# I've recovered and I want to help you :) Please read.



## MSP93 (Mar 27, 2014)

Hey everyone, so it's been about 9 months since I became depersonalized and I've been waiting for a while to write this as I've been feeling pretty good for a while now, but in the last couple of months not good enough to say I've "recovered" with an entirely straight face. However, today is that day 

Ok, so before I get into the main guts of my post I want to stress a couple of things that I feel are very important. Firstly, if you acquired this problem through taking drugs such as marijuana, shrooms or acid, STOP. Psychedelics are the very worst thing there is for your mind right now and if you continue to take them it's just gonna exacerbate the issue. You may have been a massive stoner in the past and one day something just went wrong (I've seen plenty of stories like this), but now you're feeling ok and are wondering if you can try smoking a little once more. My strong advice is never again. You may love pot or other drugs but is it worth the fucking risk? Some things in life are just too precious. I know I'm never going to touch anything other than nicotine, caffeine or alcohol again as long as I live. A couple of hours of pleasure or months and months of horrific distress? Your choice. I think psychedelics are very beneficial in general but they're not for you and they certainly ain't for me.

Secondly, I want you to read this post, maybe a couple of other recovery stories, ask me some questions if you want, then log off and don't come back until you're ready to write a recovery story yourself. This place is the worst fucking thing possible for someone with this problem. I'm sorry, I know it's trying to help but mostly it's just a great resource to panic and go "shit shit shit I'm screwed and I'm NEVER gonna recover, look at all these people who've had it for 20 years!" Ironically this process is THE primary thing that stops you from recovering. XD

I used to come on here a few months ago and I'd feel so sorry for the people on the "road to recovery" giving us daily updates on how they thought they felt something "real" today... or maybe it wasn't real... I dunno. And also "I'm 50% recovered and in a few months I'll be 100%! I just know it!" No offence, I don't want to be mean but you have to be cruel to be kind sometimes: stop lying to yourself. By sitting here typing up stories about how things are 1% less bad today (maybe), you are not recovering. You're not even close, and you're not going to recover. You need to get this shit off your mind completely, and that means logging out and scraping the pieces of your life back together, not writing self-deluding stories about how you're getting better by staring at a screen and reading horror stories.

Thirdly, prescription drugs and the phrase "depersonalisation disorder" itself. I took a very low dose of olanzapine for 3 weeks to help me sleep and, as the doctor told me, eliminate the problem: it didn't. If anything, it just made me feel like the walking dead and question what the hell had happened to me even more. It did lessen the anxiety, but at a cost. I just didn't know what the hell I was doing anymore. I'd sit there staring at the wall and feel like I was hiding from the problem rather than addressing it. Now I'm not gonna say that drugs help nobody as that's sweeping generalization but for me it just made me feel strongly that if I kept taking them they would be more likely to cement the problem in place rather that cure it, so I threw them in the bin and did it my own way. If you need them to cope, fine, but I feel like so many of the people here taking benzos or mild doses of APs to treat their depersonalization on a regular basis have in doing so just accepted it into their lives and made it massively more difficult to get better.

With leads me to my next point: I'm of the opinion that treating this as a "disorder" at all actually makes it much more likely you won't recover. You've made it separate from yourself, it's like an affliction rather than just what it actually is, a bad mental state of constant panic. You're still you, you're not feeling too good at the moment but nothing has really changed. You have no affliction, you're fine. Likewise with depression: a person who is depressed may be in a lot of pain, but they are still the same guy whether they feel good bad or indifferent. Sadly mental illness such as this and anxiety/dp are treated like an extra limb or something and the subjects are given lots of drugs just to placate them, not make them better. Just my opinion. Remember, you are still you, nothing has really changed. This ain't a disease, no matter how much it may feel like it.

Ok, now after that long ass intro I'll get to my story  About a year and a have ago I had just a couple of pulls from a joint with some friends. You know the story... felt absolutely fucked up, wondered if it was laced etc. Everyone else was fine. Luckily it went away after about a week. Then, stupidly I decided to repeat my mistake about nine months ago, smoking a lot more in the process. At first I felt really high... but fine. Then I fell asleep and when I woke up well... you know the score. Wondering where the hell I was, my room didn't look like my room and so on.

