# Suffering for nearly a month now. Existential thoughts and the brain freak me out so much.



## Guest (May 15, 2016)

Hi folks

I'm Joe from London, UK. I'm 19 years old and my DP/DR seems to effect my ability to write well and coherently, but here's what's been going on:

So i've been suffering for about a month ever since i tried Zoloft. I took it for three days but it gave me some kind of seratonin syndrome like effects on the third night. A couple of days after discontinuing, i got DP/DR. It came so suddenly! I had a small panic attack and then it just came on so hard. It was extremely disturbing.

I thought after a couple of weeks i was getting better but now i'm way worse than i've ever been. This week has been horrible. These last few days have been truly the worst.

My initial symptoms were:

- Feeling completely numb

- Feeling detached from my emotions, like i couldn't fathom or understand at all what they were

- Not feeling as if i recognised myself or anyone

- A hollow-like feeling in my legs

- A strange 'vertigo' feeling when i tried to fall asleep

- Feeling like i'm 'in a dream'.

These things got a little better. Now they're worse. I think things get worse when I drink alcohol. So i need to cut that out for a while. That sucks because I'm going to university in a few months and alcohol is reall good for making friends i think. I had a great night last night, and completely forgot myself and my DP/DR for a short while. Until this morning. Now i feel like crap again.

My problems this week have been of a very metaphysical and existential nature. It started when i was drunk one sunday night and began thinking about my brain. I've always been kinda grossed out and freaked out by the idea of the brain, but this got quite persistent. I was thinking things like 'is that all i am? Just a brain? How can everything i am and love and feel and know be down to this weird fleshy thing in my head?'. I looked at myself in the mirror and other people and became freaked out by the fact that we're all just gross sacks of meat and bones and blood roaming this big rock that flies round the sun. A couple of days later i was walking down the street and listening to music and just began to doubt all my senses. I started thinking things like 'what IS my vision and how do i comprehend visual information? What the hell is this music and what allows me to enjoy it? What does it mean to enjoy anything?'. I started to ponder the sheer meaninglessness of life and everything. This continued for a couple of days until this Friday night where is got MUCH worse. I hadn't drunk or anything (i did the night before i think) but i was trying to fall asleep and suddenly these thoughts started to get to me again. But then it started to get more about consciousness in general. I started thinking things like 'what are thoughts? what allows me to have them?'. Thoughts seem meaningless and it freaks me the hell out. I can't explain it very well but i've sorta been able to relate to some others who have posted that they feel 'too aware of their own conciousness'. I feel like that. I feel like life relies on an illusion which you're not meant to know about and that i've found out about it and done irreversible damage by doing so. I feel like i can't unsee something. I'm really not explaining myself very well, i'm sorry, but the general idea is that i'm weirded out by my own existence. As a result, i'm back in quite a heavy DP/DR state. I can't distract myself for more than like 5 seconds because something will pull me back to those existential thoughts about my own thoughts. Friday night, i went to bed at about 11pm but didn't sleep until 3am. I couldn't get to sleep. These thoughts just stopped my mind from drifting off. I guess i eventually got there in the end, but it was very horrible. It got to a point that night where i would go down a certain thought path that didnt involve the existential and metaphysical thoughts and would start to drift off, only to physically jolt awake later, upon rediscovering those horrible existential and metaphysical thoughts again. I had to be up yesterday at 6:30am to catch a train to see my sister, so i got no sleep at all. I managed to sleep on the train for an hour. I got drunk last night so got to sleep pretty easy, but woke up at around 9 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep. Being hungover hasn't helped much. I was listening to music that i know i really love but kept questioning it from a metaphysical angle again. Like i do with everything. DP/DR seems to ruin literally everything. The existential thoughts are with me all of the time and they don't leave me alone. I don't know how to enjoy anything anymore. I hate being concious of my own consciousness.

My symptoms now:

- Constant existential thoughts and constant questioning and doubt of everything

- Fear of hearing any mention of words like 'brain', 'mind' or 'conciousness' etc.

- Feeling 'detached' from my body

- Anxiety is much worse, at some points acute and unbearable

- Confusion and fear of losing touch with reality.

I'm getting desperate and starting to lose hope. I feel like there's no way out of this. The thoughts I get plague me every minute of every day now and sometimes I don't even think it's DP/DR anymore. It sucks because a lot of these things seem to be the sorts of things people who take LSD feel. I knew that LSD would probably shatter my mind somehow so that's why I never took it. Now my mind is shattered because I took Sertraline (Zoloft). I guess I also smoked a lot of weed in the past year. I really cut down for a couple of months before my DP/DR, and the couple of weeks beforehand I was completely clean. I didn't dare smoke whilst taking the medication because I knew that would be dangerous. I smoked two weeks or so after my initial DP/DR came on which I knew wasn't a good idea but I was kinda drunk and not feeling so bad then. The dreaded existential thoughts weren't plaguing me either.

