# Recovered from the worst of DP/DR for the second time



## aworthycause (Mar 22, 2010)

Hey guys... Maybe someone remembers me. I haven't visited DPSH in the last several months. But I didn't want to be one of the members who just disappears after getting better without telling the community.

A bit about me: Got episodic and then chronic severe DP/DR at age 15-16 (not drug induced). Suffered deeply for years and couldn't function at all. Whatever symptom you can think of, I had it severely. Mostly recovered from DP/DR symptoms gradually around age 21-24. That time the key to me was to stop fighting it and realizing it was all rooted in fear. After recovering from the worst of it I could no longer remember what it even had been like. Several years later, 2 years ago, I got over-confident in my mental stability, succumbed to peer pressure and started smoking weed for the first time in my life. That triggered a psychotic episode one night, and some DP/DR in the days and weeks after. Around 6 months later I started doing trauma treatment to treat the anxiety/post traumatic symptoms that I'd had for many years. After a couple of months of that I started feeling better and worse at the same time. Got near-psychotic symptoms reminiscent of the weed-triggered episode and also DP/DR symptoms again. Suffered from DP/DR from about August last year until around spring this year. Had loads of panic attacks for a while and all sorts of alarming symptoms.

I thought I might be stuck with my second bout of DP/DR for a long time... but I'm now better again. I still suffer from some depression, anxiety, and low level DP/DR symptoms, such as poor memory and sometimes 2D-ish vision or not fully believing I'm part of a physical world, but the "unbearable" symptoms are gone.  My life is quite screwed up in many ways, mostly because of my DP/DR ruining my teen years and young adulthood but these days I often feel okay about just being alive.

Shit that helped me this time, possibly: low dosage olanzapine (good for sleep and against panic), yoga, meditation, journalling, self-compassion, listening to my body and mind's signals (such as not playing certain video games when I felt it was making unreality worse, etc) not dwelling on DP/DR - reading DPSH daily might fuel the fire.


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