I spent much of the next seven months in absolutely awful fear, panic and pain. I had the same thoughts as everyone on here: what if this isn't real, am I going crazy, maybe I'll never get better, it feels so bad I don't think it's possible to get better etc. I had constant thoughts I used as evidence that I was going nuts. What if I think someone's poisoning my food, I'm going to start hallucinating. I must be psychotic. I'm crazy. The fact that I was given a prescription of anti-psychotic drugs did not help in the slightest, even though it was explained to me that the dose I was taking was used to treat anxiety, not psychosis, as it was pretty much the smallest dose possible. I thought, what if they're just lying to me because they really do think I'm nuts, then that thought itself made me think I was paranoid... and so on.

If you're going through the same thing right now, TRUST ME, there is no way you're crazy. Crazy people don't ask themselves if they're crazy, simple as that. The thoughts you are having are anxious in nature, not psychotic. It's hard to believe because you're in a state of panic, but the "crazy" situation is a massive illusion. You feel so fucked up that you think you must be insane because, well, it's a good way of keeping you panicking. If you stop panicking you will stop worrying whether you are insane because it will cease to be important in any way. It's a non-issue. A red herring. The real problem is that your mind is in a constant state of shock and panic, and this is stopping you from feeling regular. And the even realer issue is that you are anxious because you've gone through huge amounts of emotional pain in your life.

I have a horrible relationship with my parents. I feel like they've never supported me my entire life, don't love me in the way I needed when I was growing up, and the nature of my relationship with my mother in particular has put me in huge amounts of pain and sadness that I still carry around with me, though I have been working my way through it. This kind of shit is your real problem. If there is even one person with DP who hasn't suffered some kind of real trauma in their life I'd be shocked. If you can focus on and work on this, you will be fine. A lot easier said than done I know, as this stuff tends to be rooted quite deep, but you can do it. You're not going crazy, you won't suffer forever if you don't want to. This anxiety is just a distraction, deal with what's really hurting you deep down inside and you can become the person you have the potential to be, who's not scared of anything and doesn't give a fuck who people think of them because they love and look after themselves. That's where I'm going, make up your mind if you are too.

So what did I do to cure myself? I basically went to Spain for an Erasmus year, which I'm halfway through, made some great friends, drank a lot of alcohol, got a job teaching English in a school, and just generally did shit other than worry about whether I was going crazy or if the world was going to end. I started to get feelings for a girl, had some arguments with people, had my money stolen etc. This is the real shit that you need to do if you want to get better, forgetting all about the existential and insanity rubbish. It doesn't matter, you're distracting yourself. When I was really bad I didn't give a fuck about any of the aforementioned things because I couldn't see past the end of my nose. Laugh, live, open yourself up. Close your laptop and stop researching everything, and if you ask me throw the Klonopin in the bin.

One practical thing that really did help me was taking herbal remedies. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my GP for that and don't know If I would have gotten through this without them. Alternative medicine might not appeal to you, it didn't appeal to me until I tried it. But if you can find a good herbalist, do it. Exercise really helps too, but you don't have to go nuts in the gym 

Don't worry about whether you're going to get better. I know it's hard but it's actually irrelevant to what you really need to do, which is sort your emotions and your relationship with yourself out. The problem with this board is that there's few recovery stories because the vast majority of people who are still here are the ones who never recovered. I had difficulty coming back here to write this because DP isn't something I really want to think about, to be honest. I've had some of THE worst times in my life the last few months and I'd love to just forget it ever happened. But I really feel for all of you here because I know how it feels and I just want to help you so much. Keep your head up. The vast majority do recover, they just don't go around telling everyone because they would rather forget and move on. It seems like there's no recovery stories because the people on here are "recovering" assways. You don't recover by analyzing every little thing and declaring "I am 30% recovered". It's impossible. You have to forget about it. Its not an affliction. It's just you, feeling bad, that's it.

If anyone has had problems with sleep, don't panic, it should resolve itself. This was the worst, and most bizarre, thing for me during the whole experience. I'm still not 100% sure, but in hindsight I think I just became hyper-aware of the normal weird subconscious shit that our mind does when we are falling asleep, and it felt like my mind was tripping out every time I went to bed. Imagining I was having a conversation with someone and then forgetting they weren't real, or imagining I was on an island and for a second I thought I was actually there, but I was still half away, if that makes any sense. Sort of like delirious. It was pretty horrific. But with time and the herbal remedies I took it gradually got back to a normal level. I still have the odd strange experience when falling asleep but it's fine. Just remember, we're entering out subconscious. It's normal for the mind to do weird stuff. We're just usually not aware of it and when we are it becomes quite unsettling.

