| I think that's an interesting thought. I struggled with DP/DR for a couple years, and the alarming part was that I felt like I was just watching myself perform automatic actions without any need for conscious oversight (this is where my experience differed significantly from Bandersnatch - rather than feeling controlled by someone else, I was frightened by how I was just watching myself act. It's interesting to connect this to ideas of confabulation in neuroscience/psychology to that of DP/DR. There's evidence that we may actively confabulate stories to explain what we're doing, even if we don't actually know. This is explained a bit here: https://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/the-situati.... Oliver Sack's writings explore the topic a bit too, where those with severe mental injury or impairment would create unrealistic stories to explain their bizarre actions. So, I wondered if part of the DP/DR involved losing the ability to confabulate and create a narrative regarding why I was acting the way that I was. And, part of my recovery was trying to recover that 'delusion.' Furthermore, the article 'Anxiety Changes Depersonalization and Derealization Symptoms in Vestibular Patients' has a couple relevant sections: 'It has been hypothesized that “depersonalization is a hard-wired vestigial response for dealing with extreme anxiety, combining a state of increased alertness with a profound inhibition of the emotional response system.” The proposed mechanism is that the medial prefrontal cortex inhibits the emotional processing of the amygdala and related structures in response to increased anxiety resulting in a dampening of sympathetic output and reduced emotional experiencing that leads to hypervigilance, attentional difficulties, and emptiness of the mind.' This provides evidence that DP/DR involves lessened emotional response. Later, the article states: 'The role of the limbic system and the amygdala in particular is very important, since affective memory connections to past experience could be an important factor in making new perceptions feel familiar and real' So, I wonder if DP/DR is partially caused by a lessened ability to create narrative/reasoning about control over one's actions (with the emotional hyporeactivity exacerbating the feeling of detachment from the environment). And, if you consider these often-faulty narratives to be a bit delusional, then maybe you could make that conclusion! |