r/Depersonalization

I recovered and I want help people recover now. I got mine from weed it was freaking brutal man. 5 years later here I am recovered.

Hello everyone, I'm 18, and I've had the dprd for around 3 months. It has caused so many issues for me in the last semester of my senior year of high school, and I cannot do this going into college. Because of this, I'm setting up a 30-day protocol to help me get rid of this evil disorder, but what does it involve?

Limiting screen time to 2.5 hours daily

Have to go on at least a 20min daily walk without a screen

Take GABA, L-theanine, Magnesium Glycinate, Vitamin C, Lysine, and Glutamine every morning.

Work out 3x a week

Read for at least 30 minutes a day

Meditate for 30 minutes a day

Utilise a 7-day water fast in the 2nd week

Avoid: Forums on DPRD, Caffeine, drugs, alcohol, negative mindset on my mental state, doomscrolling

I will give an update on my mental health after the 30 days are over, on improvements, struggles, and if I'm cured or not. I'll also be starting on May 20th, 2026, and ending on June 19th, 2026. See you all soon and hopefully better!

So... Since I don't know when, I feel disconnected from my body, never really cared how it looked. I often forget how my face looks like so I have to check the mirror to remember.

When I'm crying (I have depression, so I feel REALLY SAD) and I look in the mirror I instantly stop crying. I just can't believe I look like that, specially when crying. And it's not about aesthetics, I just can't believe that's "me".

Then I forget why I was crying, I remember it, I don't feel like I finished crying but I don't feel as sad as I was before and look, I'm still very sad but at the same time I feel...nothing.

If you understand me, please comment.

I’m 26 and I’m honestly just reaching a breaking point with how my brain is "installed." I don’t know if it’s ASD, Schizoid traits, OCD, or some massive DPDR loop, but I am so exhausted from the effort of trying to be "human" every single day.

It feels like I’m constantly viewing life from this weird, top-down X-ray perspective. I can’t just eat dinner or fold a towel.

When I’m folding laundry, my brain immediately spirals into the global logistics of how the fabric was made, the carbon emissions from shipping it, and the total absurdity of why humans even exist in these cramped little boxes. I have absolutely no background noise filter.

Lately, the visualization has been getting worse. I’ll be in my apartment and instead of seeing a home, I see a stacked box, and I start visualizing the plumbing and electrical wires through the walls. I look at my neighbors or even my family and I don't see "people," I just see biological machines that are "recharging" or "consuming fuel." It makes me feel like a ghost in the machine or some kind of alien experiment.

The weirdest part is that I’m usually a really jumpy, flinchy person. But when these "X-ray" episodes hit, I become terrifyingly detached. I feel like I could hold a snake or a giant spider and feel nothing because nothing feels real anyway.

When I’m driving like this, I get these intense urges to just crash into a building.. not because I want to d1e, but because I’m so desperate to feel a "collision" with reality to prove that I’m actually here and have an effect on the world.

I’ve been asking "what do normal people do?" since I was 12 years old. I work a high-pressure sales job and I’m good at it, but it’s all manual-drive. I’m just simulating being a person while I observe everything from ten feet above. I feel like I’m playing a character (which I understand sales is a performance) but I’m playing the character of a good employee. And they’re buying it.

I’m astonished at how easy some things are to fake, and how social interactions work, and how you can just choose the right dialogue options and move up in a company. Like a game.

Has anyone else dealt with this? I have posted about this years ago, I’ve been treated and therapy and what feels like everything ever, and I just want to be able to eat dinner without the X-ray vision and the existential dread.

I don’t know how much longer I can do this, every time I think it’s gone it comes back. Thank you for reading.

I feel like I don’t care anymore about anything in my life. I still feel my emotions but only when they’re strong, i’m mostly blank. I feel like nothing is probably real anyway and we’re all going to die sooner or later. My brain is foggy, my once racing thoughts disappeared, whenever I get asked questions I get stupid, panic and laugh then answer wrong. My mind is just blank I don’t even remember why and what I wanted to write here anymore. My memory was always bad but never this bad I can’t read a sentence and remember what it said anymore. I can’t concentrate, i’m daydreaming nonstop and when I try to pay attention I forget it within 2 minutes. I pinch myself whenever I feel like nothing is real and I’m dreaming. I used to be smart enough to pass and now I can’t get myself to care about the fact I’m failing high school. How do I stop this before it affects my future, is it too late?

I've seen this occasionally on this subreddit, and it's my specific case as well. Does anyone have an answer? Thanks in advance, and sorry if it's poorly written—I'm a Spanish speaker.

Hi everyone
I wanted to ask something that used to scare me a lot during my DPDR episodes.

Sometimes during severe derealization/depersonalization, I would feel strangely disconnected from other people and occasionally even feel “different” or somehow superior to them. I hated these thoughts and they made me panic. I kept thinking: “Am I a narcissist? Am I becoming schizophrenic?”

The feeling was not enjoyable at all. It actually made me feel lonely, emotionally detached, and guilty. It was more like I felt separated from normal human connection rather than truly believing I was better than others.

Now, after a long time, I don’t really have these thoughts anymore and I see myself equal to everyone else. But I still wonder if anyone else with DPDR experienced something similar during intense dissociation.
Did anyone else go through this?

Can derealization or disassociation make you feel disoriented i dont know how to describe the feeling but sometimes iam in my house or parents house and i feel its weird like this is not my house or im lost in a way but i know where jam and i cant tell everything but it makes me think im going crazy its so scary

I first noticed what I thought were symptoms of DDD around 7 years ago. Used to think they were severe anxiety attacks. Trauma from SA was the trigger for these moments.

Nowadays I feel derealization so frequently and I appear to have the opposite reaction to the episodes than most. I experience a tingly brain, along with feeling "lifted" out of my body. I absolutely love these episodes, and in fact I have previously tried to deliberately trigger the sensations.

It's hard to explain, as I feel that maybe my symptoms are something different than DDD? But the sense of relief and freedom from the real world give me so much peace.

Curious to hear other thoughts...

My boyfriend has always been a anxious and sensitive person, (not as in emotional and cries a lot, he hates being emotional in front of me. Just sensitive toward his surroundings) but over the past few months something has changed and I genuinely don’t know what’s going on or how to help him.

For context: he has a “good” life objectively. He goes to university, gets very good grades, has a really fun and impressive job that benefits his future career, works out regularly, eats well without being obsessive about it, etc. So externally he seems balanced and functional.

But emotionally and mentally he’s become extremely fragile lately. Even very slight criticism, or sometimes completely neutral comments, can make him spiral because he interprets them very personally. In those moments he sometimes starts stuttering badly and struggles to form sentences at all. I’ve seen him become so overwhelmed that tears were running down his face, even tho he hates when i see him cry.

The thing that worries me most is that hes muttering to himself out loud very intensely, almost like he’s talking to another person in the room. Sometimes he says things like “three times… I just have to say it three times and then…” and other times he angrily says things like “stop” or “get your shit together!” He becomes visibly distressed while doing it. he also doesn’t get where the “three” thing is coming from and why he feels the need to say it.

He told me that he feels like there’s a version of himself that used to feel normal, happy and connected to life, and now there’s this “broken” version that he can’t get out of. But he says it does NOT feel like separate personalities or entities both feel like “him.”

I’m autistic and have ADHD myself, and we both strongly suspect he may also be autistic and has maybe been masking heavily his whole life. To me it almost feels like some kind of extreme burnout, shutdown, anxiety spiral, or loss of ability to cope emotionally, but I really don’t know.

Another confusing thing: sometimes when he stutters and I tell him I genuinely can’t understand him, he’ll insist that he DID say the sentence clearly and that I “must have understood.” But later, when I asked him calmly about it, he admitted that he also noticed himself stuttering and knew he wasn’t speaking clearly.

I don’t know if this sounds like autistic burnout, severe anxiety, OCD, dissociation, chronic stress, or something else entirely. I’m mainly asking because I want to understand what could possibly be happening and how I can support him without making things worse.

Title: I feel like I’m mentally disappearing inside my own life

I don’t even know how to explain what’s been happening to me for the past few months. I feel like I’m forgetting who I am. Some days genuinely feel unreal, like I’m living in a dream and just moving through it without feeling connected to anything. I barely sleep. I don’t feel rested anymore.

I live in a very controlled environment. My parents monitor everything I do. I’m not allowed to go out freely, meet friends, wear what I want, eat what I want, or even spend my own money without being questioned. I work and earn well, but I still feel like I own nothing in my life. Even small things feel controlled and watched all the time.

Every weekend has become pressure about marriage and meeting new people when I’m already mentally exhausted. I don’t want marriage right now. I want freedom. I want to travel, make memories, meet people naturally, experience life, and figure myself out before being pushed into another responsibility.

