Hi all,

I'm looking for advice and support and perhaps to meet people who have felt as if they've been to the brink of insanity and returned to normal life. I'm not 100% confident when posting in the DPDR forum as I do not have DPDR currently but when I did have DPDR earlier this year I entered into this strange existential state that I have had no luck getting rid of ever since.

It appears to me to be some sort of realisation about time, how the planet is in a constant state of change and movement that my mind just cannot accept. I suffer continual existential thoughts about time and change and have felt literally trapped between past and future. What I am really struggling with is the existential thought that memories do not exist and this strange feeling that I am not myself in my memories. For example if I try and think about what I was doing last night or this morning I get a wave of nausea. There is no problem with my memories, they just do not feel right. I went through a phase which has lessened now of constant flashbacks to the previous second or minute, but even now I am occupying myself with this constant sense of danger that I'm going to have a memory, just a simple memory! I do not get normal emotions anymore and feel like an empty, terrified shell having to endure this constant change that my mind cannot accept.

This all came from a breakdown I had earlier this year, and whilst some symptoms have subsided, this is by far the most prevalent and enduring. My other symptoms include:

DPDR (gone)
Panic
Anxiety
Waves of doom
Inability to have a normal, coherent thought, feeling like thinking and living is like swimming through a thick soup
Extra-sensory shapes in my periphery
Uncomfortable 'biting' feeling in my head
Brown doom vision

I am currently under the care of a consultant psychiatrist who seems optimistic that this happened because of a monumental depression, and so I'm really just being treated for that, but I feel she is being both simplistic and overly optimistic when she says I should feel fine to continue my degree in Jan next year. I would love it, but living what I'm living currently I just can't see it.

Anyone here been to the brink of madness and returned to normal life?

Alex