Ask Louise Airey, who was only 8 years old when she first felt like shed been pulled outside of herself. All of a sudden youre hyper aware, she said, and everything else in the world seems unreal, like a movie. At 19, a migraine triggered what felt to her like living through an 18-month-long movie (eat your heart out, Peter Jackson), and shes dealt with similar episodes ever since. Lucky her! She gets to experience all the sensations of starring in a movie without any of the pesky side effects like fame and fortune. Welcome to the hell known as depersonalization disorder. Its a condition that can happen with no apparent cause, but often results from intense anxiety or extreme trauma. After a stressful situation, your sense of self can come unplugged from your own experience, and you end up with the deeply disturbing feeling that something else is controlling your actions. If you wave your hand in front of your face, its not really you waving it -- youre just watching it happen. And maybe its not even your hand at all, but that of a foreign body that you just happen to be inside of, like in Being John Malkovich. Then theres derealization, the pervading sense that the world you live in and the people in it are artificial, just props and actors on a stage. In severe cases, the whole world can look like the two-dimensional background of a low-budget off-Broadway show. And like many anxiety disorders, the fear of having a depersonalization experience can actually trigger one. So if you suffer from depersonalization disorder and your greatest fear also happens to be that your entire life might be a work of fiction, well, youre basically doomed to life as a fictional character. Your crippling mental illness makes for a pretty sweet narrative device, though. Try to take some thin comfort in that. Read more: cracked/article_21089_5-bizarre-mental-illnesses-that-turn-reality-into-tv-show.html#ixzz31eGm7Ucc
Posted on: Wed, 14 May 2014 01:22:43 +0000
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