Meanwhile everyone around me moved on with life. Friends got married, moved abroad, got busy with work, and I feel left behind emotionally. I keep looking for validation and emotional connection outside because I don’t feel emotionally understood where I am.

The stress is affecting me physically too. My hair is falling, I feel exhausted constantly, and I don’t even recognize myself anymore. I feel trapped between wanting a completely different life and not knowing how to even begin changing mine.

Has anyone else experienced feeling emotionally trapped inside a life that looks “normal” from outside? How did you start rebuilding yourself mentally when you felt completely stuck?

Finally after years I was able to recover and I’m so relieved. I made a promise I’d come back and help others if I ever found a way out. I have started some peptides I think those might’ve contributed to my recovery but I think it was mostly other stuff.

If anyone needs advice or help I’m here and I promise it gets better just trust the process.

I did LSD twice once in May and once in October. The first trip in May was actually really nice. It was light, calm, no crazy hallucinations or anything. I was just enjoying myself the whole time and it only lasted like 3–4 hours. Nothing scary happened and honestly I thought “people overreact about bad trips.”

Then October happened

That trip lasted almost 12 hours and it completely overwhelmed me. I had my first panic attack that day. I also smoked OG during it, and ever since then, smoking gives me panic attacks too.

It’s been almost 8 months now and honestly I still don’t feel like myself since that last trip. People kept telling me “it’ll get better with time” and while some things improved a little, it still feels like I’m stuck at the same mental altitude most days.

My dreams feel way too real now, like sometimes I wake up confused because it felt like it actually happened. And every evening I get this random anxiety because my panic attack started around sunset time, so now even the outside sky sometimes triggers that feeling again.

I was shivering a lot during the trip too, and now sometimes I twitch in my sleep. Before all this I used to sleep so peacefully. I also stopped smoking because I started getting this horrible feeling that I was losing my mind or that nothing around me was real. Like logically I knew everything was real, but my brain wouldn’t stop making me question it and it got too intense.

Not smoking weed/hash honestly did help a bit though. The panic got worse whenever I smoked, so I cut it off completely.

Now I get panic attacks pretty easily and tiny things scare me way more than before. Has anyone else gone through this after LSD/weed? Did it eventually go away? What actually helped?

Idk whats wrong with me, it feels like there is two me's. Like one me is a dumb guy who does physical stuff and i js sit back and think and watch. I feel like its brain fog becasue i can remember key moments of my day if I try. I can remember I played uno today for example. I feel like im just trying to make excuses for myself but then I dont and i go back and forth. I obviously woudn't talk to anyone in real life about this. That's why im using a account that i think is anonymous. If it just made me uncomfortable i wouldnt come here. Its effecting my work and it might make me loose my chance to go to college. When I search what im feeling it comes up with derealization or depersonolization. But i can reconize my self in a mirror. I'll look and think "okay thats me". It feels the same as looking at anyone else. But I feel disconnected from my body. It feels like my voice is coming from a thin wall. When im in a conversation it feels like watching someone else have it. It also feels like my eyes are behind my actual eyes. Am i js lazy or dumb. I think im just dumb but dumb people cant realize their dumb. Am i coping with being dumb?????? Am i just tierd??? I dont want to say i have anything more than brain fog because I feel like im taking away from the people who actually have smth bad like depersonolization. But if I dont then why do I feel like im not controlling anything. Even while im typing this. I feel so selfish for typing all this. Sorry to anyone who has these things. But i swear stuff js come out my mouth and i dont think until im alone. Like when im in a room full of people im LITTERALLY an air head. I feel like a mass of smoke and eye balls floating in my skull. but not litteraly but also litteraly???? But wierdly enough i dont really mind any of this that much. I mean I mind it because I dont know WHY im like this but i feel like if i did i would be fine. I also dont like that its effecting my work. Do feal relatively fine from what ive seen other people say bc i accepted it? I remember when I 1st started feeling like this 3 or 4 years ago. I was in middle school. I stared crying, so does that mean i just got used to it. I feel like if i switch to how it used to be it'll feel wierd. Am i self centered for typing all of this????? I feel like im trying to sound like a main character of an anime. Or that im trying to make an excuse for being dumb/lazy. Or that im only acting like this BECAUSE Ive seen the symptoms. BUT IVE BEEN DOING THIS BEFORE. I remember the last time i felt normal was either a year or 3 ago/ w or 1 grades ago. I had a big nosebleed and i can't remeber the last time i didnt feel air headed. Does the nosebleed have anything to do with this??? DO I need a theripist?? Even if i do i deffinitly wouldn't get one. I feel more grounded after "Good" conversations but after bad ones I feel fogged up again. Like clouded glasses. If it was a pint systom a good is +1 to being normal and a bad is -2.5 away. I feel like my thoughts get sharper somethimes but im never fully there. The max is like a 50 or a 75???? Dreams and real life feel the same when i think about them in a memory. I realized this right now. If you read allat then thx. I kind of js wrote ts because I heard writing down your feelings is a good thing. Ive heard it so many times but if i wrote it on paper i would js destroy whateer i wrote. Even when i write "destroy whateer i wrote" I feel like im trying to be edgy. BUT ITS TRUE. whats the point of writing it down?????? What do you do with the paper?????????? Destroying it is basically the same as not writing anything. I live in an appartment so if I hid it people would probably still find it. But its clearly doing something. I wrote all of this. Ill probably delete this because after i wrote it all I realized im just writing my thoughts down. Reddit is a place for question not diaries. Also sorry for the typos.

