# Depersonalization since 1971



## jnsx (Feb 13, 2010)

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, 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 fourth 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 a little nervous and panicky. However I was capable of working with others in informal situations or on my own.

In my last year of high school 1968, the hippie 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 returning 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 than the old one. Earlier on, the desire was to seek God and transcend materialism, which wasn't working. This was changing, now it seemed 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. Now that I'm much older this behavior seems stupid, reckless, 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 People's 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 (perhaps laced) 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 seemed unreal and sinister, time was distorted. My perceptions of the world changed completely. 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.
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 brillantly dull and void of any goodness, like a living death. The wonderful ordinary things of life became extraordinarily bizarre. 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, . I wonder how many persons prescribed medical marijuana by doctors, will become depersonalized? No doubt it will be blamed on something else. Look on YOU TUBE or depersonalization web sites and see the number of young persons who became depersonalized from marijuana.
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I know of a number of people using medical marijuana for a few years now, but still need the prescription medicines they had before.
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http://rt.com/usa/so...-marijuana-189/
Billionare, George Soros is funding the legalization of marijuana.
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MEDICAL MARIJUANA, THE NEW SNAKE OIL?

When you look online, the list of illness and social maladies that marijuana will fix grows day by day. Some even think it's the messiah and say it will save the world. Others see it as a battle cry for revolution,so much for peace and love.
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British elitest Aldous Huxley quote;
"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution."
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The role of these 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 media's power of persuasion, even upon the professional sciences.
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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 through. 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.

After getting copies of my records, I was appalled by how they converted what I said
into some kind of pseudo-scientific petri dish terminology, combined with moral and social judgments. It was as though I was being professionally and socially depersonalized.

The Indefensible Science
My take on any useful value of psychiatry and psychology other than limited help from
medications are, entertainment / false hopes-buys time and sometimes good intentions with common sense.
But it seens similar to a cult in that you have to believe in it's power. Of course if you're desperate to get help you quickly become a believer. But don't try to question it's validity in any meaningful way. You will most likely find out how irrational and unfriendly it can be. One of the problems is that it needs to seperate from its occult
roots.

I recently read the book; Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition by David
Bakan, and read about others like Carl Jung' who are so messed up by occult nonsense
that it's no wonder psychiatry/
psychology, can be so ineffectual and absurd.

Also a year or two before my Earth People's Park experience, Northeast Kingdom Mental Health had a drop in place for teens. While there one night, another person went though some drawers and found a paper entitled "Newport Shit List", which had a number of names on it including mine. So I didn't feel I could have very much trust in them to begin with. Seeing how I had never been in any trouble. .
Its ironic that years later I became vice president of this organization. It does try to help people but at the same time it's an agent of the state that fulfills the needs of politics in multiple ways. I heard more than one psychiatrist say they were astonished by the amount of power the State entrusted to them. The profession's
chameleon like abilities are sometimes called upon to help the state out of sticky situations. I've heard state employees say they were told that the state is "never wrong" and act accordingly.

I have seen some evidence that US Military had some role in the creation of the Community Mental Health System. I heard that the three persons who strarted the local clinic were fresh out of the Army.

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 and amplified 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, 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. Common sounds such as bird songs were sharp and piercing. Visually things appeared unnaturally brilliant. Couldn't define or sense where my body was in relation 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 fluorescent 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.

One interesting aspect of depersonalization is that with this altered reality, our inner self or soul still remains intact and can see the stark "realities" of life. Normal persons seem mostly oblivious to this.

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 "professionals" 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.

Over the years I have improved, I don't know how much of that is symptom improvement or developing the muscle or techniques to cope. It can still be very difficult but life still has been good.

I've been married since 1983, have 3 children and 2 grandchildren. I still seek God, but with more caution.

SERENDIPITY STRIKES!
In the early 90's, I got a job as a disability advocate. 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 was very unpleasant, 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 People's 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 that they were communist. Humm&#8230;perhaps a Marxist Dialectic.
Order Out Of Chaos
The CIA mules and middle management may of believed that they were fighting Communism but if you look at the big picture, the plan from above. It was a chemical tool to alter the consciousness of the masses "hedonic engineering" and bring about the advent of a New Age-occult secular utopia, which will probably turn out to be a global totally administered society, based on a blend of Materialism and Occultism. A carnal spirituality

See: Stanford Research Institute's(a Tavistock Institute associate); The Changing Image of Man. The aim of the study, the authors state, is to change the image of mankind from that of industrial progress to one of "spiritualism." The study asserts that in our present society, the "image of industrial and technological man" is obsolete and must be "discarded...

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The Aquarian Conspiracy
by Marilyn Ferguson 1980
...years later with nearly an entire generation of American youth submerged in the drugs that flooded the nation's campuses, the Aquarian Conspiracy's Marilyn Ferguson is able to write:
"There are legions of [Aquarian] conspirators. They are in corporations, universities, and hospitals, on the faculties of public schools, in factories and doctors' offices, in state and federal agencies, on city councils, and the White House staff, in state legislatures, in volunteer organizations, in virtually all arenas of policy making in the country

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 direct victim of CIA.

