The earliest writing that attaches the label “depersonalisation” to an overwhelming, clinical sense of separation dates from the late 19th century, since when its symptoms have often been presented as contributory to better-recognised conditions, such as anxiety disorders and depression. “If we can do something so simple to bring that diagnosis forward by potentially years, I’m not sure why we haven’t done it yet.” “Often a turning point in getting better is having a diagnosis,” Charlton says. However, staff at the clinic believe this represents only a fraction of people with the condition, whose diagnosis still often relies more on typing particular search terms into Google than on visits to medical professionals.

All we need is awareness,” she says.Ī specialist treatment clinic for DPD opened at the Maudsley hospital in London in 1999 and saw more than 500 patients in its first six years. “It’s slightly different to most other disorders, where people say we don’t have the right treatments or the right doctors to help us. She is hoping to bring wider recognition to DPD, offering people a way out of their unique torment and access to the same treatment that eventually rescued her. They endure countless visits to doctors and psychiatrists, who shrug their shoulders in mystification, having never heard of the condition.Ĭharlton, 32, is intent on ending this bewilderment. Yet almost everyone with DPD describes years of fearful, isolated frustration without a diagnosis. If the studies are accurate, roughly the same number of people have DPD (or the closely associated derealisation disorder) as are diagnosed with schizophrenia or obsessive compulsive disorder. “When I first spoke to my dad, the words I used were: ‘I’ve gone mad. “The best image I could come up with was that I was a little man sat in the back of my head, with the controls, and you can see the inside of your skull and you’re looking out of these two eye sockets,” Charlton says. Their bodies and their beings have separated their limbs are no longer their own. (You might think of Channel 4’s recent hit Humans, which featured an intelligence trapped, powerless, in the body of a robot.) They feel as though they are observing their life through a plate of glass or a dense fog, or as if it is appearing in a film. People with depersonalisation disorder describe a sense of complete detachment, a life lived as an automaton or on autopilot, characterised by an absence of emotions, either good or bad. According to studies in both Britain and the US, DPD could affect up to 2% of the population – that is, around 1.3 million people in the UK, and 6.4 million in the US. Yesterday I had a life, and now I’ve got nothing.”ĭepersonalisation disorder, or DPD, is among the most common yet under-recognised psychiatric conditions in the world. The feeling was of having left myself completely, constantly trying to grasp on to reality, trying to claw back what I’d had a few days ago. “It’s a feeling that, if you’re feeling this way, you shouldn’t be existing at the same time. “It was a constant, continuous otherworldly experience,” she says.

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