downtown. When I looked down the main street, my mind would perceive every little motion on the street, it all seemed asymmetrically choreographed like looking in a kaleidoscope, but not a pleasant one. Everything seemed sinister, dark, without life, meaningless. I headed home.

I kept pressing on and with the help of my good friend Peter. I managed in time to get out in the world more often. I had to become somewhat of an actor. I intellectually knew that my perceptions of the world and that of my body were distorted. I had to try and act how it was suppose to be. It had it limits and I avoided situations I knew were undoable. These are some more of the symptoms I was battling; anxiety, inability to concentrate especially in public or social settings, my thoughts would not flow smoothly but come and go in bit and pieces. Short-term memory impairment. I felt that there was always unwanted and undue attention on me. Panic attacks, sensations of dying. Couldn't define or sense where my body was relating to the world, reality, time or to myself, an awful dream state. A vertigo of consciousness. Some things defy description. My math skills were seriously impaired by this condition so stores were difficult not to mention those florescent lights. My philosophy was to keep trying but be easy on myself. One positive thing was I did have a lot of time to read and study a variety of subjects.

I would occasionally get indirect feedback from the community as to my being lazy and stupid. What could I say to them when even the "professional's" were clueless? I do understand however, how could they know, what else could they think. I didn't know what it was either. There are young people on YouTube with candid and honest stories of depersonalization. God bless them! At lease they have the comfort of knowing what it is and that they aren't the only one.

It's been about 40 years now with this condition, I am doing well, but still have symptoms. I have improved maybe around 65 to 70 %. Which still leaves me impaired considerably.

I've been married 26 years have 3 children and 2 grandchildren. I still seek God, in a more traditional manner.

SERENDIPITY STRIKES!

About 16 years ago I got a job as a disability advocate, I met many people in my work. In the late 90's I had a client who I later became friends with. I would visit him sometimes in the evening and have a few beers. One night he poured his heart out, and in tears told me about being in Vietnam and having to kill children. He told me that when younger he was caught stealing cars and the judge gave him the choice to either go to jail for a long time or go in the Army. He chose the Army. When he arrived in Vietnam they put him under the CIA and had to do stuff for them that wasn't very pleasant, like killing children. I asked him if he would do these things today and he said no. I said these things would be forgiven if you are sincere and that the ones above him bore most of the responsibility. Then he told me when he came home he thought he was free of the CIA, not so, they came up from Boston and told him he had to go to Earth Peoples Park and secretly distribute drugs for them. There was a local woman, who had a criminal record, enlisted also. I asked what was their reason for given drugs to these people? He was told they were communist. A light came on in my head.

I have no animosity toward my friend, we are still friends today. I believe he was also a victim.

Now I know that any person that has a "mental disorder" and mentions the CIA is instantly discredited, but this unsolicited story came to me over 20 years after the fact.
I don't believe I was singled out in any way but was caught in some kind of shotgun approach. I also don't believe that everyone who becomes depersonalized by drug use is a victim of CIA.

I told this story to my brother in law, who told me that he was there that night and had smoked something that caused him psychological distress that lasted about two weeks. Pehaps this shows that I had a disposition toward DP.

I was told by someone I knew, that he was in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, but stayed in the U.S., doing the paper work for cargo planes returning from Vietnam. He personally saw many of these planes loaded with illegal drugs. He was told to look the other way.
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Some supporting documents:

I found this one the web a few years ago and copied it to Microsoft Word, 
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Jim Bray: The Blog
I'm listening to Wavy Gravy being interviewed on an internet stream from 
KPFA <http://kpfa.org>. The program was "SATURDAY MORNING TALKIES". Howard Dean came up and Wavy said he was "beyond cool", like "tundra" or something. He told a story about the Feds using drug dealers to try to destroy Earth People's Park,
and how Wavy Gravy and Ben and Jerry and Howard Dean worked together to defeat the Feds and turn it into a State Park instead. If Wavy Gravy doesn't have serious counterculture activist credentials, someone let me know. Could at least influence the Old Hippie vote in 2004.
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So drugs were being spread to soften the public to accept socialism, and then the other side employs drugs to counter them? Looks like I was caught in the crossfire.

Earth Peoples Park was a project of the same network of student revolutionaries and counter culture folks operating at Berkley CA. In 1969 they took over a piece of property owned by the University and build Peoples Park. This led to actual street wars and the National Guard were called in. These sorts of activities were erupting thoughout the county. The authorities were no doubt alarmed! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippie
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From: Acid Dreams: the Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond

By Martin A. Lee

Page,228
Reflecting on the 60's a surprising number of counterculture veterans endorsed the notion that the CIA disseminated street acid en masse so as to deflate the political potency of the youth rebellion&#8230;.

Page, 283
The CIA'S behavior modification programs were geared toward domestic as well as foreign populations: targets included selected individuals and large groups of people.

The CIA came to terms with this fundamental truth about LSD only after years of intense experimentation&#8230;...

Instead the emphasis shifted to broader questions related to social and political impact of the drug. A number of CIA-connected think tanks began to examine the relationship between the grass roots psychedelic scene and the New Left &#8230;.
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http://en.wikipedia....ct_MKULTRAoject MKULTRA 
Project MK-ULTRA was first brought to wide public attention in 1975 by the U.S. Congress, through investigations by the Church Committee, and by a presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission. Investigative efforts were hampered by the fact that CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MK-ULTRA files destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the relatively small number of documents that survived Helms' destruction order.[6]
Although the CIA insists that MK-ULTRA-type experiments have been abandoned, 14-year CIA veteran Victor Marchetti has stated in various interviews that the CIA routinely conducts disinformation campaigns and that CIA mind control research continued. In a 1977 interview, Marchetti specifically called the CIA claim that MK-ULTRA was abandoned a "cover story."[7][8]
On the Senate floor in 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy said:
The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations." At least one death, that of Dr. Olson, resulted from these activities. The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense. The agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers.[9]To this day most specific information regarding MK-ULTRA remains highly classified.
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Evidence Suggests CIA Funded Experiments at Vermont State Hospital

TIMES ARGUS newspaper article,By Louis Porter Vermont Press Bureau Published: November 30, 2008

Few people in Vermont remember Dr. Robert W. Hyde, but one of his former patients can't forget him. The doctor was involved in one of the nation's darkest chapters in medical science: In the 1950s, Hyde conducted drug and psychological experiments at a Boston hospital through funding that apparently originated with the CIA. Later, he became director of research at the Vermont State Hospital.....

http://www.timesargu...STIN/811300297/
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Books:
Storming Heaven:
LSD and the American Dream
by Jay Stevens
http://stormingheaven.com/

ACID DREAMS
The Complete Social History of LSD:
The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond
by,Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain 
http://www.levity.com/aciddreams/

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## codeblue213 (Feb 15, 2010)

I really respect you for fighting so long, and I thought my 15 years of it was a long time!
ROB


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