Greg’s Story: DPDR And Healing

**Trigger Warning: contains references to drug use, paranoia, and psychological distress.

My name is Greg and I’m a writer, an arts journalist, and a communications specialist in the third sector. I'm writing this blog post because I was prompted by the recent publication of Nathan Dunne’s brilliant book When Nothing Feels Real to share my own story. That book has inspired me to do something both to minimise the self-stigma associated with my condition and to help others. Perhaps severe and sudden DPDR won’t be so scary and traumatic if the sufferer knows they are not alone.

I was plagued for many years - and am still occasionally troubled by - a condition that used to feel like a kind of malign magic from which there was no escape. 22 years since I experienced the sudden onset of Depersonalisation Derealisation Disorder as a 17-year-old (after a single instance of cannabis use), and as I approach my 40th birthday, my life is richer, happier, and more stable than I could ever have imagined it would be for large stretches of my young adulthood. This is a brief story about despair and grief, then, but also about abiding hope and, ultimately, recovery. I would like people suffering from DPDR to read this and know that they, too, can recover—and young men in particular, whose vulnerability to suicide is one of the great untold stories of our time.

I didn't smoke any more cannabis than the average adolescent indie kid. Probably quite a bit less actually, because my mum had always told me that my childhood epilepsy, which I had inherited from her, made me more likely to have unpleasant and potentially dangerous experiences with it. I dabbled periodically and with relative caution. But one evening in December 2002 I sat down in the field behind my family home and smoked a strong joint with a friend who was much a much more regular user than I was. Perhaps I had had a stressful day, or felt like pushing things a bit further in that teenage-boy way. For whatever reason, I felt I could handle the effects. I had had paranoia before after cannabis use but nothing like this. After a series of intense visual and auditory hallucinations I became gripped by the fear that I would never regain my right mind. And that sentiment lasted the rest of the night until I fell asleep several hours later.

Few adults reading this won't have a sense of what it feels like to smoke a bit too much cannabis and have a paranoid episode. The horror of this experience began the next morning, when I woke up in precisely the same state, a feeling like being stuck in a bad trip, detached from myself and looking in, with the world around me feeling foggy, alien, and uncanny. For some strange reason, I was instinctively certain this wasn’t just the weed exiting my system. Whatever it was had come to stay forever. Sure enough, it was the same the next day, and the next; it was the same a week, two weeks, a month, two months afterwards. By the spring of 2003, I was beside myself with terror.

My supportive and loving parents stepped in immediately without judgment and we started searching round for help as I descended into what I am now able to acknowledge was a violent nervous breakdown. The DPDR itself was one thing. An over-analytical kid, within weeks I was entertaining paranoid fantasies that the whole of waking reality was an illusion generated in my own head, and that I was now being drip-fed the sensory and cognitive evidence of this by malign force from another realm. (If this sounds like a form of madness, this kind of solipsistic thought process is actually perfectly logical. And I retained the capacity to describe these thoughts in the full knowledge that they were socially aberrant and would have to be masked. I never acted on or treated them as if they had any collective truth. Because I kept my capacity for lucidity and rationality, I was never diagnosed with, for example, schizophrenia.)

That aside, the compounding horror was that no-one, including me, understood what was happening to me.  The exquisite, raw pain that was the substrate of my emotional life for many years afterwards was partly due to the resultant sense of loneliness and confusion. What on earth had happened to me? I had an inkling that this condition was connected to things called Depersonalisation and Derealisation. A very kindly NHS psychiatrist had hit on the terms early. But they were only ever explained to me as symptoms of other things: depression, anxiety, psychosis. This didn't make sense to me because the feelings of unreality that swamped me were not the symptom of better-understood aspects of my mental illness, but the cause of them. The DPDR came first, and the other things followed because of the terror and bewilderment. When I talk about malign magic, I mean that no therapist, doctor, or health professional, nor any friend, family member, or passing acquaintance, was able to give credence to my own account of what was wrong. I don't blame anyone for this. This was a “mystery illness”, as the title of Nathan Dunne’s book puts it. It simply seemed that I was the only person in the universe to whom this had happened. It felt like some strange, divine curse.

Mental illness can foster recklessness. I stopped smoking cannabis within a few weeks of the original incident. But I was constantly scared and unhappy. I went off to university a few months later and drank my way through it. There were wonderful memories and good friends made at that time. There was also the constant, dragging weight of fear and despair, and lots of vomiting and degradation as a result. I graduated from an English Literature degree and continued through to post-doctorate level in the subject. In the middle of it all I was arrested for drink driving and attended a couple of AA meetings, before realising all of it was symptomatic of the other thing, the older, confounding thing that no one could explain to me. Why had I started to feel like waking reality was an illusion one day in 2002?

I started a long-term relationship that proved to be dysfunctional and controlling. (People with self-esteem as low as mine was in my mid-20s are magnets for the wrong kind of partner.) I got told by lots of activist friends that mental illness was a symptom of capitalism and I should throw away my meds (maybe it is, but I wanted to get better before the revolution). Because I was a middle-class man, in an emerging climate of identity consciousness, and because I presented as confident and articulate through all of this, I also felt, very occasionally, that I was being treated as a bullshitter. Another toxic, narcissistic male wrapped up in his own psychodrama, trying to use it for leverage in a culture that was finally onto his game. An uncomfortable thing to read, perhaps (and for me, as someone broadly attached to progressive politics, to write), but my unvarnished sense of the truth.

With the help of family and friends, I left the relationship when I was 31. I also escaped the pressure cooker of academia. I met a loving, supportive, well-centred partner, one who was attracted to my strengths not my weaknesses. I moved to a city I liked, a city where I still live, and - after some false starts - found meaningful work in the third sector and arts journalism with supportive and humane colleagues. I started making art again, for the first time since I was 17. Everything started to turn around. Across my 20s and beyond the DPDR had morphed into and masked itself behind other things, other forms of causal anxiety and depression. I unravelled it all through periodic sessions of therapy, and on the advice of a colleague I decided to abandon my years-long attempt to come off anti-depressants (SSRIs), which had worked for me from the start. I intend to take my current, low dose of citalopram until global stocks dry up. There’s no shame in it.

Last year, my partner became pregnant. The feelings of calm, centeredness, and burgeoning joy I currently feel, as I write this waiting for our due date at the end of August, are more than I ever thought my life would yield. I am a scatterbrain, a head-in-the-clouds type, liable to forget precisely where I am and to talk to myself. But I am regularly overwhelmed, flooded by the sense that I am here. That this is happening. And that it is good.

Discovering the existence of Unreal was a source of incredible elation to me a few years ago. It prompted me to read up (through reputable websites of course) on DPDR, and I was amazed by how much information gathering had happened over the decades since my first attack. I read about people whose experiences mirrored my own almost exactly. I read about the link between cannabis and DPDR, and learned that the condition can, indeed, come on in a sudden moment, which no-one had acknowledged in the early 2000s. (Right now, I am mid-way through Nathan’s superb book, which I highly recommend, and which has shored up my newfound sense of community).

That's my story: a meandering, torturous, error-strewn road from severe DPDR to a happy, secure life. It can happen. If you are reading this and you suffer from DPDR, good luck. I love the feeling of community I have found, even though I have never met any of you, and I want very much for you to be ok. You can be, and I think you will be.