She tried to relax her mind by having breakfast, listening to some music and studying for her first exam. He was back to his normal self, however, which did reassure Trish at all. The pot must have been stronger than usual, he said, assuring her not to worry because it would gradually dissipate over the curse of the day. She told her boyfriend that she was still stoned, by now feeling frightened. Books, the alarm clock, a small trophy, a plant on the window sill-they had all been there each day, but now looked less familiar, as if she were seeing them for the first time. Familiar objects around the room seemed somehow different in the morning light. However, when she woke up the next morning she was feeling as strange and detached as the night before. Trisha remembers going to bed much later that evening thankful that she still had Saturday and Sunday ahead of her to get straight and study some for her final exams coming up the following week. I didn’t panic because I knew it was temporary. “My head felt too present, and hollow somehow.” I felt like my mind had somehow disconnected from my body. “It wasn’t a pleasant sensation,” she recalls. She smoked about a joint over the course of the evening, and felt “very stoned,” oddly detached from her body and from everything happening around her. It was just a way of being sociable and joining the others. She didn’t feel particularly high nor enthralled with what she did feel.Ī year passed and Trisha came on the occasion of smoking pot for the third time in her life, amidst a small gathering of friends. After inhaling deeply a few times and holding the smoke as she had seen him do, she began to feel cloudy-headed, giggly, and quite hungry. She was at the time dating a student who smoked pot regularly, and she tried it again one night at a party with him. Trisha, however, was not particularly curious and did not try marijuana again until her second year in college. She did not feel much of anything, and her friend told her she had t try it a few times to feel the effect. The first time she was in tenth grade, when she and her friends were at a party one Saturday and she took a few “tokes” of a friend’s joint. Prior to a fateful day that was to come, she had tried marijuana twice in her life. She had never felt particularly troubled, other than the ups and downs of normal teenagers. Trisha always did well in school, was athletic, and had many friends. She got along well with both of them and was particularly close to her sister Jane, who was 2 years younger. She was the second of four children raised in a small Midwestern town, and her parents were still happily married. She describes her upbringing as happy and uneventful. She was bright, attractive, ambitious, and sociable. Trisha was a 21-year-old college junior majoring in fine arts at a large state university. Below is Trisha’s story, just one of many varied experiences with Depersonalization Disorder. This afternoon we have an excerpt from their book which will hopefully help you better understand Depersonalization Disorder. This morning we posted an original article by Jeffrey Abugel, co-author with Daphne Simeon, MD, of Feeling Unreal: Depersonalization Disorder and the Loss of the Self.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |