Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: One night during my adolescence will be perpetually engrained in my memory. The evening had passed and I found myself lying in bed, wide-eyed and full of energy, even as the clock crept steadily toward the wee hours of the night. As I basked in the silent darkness, my mind wandered from the petty topics of the day to the deeper existential questions of life. “Who am I? ” I asked myself. “Why am I here? Is any of this real? ” Suddenly, as my gaze drifted around the room, the objects in my field of vision began to blur. The desk to my left slowly grew in size and the chair to my right seemed to shift its shape. I was completely perplexed. In a rush of panic, I quickly sat up, closed my eyes, and forced myself back to reality. As I opened my eyes, the world was as it was just minutes before. Could this experience have been merely a dream? It is impossible to say. Whatever the nature of the experience had been, it had given rise to very real feelings of depersonalization and derealization, two all too common but seldom recognized psychological phenomena that form the basis of the psychopathology known as depersonalization disorder. In the following analysis, I intend to
Author: Geoffrey M Hunt
Institution: Towson University
Language: English
Subfield: Psychiatry and Mental health
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1510616812