# Wrong Diagnosis?



## Relevance (Nov 22, 2007)

Hey everyone, let me start by saying how relieved I am that there seem to be at least a few forums out there for this. As much as research can help, I find I learn best from the experiences of others and open discussion.

Now, I have not been diagnosed with Depersonalization or Derealization yet, but I believe I have a pretty valid reason to suspect I've been diagnosed improperly.

You see, I am only 17, female, and I come from a multi cultured family. My mother and my biological father are from Central America, while my step-dad (and my two half brothers) have Czechoslovakian background. 
My family has moved around a lot and so there really never seemed to be any time to assess my situation. My mother would always promise to take me to therapy, but it never happened. The worst problem was that when I tried to seek help no one believed that I anything was wrong with me because I act quite normal and passive the majority of the time and seem to have perfect self-control.

Now, my explanation is long, but I give it in order to explain myself, my dilemma, and get some inside opinions and suggestions on my situation.
I look forward to sharing with you guys and providing any support I can.

Last year I became very aware of my problems. I suffered a few medical complications and fell into a deep depression out of feelings of helplessness. As time progressed I begin to have nightmares and flashbacks, strange episodes of paranoia, etc, etc. This was the first time I had close friends, and I realized, growing more and more disturbed with time, that the way I have lived since I was a young preteen wasn't normal. I felt detached from the world, as if it wasn't real. I had a self-effacing tendency where I would often forget I was a person and just see myself as some sort of objective observer of everyone around me. I realized my only motivations for doing anything had been for the benefit of my family and now that life had settled I had little desire for anything.
And things got worse. I became increasingly aware of my lack of "functioning". People all seem to do things so automatically. To me, even something as simple as hugging someone requires an analysis of the original impulse to hug them, the situation, the likely effects and weather I feel "stable" and "controlled" enough to carry out the action. I have to talk myself into getting up in the morning. I forget I have to eat unless I'm reminded. When I begin to "brood" in group situations I find that I forget that I am -present- and noticeable in the situation.
Then came the detachment from my own feelings. For long periods of time, even though I logically -know- I love someone, I don't seem able to -experience- my own feelings! Very seldom I'll break through this for a few moments and really -feel- it but my inability to express anything quickly drains me of any motivation and I slip back into my brooding detachment.
As time passed, I suffered an even stranger and more disturbing dilemma. I slowly began to lose my sense of "relevance". Everything seems so relative to everything else in this world. The size of one thing is relative to the size of another, the details of an event are relative to the perspective of each person, etc - and I just can't seem to grasp my relevance to anything. As I begin to feel more and more irrelevant, I begin to feel less and less real. As if I exist in some strange abstract capacity.
During this time, I experienced a lot of conflict with my family, and I ended up being kicked out of my house.
I wandered around for a long time, but no matter how hard I tried to succeed it always seemed like something was in my way.
Suddenly, I'd find myself walking downtown and trees, people, cars would all look foreign and surreal to me. Sometimes I'd be filled with this irrational sense of fear. Sometimes I'd lose "connection" to my body and be able to direct it properly. I walked into walls, and people frequently in this state. Once I walked straight into traffic. I experienced a car accident in my youth during a very traumatic time in my life (domestic violence, and all that jazz) and this experience left me completely mortified. I'd often find myself feeling so lost that I'd eventually forget I existed and lie motionless for hours upon hours with my mind entirely blank. Even out of this state, I could never keep track of time, and somehow despite it I was always able to respond and interact with other people and maintain clarity on how things actually are. 
Then there was my incoherency of thought. Words, thoughts, language would start jumbling up and slipping away from me vaguely, like that sensation you get when you see but don't see something out of the corner in your eye. 
Things kept getting worse. I found myself isolating friends, losing jobs, letting time slip past me. I had this unrelenting anxiety about all the things I HAD to DO, and yet I seemed to unaware of time to actually do these things. 
The worst thing was, I could never really explain any of it, even to myself, so I wouldn't dare try explaining it to everyone else. I questioned my sanity constantly and feared being insane or being mistaken for it.
Ironically, all this experience led me to a lot of philosophical insights about life that were often discouraged as madness. 
Eventually, I went to see my doctor. She gave me a short checklist, I filled it out, and she decided I was depressed and prescribed me serotonin focused anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medication, classified me as clinically depressed with a social anxiety disorder, gave me some sleeping pills for the nightmares and sent me home.
Everything got WORSE.
I felt dead.
When I found myself drowning in the tub and too apathetic to save myself, my logical mind snapped into action and I slowly rose out of the bath and crawled onto the ground. Hours of thought later, I decided to quit the pills.
When I lost my last job this year, I found myself desperately wishing I could just leave my body, my life, and float into complete abstract detachment. I was fighting really hard to at least -feel- though, even if it was only within myself from a distance, but it made things harder.
I wandered the streets for hours, took a tonne of busses. When I realized it was night time and I didn't know where I was I stumbled to my mother's house.
After a few hours of being unable to get me to talk, she took me to my doctor.
She wouldn't reconsider the diagnosis, even though I tried to explain to her that I did NOT feel fatalistic, that I did NOT feel suicidal, that I was NOT socially anxious and how things actually were, but she just told me that depression was normal in kids my age, that we all felt like no one got us but really it was the same thing.
She prescribed me Wellbutrin X L. I came to the sudden realization that I had a tonne of debts, a tonne of angry friends, a handful of worried ones, I (Having been a A+ student all my life) had forgotten entirely about my schooling, and I had been wandering around for a year that to me felt like a week at most. I also realized that whatever this was, it was ruining everything around me. I came back home.

The Wellbutrin XL, a dopamine-inhibitor, has helped me at least by increasing my motivation. This led to some pretty bad things too, though. At times I experienced this severe anger with myself for my state. I used words like "irrelevance", "non-person", "abstract", "disconnected" "lacking in self", I used a tonne of crazy metaphors but nothing made sense to anyone...and when 'd get angry, I'd want to FORCE myself out of it. I'd take a knife to my paintings, hack at my hair, start fights with people I loved for the sake of being provoked to feel something.

Ironically, it was my developed philosophies on life that helped me through. Because it seemed, as crazy as I felt, I could still be completely rational, and more insightful than ever before, when helping out my friends. And one of the things I told my friend was to love herself and believe she deserved everything she thought others deserved- and she shot it right back at me.
This inspired me to begin trying to connect to the people I love again.
It hasn't worked out really, but they know I'm trying, and they're trying to help.

A week ago, a friend sent me a link of symptoms and signs. I read them in amazement! It sounded exactly like how I felt -inside-. When I said so, my friend told me they were the symptoms of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and that my nightmares and flashbacks had been the inspiration for relating me to C PTSD. I began to do research- even read quite a few articles that confirmed that many people who have this disorder, especially young people, are not properly diagnosed because the effects often occur years after when the incident feels "irrelevant", and that they've often been blocked out. 
As I continued to read, I came upon related disorders that are sometimes mixed in, and I landed on Depersonalization.
"Depersonalization". The very word struck me as everything I felt was -wrong- with me.
I looked it up. I found myself reading in a logical concise explanation everything I had ever been trying to explain to my friends with metaphors and jumbled frustrated thoughts.

I think it's very possible that I have been diagnosed incorrectly.

I ask you humbly, if you have any suggestions or opinions on this situation, to take the time to tell me.

Thanks in advance!


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## Cam (Dec 13, 2006)

Welcome.


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## Relevance (Nov 22, 2007)

Thank you.


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