(I added this later) Also i heard some symtoms can be caused by truama. I dont have anything to be traumatized about. Ive heard gender dysphoria which i dont think i have either. Maybe strees????? but what do i have to be streesed about??? school work? EVERYONE HAS THAT.

Have been on this subreddit now for some time and o really love getting to know you all and I am feeling definitely feeling less lonely after reading everyone’s experiences.

Alongside all the other ‘great’ things we experience from bp, I have been really struggling with feelings of derealisation for the past one and a half year. I experience every minute of every day.

In the mildest form, it feels like I am dreaming or experiencing my life as a series I am watching. In the most intense form, it feels like I died and I am experiencing my what life could have been.

I feel no control over what I say or do, you know, I hear myself talking before I even realize I've said it. Even when cycling in traffic, I sometimes don’t register stuff, which can be quite dangerous. My memory has really gotten worse too. Partly because my cognitive capacity is under pressure, and partly because entire situations pass me by without me even sufficiently experiencing them in the moment.

I feel like have tried everything: getting off my meds, getting on other meds, less phone use, better sleep schedule, more whole foods etc etc but nothing seems to work. I think it started while having hypomanic episodes but lately I have become more depressive because all experiences no longer feel real.

I am curious, has anyone experienced this outside of specific stressful periods? so for a longer duration of time?
And if so, what did or didn’t work for you? How did you manage it?

Being part of this community makes the disorder much more bearable, thank you all❤️

Would love to hear your thoughts and experiences

Sorry if the title is unclear and if this is not the right place to post this.

I (18m) have a diagnosed anxiety disorder and take pills for stress.
The feeling I’m talking about is like if something infinitly big was inside my head, not something psysical but like a concept (and not that my body would be big) the first time I had it it was during a strong fever and it was something I felt when I closed my eyes (so not asleep). I thought alot about it since it was extremely strong at the point that I was almost disgusted that something so big could exist. It stayed with me for 1 or 2 month: it would randomly pop even without being. The second time I had it, it was just before waking up. It happened the exact same way almost 1 week after that. The thing is that both times, it was an extremely stressful day for me since that day I had to give an oral presentation + 3 tests in school. So it seemed to be caused by a lot of stress. Before and after those events, I was very depressed and in general had an extremely dificult time actually going to class. Those 2 events happened at the end of last year and this year it’s been even worse. Obviously I’m very stressed by school and just going there is very hard. The thing is the feeling came back, the night of the day I started studying at home. Before that I was basically doing nothing and I had to start studying at least a bit to go to tests and not have problems with the school.

So the first time with the feeling was during a fever but the 3 times after that it seemed related with stress.

I’m just seeking similar experiences and info about what it could be and even maybe other subs where it would be more appropriate to post this, thanks alot :)

I cant handle not recognizing my husband or feel any emotions or finding anyone attractive.. 15 months is hell. I tried lamictal for a week but it's been causing me issues with my joints I can barely walk and the headaches and neck pain are crazy. The fact that my brain thinks my husband is a stranger or has deleted all our history and not enjoying anything or feeling love is maddening. I can barely talk because my voice sounds so different to me. I want this to end..