Depersonalization is a state of mind in which individuals feel disconnected from themselves.
“It’s as though you’re watching yourself navigate the world, like you’re watching a movie,” says the adult and child psychiatrist Christine Crawford, MD, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and the associate medical director at the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Symptoms can include:
Disconnection from your thoughts, feelings, and body
Feeling robot-like
Emotional and physical numbness
Distrusting your memories
An inability to describe or identify with your emotions or experiences
Feeling like you’re observing your life from outside your body or that you’re living in a dreamworld
Sadness or anxiety
In schizophrenia, depersonalization may appear in different ways. For instance, you or a loved one with schizophrenia may feel disengaged, overwhelmed by strange physical sensations, or fail to recognize oneself in a mirror.
“People describe this kind of permeability of solid objects: like things appear as if they’re melting — but it’s not necessarily a hallucination, it’s more a sense of unreality,” Dr. Gonzales says, citing research from a project called Psychosis Outside the Box, in which researchers documented firsthand accounts of psychosis and symptoms of depersonalization.
Someone experiencing depersonalization may also seem completely preoccupied, despite being in the same room with you or in the middle of a conversation, Dr. Crawford says.
“It’s like something is playing out in their head and they’re trying to work it out,” says Crawford. “And because they’re so preoccupied by that internal experience, they are detached from what’s happening in their present, current moment.”
Earlier research has suggested that depersonalization may happen more frequently, more intensely, and for longer periods of time in the early stages of schizophrenia, and that it declines as the disorder becomes chronic. More research on larger groups of people is needed to confirm this finding, however.
Depersonalization is especially common among those who’ve experienced trauma. In some people, trauma has impacted the brain so much that it protects the person by detaching from the body, says Crawford. Estimates suggest 25 to 54 percent of people who have a history of interpersonal abuse experience depersonalization.