Finally, as I know a lot of people are into existentialism here, I'll address that. It was one of my biggest problems throughout the whole thing, especially as I do philosophy in college and it was something I thought about to a certain extent anyway, though not in a practical sense. I did tons of research on things like DMT, the illusion of reality, how we are all one consciousness etc and ego is false, then got really worried about it. What if this isn't real? Oh no! But then recently I realized, who the fuck actually cares? Real, false or otherwise, life is life and will continue to be that way. It's not scary, we'll all learn when we die if perception is false, but until then there's not much point worrying about it really. This is real in the sense anything is real. If nothing is real, then real is null and void as a concept. Its a silly thing to concern yourself with. Sure, the search for knowledge is noble, but thousands of years of philosophy hasn't really brought us any closer to the meaning of life. The idea that DP is a spiritual revelation is not really true. Yes, in a sense it does teach you that life is all in the way you look at it, but it's also true that you feel "unreal" because your mind is in a state of panic and is trying to escape when there is no escape, not because you've become an enlightened being.

Ok, I hope that helped, and thanks to anyone who's stuck through my long-ass post. Apologies for the sometimes flowery language, but I want to encourage you to kick your own ass into gear  You'll notice I didn't include a list of symptoms, mostly because I think that's pretty irrelevant. Suffice to say that whatever you're experiencing, no matter how crazy or fucked up it feels, is believe it or not almost certainly caused by anxiety and not something worse. Focus on the really important things, like how you feel deep down inside, and ignore the crappy distractions, and you will get better with time  Take care of yourself, and feel free to ask me anything.


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## MSP93 (Mar 27, 2014)

PS I'm sure I've forgotten a bunch of stuff, I'll put that up in the next couple of days if I remember.


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## Guest (Dec 9, 2014)

> By sitting here typing up stories about how things are 1% less bad today (maybe), you are not recovering. You're not even close, and you're not going to recover. You need to get this shit off your mind completely, and that means logging out and scraping the pieces of your life back together, not writing self-deluding stories about how you're getting better by staring at a screen and reading horror stories.


This is a great point. Many of us have a good day and feel the need to express it- which is understandable. All this does is make it harder when we crash. Any attention to DP/DR is still attention.


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## RafinhaBrasil (Jun 22, 2014)

Whenever someone here who has DP, anxiety and panic, put the doctors prescribed antipsychotic for them in a minimum dose for sleep or anxiety, I keep thinking that everyone here has a slight schizophrenia and psychiatrists lie to us. .. or DP, can be a mild psychosis that they are dealing with anti psychotic or they think we are crazy, someone help me with these thoughts??


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## RafinhaBrasil (Jun 22, 2014)

During the beginning of my DP I felt a hyper awareness of everything that happened in my subconscious, I questioned everything, it seemed I was more aware of all thoughts that came into my mind and everything that happened around me, it seems I had a very great insight of all, I had a much more vivid sleep, I think someone who is psychotic not even come close to having this hyper consciousness ..


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## MSP93 (Mar 27, 2014)

Yep RafinhaBrasil, sounds familiar. Your brain is just hyper-switched on to everything because it's in a state of constant panic and confusion. It's crazy stuff but it's nothing to be worried about, though it may seem so.

If you had even slight schizophrenia you'd have no idea. I stumbled across a guy with schizo on facebook a couple of months ago who writes about fifty posts a day about how the doctors in his hospital are trying to kill him with seroquil, puts up random pictures of cats and goes on about alien mind control. He rambles and makes no sense, and it's clear he ACTUALLY believes all this. It made me realise that nobody with an anxiety problem like this is anything even close to that. THAT'S crazy, not DP.


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## RafinhaBrasil (Jun 22, 2014)

MSP 93 It's funny to me hahahahaha sorry, I went to a psychiatrist, perhaps the best of Brazil, 20 years working in the area, president of the national drug institute, master in pharmacology and worked in a psychiatric hospital and dealing with crazy all day when I got there he said: You? Psycho? I'm more psycho you, I lected with crazy every day and I know what I'm saying, if you are schizophrenic I tear my degree and never work, you can rest assured that you have nothing, he said he had a patient it has come talking that people wanted to steal his eyes that he had eagle eyes, and could enchergar better than everyone, after that my preoccupation with schizophrenia I left side ..


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## MSP93 (Mar 27, 2014)

Im not trying to be mean RafinhaBrasil, but the fact that you are telling me this rather indicates that you haven't left it to one side. Just accept the fact that you have irrational fears caused by panic and make a deal with yourself to focus on the real problems in your life: the demons in your past that caused you to have anxiety in the first place. Do that, whether it is through councelling or some other form of self-discovery, and there is no way you will not be fine  100% of DP is based on fears, worries and most of all emotional pain. Yes some of it is physical and sensational and it will seem very much like you are losing it, but deal with the irrational fears and the rest will follow out the door, hard though it may be to believe.

On a side note, having gone through the mental health system a bit, and from reading these boards, I think the manner in which depression and anxiety are treated in general is an absolute disgrace. I feel like in many cases the only reason people have this for years or decades is because they are lumped with a "disorder" and made to deal with it by taking lots and lots of drugs every day of their life, the fact that they are on these things only fortifying their belief that they are terribly sick and fighting an unwinnable battle. Mental health boards do not seem to have the time or give the fucks to enable people to properly heal by exploring and properly dealing with the pains in their past, so their solution is to brush them all further under the carpet by saying, "here's some powerful sedatives, take them and you may not get better but you will at least feel so numb that the anxiety will be less unbearable". It seems to me that this is the rut a lot of people on this board have got stuck in. I know they help you to cope, but it was only after feeling the unbearable pain that was there without the use of drugs and trying to properly process it that I started getting better.


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## newbie101 (Nov 13, 2014)

so true you are very smart and you probably wont have anything phase you in your amazing and bright future  Thanks! lots of inspiration !!


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## Pie25 (Jun 16, 2014)

Hey ! First of all, i'm happy for your recovery !

I'd like two kinds of advices :

1) I'm kinda stuck in the philosophical shit, especially about "Do other people have minds ?" and "Do "I" really exist ? Where do my thoughts come from ?"... I obviously know that whatever the answer is to those questions, nothing will change and life will continue... I try to distract myself as much as possible, but it keeps coming back, even though i know the answer won't change anything.
2) How not to come back on the forum? (I know it's kinda strange to ask this here, but still ), i try my best not to come back and trigger anxiety about things i wouldn't have noticed without reading, but whenever i'm totally at my lowest, i feel the need to come (though i only usually read "Road to Recovery" and "Recovery Stories")... Any help on that?

Anyway thanks in advance and once again i'm happy for you !


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## MSP93 (Mar 27, 2014)

Pie25 said:


> Hey ! First of all, i'm happy for your recovery !
> 
> I'd like two kinds of advices :
> 
> ...


1) I think you kinda gotta just come to the conclusion, "who cares"? It is what it is. There really is no reason to fear death or the nature of life or whatever. Just enjoy it, "real" or not. In any case I reckon what most people are REALLY afraid of with DP is the trauma in their past. Philosophical ruminations are a distraction.

2) I recommend finding a minigame or something that you like, or a few youtube channels (what I did) that entertain you and just force yourself to play/watch them instead whenever you feel the urge to start googling symptoms.


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## Pie25 (Jun 16, 2014)

I'm thinking "who cares" but still can't get it out of my head... Maybe i don't really believe the "who cares ?" that much, i don't know.
I don't know about the past trauma to be honest, i don't think i've always lived something as strong as a "trauma" (have a wealthy family who love me & my brother, and raised me well, i've had been through some people deaths, but like everyone, have had some accidents like breaking my arm, but like everyone once more...), but if it was a trauma i'd prolly have forgotten it i guess, but i can't find anything near a trauma :/

Sounds like a good idea though for the youtube channels


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## MSP93 (Mar 27, 2014)

I guess the "who cares" comes from not thinking about it so much and focussing.on other things.

Idk maybe Im being biased on my own experiences, people do claim that anxiety can be purely genetic and appear in people with otherwise normal, healthy lives. But to me it seems to be something that comes from a conflict with yourself and the world around you so if you were really as satisified and content with your lot as the majority of people and your mind was still employing a defence mechanism as powerful as DP that seems strange to me.


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## Guillaume (Dec 14, 2014)

Hey! congrats on the recovery, i could picture myself in many parts of your story and it feels really comforting to know some people went through the same state of mind.

i'm 24, managed to keep my job, almost done with school, seeing a girl, i dont feel panicked anymore but i still feel im pretty much anxious and it seems deep inside, well rooted in me, its keeping me depersonalized (since i was 19)

i was wondering if you ever tried meditation (if yes did it help,in what way)

also, dp started at a point where my relationship with my parents was pretty awful, did you simply talked it out with your parents, or with a therapist, how did it turned out for you?

thx

Guillaume


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## positivehope (Aug 14, 2015)

this is literally perfect and made me feel
so amazing


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