My story with depersonalization

I lived a really happy life with what I thought was an exceptionally healthy childhood. At the start of high school, I knew I was anxious, but I didn’t think much of it. Everyone has problems in life, no one is happy and without worries all the time, and why would I make a scene now? That was who I am, why change it, and why look for help? As I look back now, I couldn’t have been more wrong. But how was I supposed to know that? I LOVED my anxiety. It was fuel for me and the thing that got me out of bed in the morning. As it turns out, starting med school certainly skyrocketed my anxiety levels. I struggled to study since high school, but I never connected that hardship to my anxiety. The good thing is that I was incredibly determined to pass all my exams, and I did. The first year passed, and in the second year, I kept that will and determination and passed all of the hardest exams. Unfortunately, at the end of the second year, my downfall began.

I’m going insane

That was the first thought that came into my mind 2 days after a huge night of drinking. My friends and I celebrated passing the hardest exam in the second year, and we had a blast. The morning after, I felt strange, but I attributed that to my usual hangover symptoms after a big night out. When the second morning came, I was almost sure that this wasn’t just a hangover, but little did I know, it was the start of the worst experience of my life so far. I was panicking, to say at least. I had the worst kind of anxiety-fueled brainstorm, and all the negative thoughts I could think of. As days passed, I started to notice all of the symptoms of my new “curse”. 

Symptoms (or how I hated trees)

I was never really a depressed person, but I was anxious for sure. All the anxiety started ravaging through my mind, and I felt like my world was collapsing. “How could I finish school in this state?” “Am I ever going to be normal again?” “What is happening to me?”.

My mind and my body were detached. I felt like my body was running on autopilot without my brain controlling it. I knew who I was, but I felt detached from my past self. Like I am an impostor in someone else’s body. Everything around me felt out of place, dreamy, foggy, and unreal. I started hating trees, clouds, and sky, for they were not real. So I made the worst decision at that moment: I started googling my symptoms.

Doctor Google 

In panic-fueled desperation, I googled every one of my symptoms and read every Reddit page about what I thought was my definitive diagnosis: Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder. As I continued researching every possible site I could find, I realized that this was my life now. There was no cure, no efficient therapy, and no hope to turn my life around. In the middle of this catastrophe, I turned to my family for help and guidance. They were all worried for me, and after speaking to my father, he decisively gave me what I thought to be the light at the end of the tunnel: 0.5 mg of Xanax.

Xan this be the end?

After around half an hour of taking Xanax, I finally felt the peace I hadn’t felt for days. Everything was starting to get clear; no more fog covered my mind, and everything about this disorder seemed unimportant. Those god-given pills helped me calm down, and I went to sleep dreaming of a better tomorrow. 

Nightmare is not over

The morning after, the nightmare returned. The whole world felt strange and unreal, and once again I felt detached from my surroundings and, many times worse, from my own family. In the following days, I went to see a neurologist who told me that neurologically, there was nothing wrong with me. My brain functioned as it should, but I knew that my mind was completely shattered. She referred me to a clinical psychologist for a thorough psychological examination. After talking to the psychologist, I felt better, but I was still unsure what to do next. 

The days passed, but the symptoms remained.

Everything was still unreal, and for the first time in my life, I considered ending it all. Somehow, I was able to snap out of it, and with the help of Xanax, I managed to mask my symptoms for a few weeks.

I knew Xanax was just a temporary solution since it is pretty addictive. It still is the best medication for anxiety relief, but I had to try something else. 

The first person who helped me was one of my colleagues from med school, who taught me how the anxiety loop works and recommended I talk to his psychiatrist friend. 

The first time coming into the psychiatry ward of the hospital, I was prescribed an SSRI antidepressant called Lexapro. I thought that it might just be the right medication for my anxiety and the mild depression I felt, caused by the symptoms I mentioned.

The psychiatrist said that Lexapro and Zoloft were usually the first antidepressants that she prescribes due to their low side effects profile and high efficacy. 

“If Lexapro doesn’t work, we’ll try Zoloft.”

I was baffled by how simple that was. I felt like a lab rat in some experiment and not an actual patient. But I listened to my friend who said that she was one of the best psychiatrists he knows. 

