What is Depersonalization Disorder?

Personality disintegration is one of the most common mental symptoms that occurs most often when suffering accidents, assaults, severe physical illnesses, and trauma. It can also be a symptom of other mental illnesses and epilepsy. As a separate disease, personality Disintegration has not been extensively studied, and little is known about its incidence and etiology.

Depersonalization disorder, also known as Depersonalization neurosis, is a type of psychological disorder characterized by the continuous or repeated feeling of one's mental process or physical separation. ^[1]

Patients have a distorted perception of themselves, including their bodies, and life, which causes them to feel uncomfortable. Patients feel like a robot, or live in a dream. Usually these symptoms are short-lived and accompanied by anxiety and panic, Horror symptoms. But sometimes symptoms can become chronic, persistent or seizures for many years. Patients have difficulty describing their symptoms and are afraid of whether they will be mentally disturbed. Patients have unrealistic feelings and feel that the world around them is unreal, such as dreaming general.

This disease has a small impact on some patients, but it has a significant impact on some patients and even causes functional disability. Although some patients can adapt to the feeling of disintegration of personality and even resist adverse effects, other patients are anxious and worried about their psychological state Whether I am going crazy or thinking over the meaning of the abnormal feeling of the body and the strangeness of the surrounding world.

The diagnosis relies mainly on the presentation of symptoms, previously excluding physical illness, substance abuse, and other dissociative disorders. Psychological tests and special mental examinations can help the diagnosis.

The cause of personality disintegration is unknown. Personality disintegration is a common response to life-threatening dangers, and less severe psychosocial factors can also trigger it. Mayer-Gross attributes the disintegration of personality to pre-formed reactions in the brains of some individuals, while Janet believes that the occurrence of personality disintegration has biological qualities. Frend explained the disintegration of personality as a defense mechanism: denying the source of guilt by denying his own experience. ^[2]

Personality disintegration disorder is more common in adolescence or adults. Children may also have seizures, but they are difficult to detect because they do not actively narrate. Few patients in the clinic will take the disintegration of personality as the main complaint to see a doctor, but patients can go to the doctor with anxiety, panic or depression. The main symptom of the patient is the feeling of separation and alienation of the mental process or body. The patient feels like an automaton, or as if living in a dream or a movie. Patients have the feeling that they are external observers of their own mental processes, their bodies, or parts of their bodies. A variety of sensory deficits, emotional reactions, and feelings of lack of control over speech can occur. The patient's ability to test reality is complete, knowing that this is just a feeling, that he is not a real automaton. ^[2]

Most patients can recover completely, especially those symptoms related to stress, and these stress problems can be solved in treatment. Some patients have poor treatment results, but they will gradually improve.

The feeling of personality disintegration is usually short-term and spontaneously relieved, and formal treatment is needed only when symptoms persist, recurring or causing pain to the patient. Various psychological treatments (such as psychoanalysis, cognitive behavioral therapy, hypnosis) are effective for some patients and Not all. Sedatives and antidepressants can be helpful for some patients. Others must be treated for the onset of personality dissociation or related mental illness. The relationship between stress and the occurrence of this disease must be analyzed during treatment.

Tucker concluded from the answers to these questions by more than 300 patients: (1) the disintegration of personality is a clear experience, and when patients who have had this experience are asked in this way, they immediately understand of. (2) Disintegration of personality is a primary state of inner sensation that can occur under many emotional states, including pathological and normal, and can also occur under conditions of depression and cognitive processes. (3) Patients with symptoms of personality disintegration often have chronic anxiety, persistent depression, and an irregular degree of thinking and pathological changes. In evaluating the relationship between personality disintegration and thinking process, it is found that personality disintegration is more common in thinking decomposition and conceptual boundaries. Confused cases. (4) The disintegration of personality has an obvious relationship with anxiety, but has no obvious correlation with the phenomenon of delusions or hallucinations, and is rarely associated with suspicion and delusion. (5) The disintegration of personality is more closely related to schizophrenia, especially in patients with schizophrenia with insidious or marginal status. This disease is more common in patients with mixed depression. Moreover, many patients with personality disintegration also have significant rickets. (6) Personality disintegration is more common among young people, but has nothing to do with gender.

Related studies have found that the duration of personality disintegration is from seconds to months. The most common is minutes or hours. This symptom occurs in many diseases, but it is also found in normal people, especially in fatigued states, drug poisoning or sleep-like sleep. While sleeping. Isolated transient episodes, especially when fatigued, need to be distinguished from temporal lobe epilepsy, which is clinically distinguishable. Personality disintegration may occur periodically and continuously. The most common pathological condition is associated with anxiety syndrome, especially catastrophic syndrome or horror-anxiety-personal disintegration syndrome. In normal women, mild square phobia is often associated with neurosis and psychotic depression, especially during severe depression. Adolescents sometimes experience acute personality disintegration during extreme panic, which can lead to severe behavioral disorders, but cannot be misdiagnosed as severe mental illness.