Hi all,

I guess I'll get down to it and say I'm not looking for a direct match of my condition as it seems to be very rare, but I am looking to find people who've experienced extreme and chronic existential ruminations, DPDR and come out the other end.

About a year ago I experienced a mental meltdown which lead to two weeks of DPDR. By the time this left me my thought processes devolved into a constant state of existential rumination to do with time. My mind began to think 'how is time possible?', and I became absolutely terrified of time for no reason, and I could not stop this descent into madness. The way this has manifested is I feel like I'm trapped between past and future, I'm constantly thinking things 'I was just at the shops, now I'm not. that's just a memory that no longer exists', I freak out after speaking to someone, as thats now ended and is in the past, I get wierded out during conversation as well as I'm not really focussing on what is being said rather where the time is disappearing too. Even doing simple tasks like going to make a coffee requires force of will... I cannot look forward to anything or be in the flow. When I look at a clock I cannot comprehend what I see, I have to look at it with extra effort to internalise 'what the time is'. In short, my mind sees past and future as a terrifying abyss, it has destroyed my 'present moment' and I'm completely unable to break free from this thought loop. It is like my brain is rebelling against nature and reality itself, and is happy with nothing anymore. I feel oppressed by the laws of reality, not free to use it and act at will. I have additional existential fears:

I somehow developed a fear of being a different person in the evening compared to who I am in the morning, not sure why this stuck, but it did and wont let go.

constant intrusive thoughts of molecules and synapses, things like that doing the 'sciencey' stuff

fear of time moving forward marked by anything. I can be lying in the dark completely still and still be reminded of this anxiety by my heartbeat and shallow breathing.

A big problem for me is that I'm not wrong. Time is arbitrary, it is disappearing before our eyes and the past and future do not exist outside of being a mental concept. We are indeed also subtly different in the evening compared to what we were in the morning. All my stuff is true, and so I find it hard to express the degree of horror I feel every morning as I wake up feeling completely spun out by something real that my mind can no longer accept, and I do not have good days, bad days, or periods of normality. This is life for me, this is 24/7. Sleep feels like an eye blink between horror.

Last summer this got so bad that I developed psychotic and clinical depressive symptoms... I could not look at someone moving as the sight of this irritated my perceptions, but this seems to have gone. My only victory against this condition has been in reducing the physical feeling of rampaging anxiety through use of mirtazapine and Valium. I'm now able to do stuff like drive, exercise, act normal in public, but the 24/7 existential terror remains.

This is all very hard to explain, the mental torture, very hard to explain. A healthy person, or those with another mental state would look at what I described and think that's crazy there's no problem with time, but my logical mind already knows that. This has been, and is, very real for me, and has cost me a career, a relationship, but more importantly my sense of self, peace of mind, self respect. It's been so long since I felt anything like normal, the old me, that I don't even know what I'm looking to get back to anymore. All I know is that I was once a person with some great, some dubious qualities, who knew how to enjoy the small things and enjoyed what he did. I'm only kept going by a fantastic mother who tells me daily that today is a day closer to being well, I would not be alive without her.

Can anyone relate? I feel as though my psyche has been so warped by these thoughts and ruminations that I don't believe in my own recovery any more. Has anyone ever felt the same? I'm desperate for some light at the end of the tunnel but at the moment all is dark.

Alex