Part of a group of anxiety disorders, Depersonalization Syndrome involves a nagging or persistent feeling of detachment or estrangement from one;s self. The individuals feels as if he/she is acting on automatic pilot or as if in a dream or movie. More often than not, the patient describes a sensation of being an outside observer of one's mental process and/or his/her own body.



Contrasting these feelings of detachment, the patient maintains a sense a reality. He/she knows what's going on around them, they simply have no way to control their feelings of being an outsider or observer of their own life.

A dissociative disorder, Depersonalization has not been studied widely, even though it is the third most common psychiatric symptom behind depression and anxiety. It frequently occurs in life-threatening danger, such as near-death accidents, assaults, serious illness and injuries, as well as stemming from episodes of child abuse. Depersonalization disorder can also exhibit as symptoms of other psychiatric disorders and in seizure disorders.

Signs of depersonalization can often coincide with many illnesses, both mental and physical, however, for the most part occurs early in age, from around puberty to the late twenties. For many patients, they come to accept and adapt to the syndrome opposed to treatment.

People associated with Depersonalization disorder become masters at maintaining a front; almost as if imitating or acting as how they want others to perceive them. Part as an act of denial, part simply as a way to adapt to the condition, patients continue to experience this sense of detachment but rather than deal with it, they simply accept it as normal.

One main attribute indicative of the disorder is reality-testing remains intact. While some patients feel as if they're going insane, the opposite is true. It's like being hyper aware of the world around you.

Some patients develop Depersonalization disorder through lack of sleep, sometime brought on by high stress. Often times, the symptoms will vanish on his or her own, once the patient's sleep pattern returns to normal.

In rarer instances, the syndrome occurs with the use of marijuana and ecstasy; the drug of choice among the rave crowd has been noted in particular to provide occasional episodes linked to the disorder. Psychoactive drugs may be one of the primary causal agents among DP sufferers today, the irony being, the drugs these people are self-prescribing to medicate the disorder may actually be help causing the symptoms. Delta-9-Tetrahydrocannabinol is the active ingredient in pot has been shown to cause the condition in some patients.

Presently, the best method of treating chronic symptoms of Depersonalization is therapy as well as healthy living.