I told this story to my brother in law, who told me that he was at Earth People's Park that same night and had smoked something that caused him psychological distress that lasted about two weeks.

I was told by an aquantance, that was in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, he 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 on the web a few years ago and copied it ------
Jim Bray: The Blog
I'm listening to Wavy Gravy being interviewed on an internet stream from
KPFA <http://kpfa.org>.Theprogram 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.
I'd say, more likely Dean and the Feds were working together.
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So drugs were being spread by the Left to soften the public to accept socialism, and then the Right employs drugs to counter them? Looks like I was caught in the crossfire.

Earth People's Park (Wavy Gravy was involved) was a project of the same network of student revolutionaries and counter culture folks operating at Berkeley, CA. They had taken over a piece of property owned by the University and built People's Park. This led to actual street wars and the National Guard was called in. These sorts of activities were erupting thoughout the country. The authorities were no doubt alarmed!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippie
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Earth People's Park
Wikepedia
Years of intensified government intelligence gathering and a series of arrests by state and federal law enforcement led to the seizure of the land in October 1990. A pair of park residents sold ten ounces of park-grown marijuana to an undercover narcotics agent for $500, introduced by a park resident turned paid informant.
This event gave the federal government probable cause to seize the land, evict everyone still living there, and to destroy any structures on the property. After drug forfeiture proceedings filed in US District Court (Burlington Vt. 1990) pursuant to 21 U.S.C. Sec. 881(a)(7), the 592 acres (2.40 km2) was eventually conveyed to the State of Vermont for use as publicly-owned state forest lands.

Originally destined for sale by the federal government, substantial unique natural resources were discovered allowing the land to escape sale under a provision in the forfeiture laws. After negotiations with the US Attorney's office state officials, including the office of then governor Howard Dean, the Vermont Land Trust, and other agencies, an agreement was signed to give the land to the state of Vermont. This respected the park founder's original intention of 'public' ownership of the land.
research -United Nations ,Agenda 21

Land turned over to State of Vermont, now Black Turn Brook State Forest on October 5, 1994, in a ceremony attended by Governor of Vermont Howard Dean, along with Wavy Gravy, Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's, along with representatives of other groups, including early park resident Laura Kross-(who had been charged with drug sales while living at Earth People's Park} on behalf of Earth People's Park Inc., title to the property was formally transferred. Today, the former park remains open to recreational visitors for hunting, fishing, and undeveloped hike-in type camping activities. It is now shown on area maps as Black Turn Brook State Forest, and is managed by the Vermont Dept. of Forests and Parks. Camping and other recreational activities are permitted under that Vermont's 'primitive use camping' rules, although vehicle access from the state highway is limited.
Many years ago, before I was aware of these things, I was delivering some firewood to a guy and in conversation he told me that he had been one of the people who had started Earth People's Park and that he had to move out because of the craziness going on there.
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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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Taking Stock: From Tavistock to Woodstock
By Iona Miller
The counterculture failed to realize that in adopting the 'spiritual' drug, they were inadvertently "sleeping with the enemy", the CIA. The therapeutic promise of the drug was lost on the conservative government. However, it still gave rise to the Human Potential movement and mind spas like Esalen, which also had a root in CIA experiments in extraordinary human potential, parapsychology, and creativity. As with many panaceas, the substance is both a cure and a poison - a dream to some, a nightmare to others.

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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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on Google Books website
Surviving Evil: CIA Mind Control Experiments in Vermont
By Karen Wetmore
Manitou Communications, Inc., Jun 2, 2014
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Books:
The Aquarian Conspiracy
by Marilyn Ferguson 1980
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Storming Heaven:
LSD and the American Dream
by Jay Stevens
http://stormingheaven.com/
email reply from
Jay Stevens to you 1/21/14
Jerry
Very interesting. I've encountered more than a few of these stories.
I live in southern vermont, so tales of what happened up north have made there way to me.
Jay
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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/

Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/

Cannabis: An apology

====================
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## luctor et emergo (May 22, 2015)

Who are you? This is an amazing story if it's true. Haven't I seen this post on another forum?


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## TDX (Jul 12, 2014)

I also had a deja vu after reading this.


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## luctor et emergo (May 22, 2015)

http://www.dpselfhelp.com/forum/index.php?/topic/20095-forty-years-of-dp/

http://www.dpselfhelp.com/forum/index.php?/topic/20091-45-years-of-depersonalization-with-a-twist/


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## WithYourSigh (Nov 25, 2012)

Indeed, I had read this story here in the past as well, about a year ago. Seems suspicious.


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## jnsx (Feb 13, 2010)

Yes I did re post . After 5 years I thought it was buried and not getting any traffic. This is a honest account to the best of my ability.

jnsx

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## devin44 (Nov 19, 2014)

Well, I for one found it a 'great' read, very compelling. Hope you're doing well these days.


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