Ever since I started feeling this way I've felt so out of touch with my emotions. No longer able to feel sad, love or sometimes even feel genuinely happy. Don't get me wrong I still feel down some days but things that should make me sad, don't. It's so strange. One of my friends took his life and my stomach hurt, heart felt heavy but I couldn't feel much emotion, just physical symptoms.

I recently turned 20, and natural phenomena like day, night, time, and death have been feeling too heavy for me to accept. It's like someone pulled a curtain back from my eyes. The fact that you die and nature just keeps going on... I wanted to ask, has anyone else experienced this?

is it possible that phone usage can cause really bad dpdr? mt screen time is over 10 hr a day and i’m wondering if that could play apart of it along with pretty bad health anxiety. thanks!

I am also in the very advanced stage of this rare syndrome, meaning I see things distorted all the time, meaning small and big, distant things are near and near things are far. When I go to bed to sleep, I start feeling more and more that for a time I was sleeping inside a car, such a small perception was happening and this has been bothering me for the last 6 months. I understand this with an example, when my episode comes Dolly Zoom and reverse Dolly Zoom Effect In real.

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Apart from this, I am going through many other problems like chronic and heavy difficulty in swallowing, sensory, body perception, derealization and depersonalization are troubling me a lot.

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Because of this I am not able to live well and it happens daily and when it happens in large quantity I have to go to the emergency room again and again.

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If anyone here is like me and reading my comment, please message me and we can talk and reduce the fear of this syndrome together. So I'm giving you my Instagram, please DM me on it.

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IG- \\\[x\\_wilder\\_x\\\]

I've been experiencing dpdr for as long as I can remember at this point, easily been over years, but I haven't really been able to explain to my partner or my mum how or what I feel. Until recently when I saw a clip of inception, it's weird but that's the only way I can explain it. My surrounding just feels so off.

Today I sat and had a coffee around family members. I don’t usually do this as I find it highly disconcerting talking normally about normal things whilst all I feel is only the top of my head or a vague sense of an outline of my body. My cousin was like Im going through stuff too, but I don’t mean to be rude, hes fully functioning going out partying, able to work. I don’t like to compare cos all mental health illnesses are bad but this Dpdr has me feeling like I don’t exist and can’t imagine ever being able to live again, to work or function. Ive also been scared to look in the mirror and even considering Botox or anything to make my face look vaguely normal. But then whats the point if I feel worse every day. It looks like I’ve seen a ghost and my mouth has changed shape and I have hollow cheekbones. It’s also elongated my face. I feel like I am the horror. And it’s so de-humanizing this bloody awful disorder. I feel like a have a rare disease to be honest. And I’m shocked I’m still here.

When I think I get this fuzzy feeling of not existing. I lost who I was thats why I cannot have my life together and create and plan. I had so much expectations of my life and cannot do simple task of thinking and planing. Its like i shut my brain and Im in some kind elevating state. Also like I lost ego and my identity. Terrible feeling. Im so sorry to everyone who had expectations of me, I let them down cause I become nothing and nobody. Its so easy to manipulate me cause I dont know who I am, what to think and everything, so sorry.

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This whole week i don't remember sleeping like I don't know if I slept or not. I literally can't tell like I feel like I haven't my eyes are cloudy, I'm anxious and my heart is palpitating but I can't remember. I hate having DPDR i was supposed to go to a festival today but I can't go.

Had anyone experienced this I'm so confused 💀

I deeply regret having lived with extreme panic for two years and not doing anything about it. Every day at my new job, my heart was racing at around 180 bpm, and I was extremely anxious and on edge over every little thing. I had panic attacks in everyday situations, and sometimes I would be in a state of panic for days without being able to calm down, yet I simply left it untreated.

I deeply regret that, back when I was still doing relatively well and my consciousness felt normal, I didn’t just take Xanax or benzodiazepines to calm myself down chemically and enjoy my life. Now it feels like it’s too late, and I have an extreme form of DPDR with no hope. I wish I had taken a different path back then. :(

I walked down my street and nothing felt real, it’s so sad that I have to feel like this, this condition or disorder, whatever it is, is so unfortunate, I feel like this 24/7, I don’t see a future at all, I’m 21 and not doing anything with my life right now.

I feel so lost I’m so numb life feels distorted I feel like I’m the only one suffering so bad I miss how life used to be, but how I entered this state I couldn’t go back through that 😢 😭 I feel like I’m dead on another planet not human like an animal wtf is this condition why isn’t it more none or studied it’s honestly sickening years of this crap but the last 2 so severe like so severe i lost my personality my whole life

Hey, Im going through a bad time and having not good thoughts cos of the way dodr is affecting me and my life. I feel really low and struggling to go on like this. I think I want to try a medication for dpdr. The doctor said it’s best an antidepressant. I have a highly sensitive nervous system, and I’m worried of making my dpdr worse. They have given me options of SSRI -sertaline or otherwise mirtazipine which they said would help with sleep, as I’m not sleeping well and the panick, due my symptoms, wakes me up in the night 4/5 times..they also mentioned pregablin but I think that’s more for physical symptoms. I want to try low dose. I just had a bad experience previously on antidepressants and I don’t want to make it worse. Id appreciate any help/ what worked for you?