So I waited about 6 weeks to see if there was any change, but was met with side effects only. I had nausea and memory problems, my anxiety and depression worsened, and my libido was nonexistent. One of the worst symptoms was very intense, vivid dreams and usually, nightmares that prevented me from getting a good night’s sleep. After about 7 weeks, I started feeling emotionless. I could not cry or genuinely smile. Everything was gray, and my lack of emotions caused by DPDR only worsened. 

I was still lost, detached from the world, with my genitals not working, and addicted to Xanax. I decided I had to stop. I couldn’t wait to talk to my psychiatrist and decided to discontinue the therapy myself. That was one of the dumbest things I did in my life, and made my problems much worse. 

I tried to ignore my symptoms as I was too afraid to try another antidepressant after the terrible experience with Lexapro. To make matters worse, the second antidepressant was Zoloft. And if you ever got on the anxiety side of Reddit, you could see that it was almost universally hated drug to date. I couldn’t find almost any posts about a successful Zoloft story, and even if there were, how could I be certain that it would help me? 

After some time, I was still miserable. 

In desperation, I searched the deepest corners of the World Wide Web and found a brilliant thought that changed my mind about psychiatry and antidepressants. 

“Psychiatry, as we know it, is a somewhat flawed profession. There are many great psychiatrists and many great medications for various psychiatric illnesses, but with anxiety and depression, it is sometimes a lottery. ”

We know a lot about the brain already, but if we cannot pinpoint the true root of anxiety, how could an anxiety medication help me with a disorder that is not nearly as understood as anxiety? If Xanax helped me that much, maybe DPDR symptoms sprouted from my chronic anxiety.

Somewhere among the depths of the internet, I found another quote that finally made me try Zoloft:

“We all have different brain chemistries, and even extensively tested medication can sometimes act unexpectedly in the brain.”

So I decided to ignore Reddit and finally try Zoloft. In the first couple of weeks, nothing changed. I was still pretty miserable, but at least the side effects were minimal. I had mild gastrointestinal disturbance, and I felt a little tired. The true change came after about 5 weeks, and it was incredible.

All of a sudden, I was no longer anxious. I could think and memorize properly for the first time in the last year or so. My confidence came back easily, but I still had some symptoms of derealisation. Another week passed, and I noticed a real difference. No longer did I hate trees, the sky, or the clouds. My emotions slowly came back, and I felt like never before. With Zoloft, I was finally able to break the anxiety loop. With no more panic attacks and with the lessening of the DPDR symptoms, I could finally breathe again. I became occupied with the different things that interest me, like writing, reading, and researching various medical topics, and especially the human brain. At that time, I noticed that I didn’t think at all about my symptoms. There was nothing to fuel my intrusive thoughts since the anxiety loop was broken. With Zoloft, I could finally control what I should think about and when to stop. I was able to take a necessary break from my thoughts, and that made all the difference. There were no more DPDR symptoms, and even if there were, they didn’t interest me one bit, so why should I think about them? 

You have to remember that the first path to recovery is to acknowledge your symptoms. If you fail to do that and just ignore them, at some time in the future, they will come back, possibly more frightening than before. After you find a way to deal with your anxiety, the symptoms won’t be able to feed off of it, and you will be free to occupy your mind with something much more important than your disorder.

Zoloft was the right medication for me.

It didn’t magically solve my problems, but it made me strong enough to deal with those problems myself. 

Summary

What started as a typical hangover after a celebration turned into the beginning of the darkest period of my life. I went from being a high-achieving med student who thrived on anxiety to someone completely consumed by depersonalization and derealization (DPDR). I felt detached from myself and my surroundings, like I was living in a dream or behind a pane of glass. Even trees and the sky felt unreal.

Desperate for answers, I turned to Google and Reddit, which only deepened my panic. Eventually, I was prescribed Xanax, which helped briefly, but I knew it wasn’t sustainable. I started seeing a psychiatrist and began taking Lexapro, but it left me emotionally numb and worse off. I quit cold turkey—a huge mistake.

Still searching for relief, I hesitated to try Zoloft because of horror stories online. But eventually, I gave it a shot. After five weeks, everything changed. My anxiety finally eased, my mind cleared, and the DPDR symptoms began to fade. I stopped obsessing over the sensations and reconnected with myself, my thoughts, and the world around me.

Zoloft didn’t “fix” me—but it gave me the strength and stability to fix myself. Recovery started when I stopped running from my symptoms and faced the anxiety fueling them. Now, I'm able to focus on what matters: learning, growing, and living without being trapped in my head.