I just want to sink back into life as I knew it before DP/DR. To stop being so concious. This really really sucks and I really can't see how it could get any better. I've suffered with anxiety and depression for years and each year it gets worse. Last year, I was going to kill myself and got put in hospital twice because of that. Now I just feel empty. I do sort of wish I was dead again at the moment, but it's nothing like last year. Those were emotional problems I was having. Now I don't even feel like I have emotions. I don't know what they are. Living is acutely painful right now. I have no real way to describe it. I'm a neurotic as hell person and very anxious by nature. I don't know how to recover from mental illness. I feel like I don't respond to positivity at all and never have. I'm lost and very far away from home. I'm starting to cry as I write. But it doesn't mean anything. I don't know what crying is. Everything about the human experience is so arbitrary and absurd. When I say I want to 'feel OK' I don't even know if I do because I don't know what that means. Nothing means anything. How can thoughts exist and what are they and why do they scare me? It seems like getting better and even writing this is futile. I can't distract myself because I just become aware of how I'm distracting myself and the fear starts to set in again and the thoughts come rushing in.

I don't know what to do.


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## Guest (May 15, 2016)

Hi

thanks for replying. The quote you have written down by Frederic Flach is really nice. Whenever I come across someone else on here whom I can relate to, it makes me feel a little better, albeit only for a few seconds. Can I ask whereabouts in London you are? nothing weird, just curious. These existential thoughts are my worst symptom and i'm really stressed out by them every minute of the day. It's torture. I'm not going to get much sleep tonight and i know it's going to suck.

i've been to that part of the forum and i suppose it's somewhat helpful, but my memory is pretty bad at the moment and i just get caught up in my thinking again. It's not nice.


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## just_liviu85 (Jul 1, 2016)

How are you ????


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## Tomisahoss (Feb 22, 2018)

I cant even begin to describe how similar our experiences are. My mind is plagued by the exact same malevolent breed of thoughts. Its absolutely uncanny. Id love chat about it together some time. I dont want to scare you, but Ive been dealing with it for about 2 years now. It does get easier, I promise. It took me 2 months to even leave my house after the colossal panic attack that triggered my dpdr. Now I am hanging out with friends and working again. The thoughts dont bother me as much as they used to because I realized, things are perfectly fine as they are. We are brains, sure. But what else would "we" be if things werent this way? Its a useless thought. It only serves to terrify us. If things were any other way, we would be asking the same exact question. Its all good dude. Hit me up!


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## GwithDP (Mar 14, 2018)

Hi Joe, 
Thanks for posting and thanks for sharing your experience. 
I want to let you know that a lot of what you've described is exactly how I would describe my feelings of DP/DR. I also experienced a lot of anxiety around anything to do with consciousness, reality, etc. 
Even jokes about the matrix, or the Truman show etc, were very triggering for me.

I suffered from bad symptoms for about 3 months, and then less so for another 3 months. Now its been 7 - 8 months and I feel almost completely recovered. 
You can recover! 
The brain needs space and time to heal. 
Do what you need to do to feel safe, and keep to routine. 
The biggest thing for me too was finding space for positive emotions - I adopted a kitten to help me to do this. 
I also exercised regularly. 
I know everyone is different, but I believe the brain will start to heal when it feels safe to do so.

Hang in there, the brain can change! 
Neuroplastiicty is our friend here.

Peace x x


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## Johqnnq (Mar 14, 2018)

Im same. Life doesent make sense to me anymore. If someone wants someone to relate contact me.


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## JayB (Apr 6, 2015)

Joe's post has always been the one I can relate the most.

It's not simply thoughts about consciousness. There's an hyperawareness of thoughts and a sense of strangeness about everything that goes through your mind. The awareness of the ability of thinking itself is disturbing because it feels strange or different than it used too. Have you ever felt weird about the human body or perceiving humans as aliens or strange creatures (which is derealization)? Take that feeling/state of mind and apply it to your consciousness and inner world in general. That is pure depersonalization. Instead of feeling like a newborn on earth, you feel like a newborn in your own head. But you can't really reassure yourself because how can you be certain that things are the same as before? You can't remember how you used to experience consciousness before dp. You just have to accept that's how things are which is incredibly hard because the insane amount of dread and anxiety you feel once the obsessions have been ingrained in your mind.


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