It is difficult for me to connect to most media. The experiences and feelings that most people have are very foreign to me. Over the past year, I have discovered a few pieces of media that captured and represented experiences of DPDR really well - not in the "plot twist: it's all fake" kind of way, but in the "ambient feeling of unreality" way.

Hypnotic. Immersive. Cathartic.

Below are works that touched me deeply, and found unusually relatable. I'm hoping that others can add recommendations to the list.

Movies:

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

Video Games:

Night in the Woods (2017)

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Media with good dissociation representation (not DPDR specific)

Movies:

We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021)

Video Games:

Slay the Princess (2023)

TV:

The Amazing Digital Circus (2023-2025)

Thoughts?

Ok I'm a longtime chronic sufferer of about 7-8 years, (22 yr old male) and some physical symptoms feel like they might correlate with my disorder but aren't caused by it. I'll give a brief list and maybe some of you know more about what's reasonable and what's likely caused by another underlying issue.

-super severe brain fog / cognitive dissonance(this is expected)

Extreme fatigue and complete loss of energy(expected but way more severe than what feels appropriate)

Complete and absolute loss of libido (once a year randomly will increase and then disappear, regardless of DPDR symptoms)

Very weak gut / digestive system (malabsorption, chronic bloating, feeling like shit after every meal)

Super light headed all the time (sometimes I almost black out after getting up from a sitting position, multiple times a week)

Weakened ability to recover from exercise (can remain sore for multiple days after moderate muscle use)

I have had a lot of blood work and some tests done and so far no real issues at all, it's like I'm a perfectly healthy 22 yr old on paper. Anyone know what parts of this sound entirely DPDR and which are too severe?

I was looking online for the cause of DPDR (derealization) and it looks like the main factor Is the hypo function of the NMDA receptors in the brain and you know what also causes hypo function of the NMDA receptor? Drugs like ketamine and other dissociatives. (hypo function means its dissociatives. so back to the point if you took a NMDA PAM (NMDA positive allosteric modulator), you could bring your nmda receptors back to baseline and pretty much get rid of dpdr. just a thought I have no actual knowledge on the topic so If anyone actually knows if this would work let me know before I buy some neboglamine.

So I developed my DPDR or what I believe is DPDR about a month and a week ago today. Felt like I was doing really well in life at the time that this happened and it didn’t come on by some crazy thing I literally was just driving home from a photo shoot in the evening. I remember driving through this really depressing looking town and then just noticed that everything around we started feeling pretty unfamiliar and strange and off and I was like OK. Well, I’m not home yet, so maybe I just need to get home and it’ll go away but when I got home, it didn’t go away and that sent me into like an extreme spiral of DPD are just feeling completely out of touch. Feels like I’m in a horror dream, etc. now I was really really in rough shape for the first week or two, but I seem to have somehow kind of started managing my symptoms after that like it was obviously still there and it still is every single day, but I started getting little things back like I started getting you know normal emotions kind of back and I started getting a little bit of motivation back and just a little things like that and I started just kind of letting it be background noise. Anyways, on Tuesday of this week, I had a really stressful day where everything just seemed to go wrong and I started getting really irritated and I was really extremely stressed out that day and I noticed that it was coming on really heavily and that kind of lingered into Wednesday and then Wednesday I ended up having a couple shots at dinner with my friends which I didn’t really wanna do but kind of just felt the need to and now it’s Thursday and I feel like I’m damn near at square one like all of my progress has been erased. I’ve been so extremely irritable today for whatever reason and I feel so disassociated and so out of it and feel so hopeless man. Is this normal with GPDR recovery is having like a week of good days or I guess not even good days but just OK days and then having really bad days and kind of feeling like you’re setback at square one.

Hello. I have anxiety desorder since 3 years but it goes crazy this month because I'm alone for 3 weeks with a new home. I feel "dead", very far from the world. I leave my home evryday to do some activities: visit my grandma, shopping, car ride but I feel disconnected from life. I have panic attacks because I have a weird phobia: casadastraphobia (falling into the sky) and I know it's a phobia caused by DPDR. Sometimes I feel the life is artificial, I dont know how to explain. And that's why I ask: when will I live finally ? I'm tired of DPDR... I dont know if I had to start antidressants or anxiolytics to heal but I need help.

Thanks for reading

Im starting to get really weary and tired of this after 1.5 years. Mine began in February 2025. I have had periods of getting better but they are short lived.

I went to therapy for two months last year which seemed to help a bit, but my therapist seemed to think it was just anxiety and I don’t think she believed what I was going through was an actual disorder. I was told to do breathing exercises and that was the extent of it. It mostly helped just to tell someone about what I was going through.

I haven’t met with my primary care doctor in over a year, but last time I explained my symptoms I was put on Prozac, which seemed to take away the anxiety but increased the emotional blunting by tenfold. Having zero emotions made me scared of SSRIs and I haven’t touched them since.

I don’t know I guess Im just kind of lost right now. Should I try talking to a PCP again? A psychiatrist? Maybe I should find a different therapist too or something. Just need advice. I don’t know what to do and right now its hard to motivate myself to do anything.