Depersonalization googleshng.
BMJ article and podcast.
He continues (
archive). TL;DR -- If you are feeling unreal, give estrogen a shot. Oh someone someone please tell me you are just like me!
I'm: 4 [Moderately-severely distressing] [Functional impairment likely] [Months to years] [Onset often in adolescence] [Acute stress] [Reported parental emotional abuse, perceived criticism and/or emotional neglect] [consider referral to tertiary or specialised DPRD centre].
After HRT put me to 0, I later tried cannabis for the first time and was briefly 1 [Seconds to a few days] [Illicit drug use].
From about the end of November to last week, a number of factors have had me slipping in and out of 3 [Functional impairment possible] [Months to years] [Period of prolonged stress] [History of significant child abuse and trauma] [Post-traumatic stress disorder]. lol I get trashed and just start talking about the thing I always talk about.
Retweet if you're like me and you literally experienced HRT as fully resolving your severe primary chronic depersonalization almost immediately and it felt like a miracle that rescued you from the hell of the life you'd lived until that completely unexpected moment of ascension. That one is like my quintessential HRT anti-DPDR experience as I understand it and the phenomenon just branches out in various forms like having an undefined or subclinical discomfort that resolves with HRT, having DPDR but not having it resolve after HRT, HRT fixing other stuff.
I've seen gender-questioning people think that because they don't have DPDR they might not be trans; I've seen people with gender dysphoria and DPDR not experience remission after HRT; and I really hope I've been appropriately nuanced about both of these things. The information we do have on depersonalization symptoms among trans people is still very limited with small sample sizes. And those tell us that 10-15% of trans people report clinical levels of depersonalization symptoms. So for 85-90% of you, this actually may not apply.
Please don't let me confuse you on this - you can be trans and *not* dissociating or derealizing constantly. You might just be, you know, dysphoric, or trans and not dysphoric.
And I don't want to give an impression that I'm offering promises about what HRT would fix for any given trans person in general. What we know is that it appears to *reduce the prevalence* of these symptoms. The number of trans people with DPDR after HRT will decrease. It will reduce from a larger number to a smaller number, which doesn't mean it will be a total and universally curative treatment for all DPDR present in people who are trans and/or gender dysphoric. It's really a pretty obscure intersection of already-obscure topics, and it may be that it will apply strongly to a small number of people and weakly to a progressively larger number. But what we know now is that *at least* tens of millions of people in this world are trans. And even a miniscule fraction of them is tens of thousands who will find such experiences strongly or weakly relatable.
I described this stuff specifically at the college pride club as direct questions recently and 3-4 trans hands shot up immediately. I've been researching this for 9 years since I got on HRT.
So basically DPDR is underrecognized generally in society among the cis population which is a massive issue of ameliorating human suffering in its own right. And it's not widely understood as a possible part of gender dysphoria either. So most people don't know that if you sit down 100 of us in a theater and describe the symptoms you'll see 10-15 trans hands shoot up. It has a massive impact on our quality of life to the point of certainly contributing to suicide attempt and completed suicide risk and it's one of the compelling reasons why transition is an effective and medically necessary treatment for gender dysphoria.
If this world did not allow me to access HRT then it would be condemning me, until the end of my one life, to my brain screaming at me at every waking moment while I felt like I was clumsily operating a puppet through an unbearably suffocating fake virtual reality. IT IS THAT BAD.
Please tell me if you are a trans person and that literally applies to you. One thing that strongly motivates me in my ongoing work is the potential to continue helping whatever number of trans people are suffering from this little-known debilitating condition and could be helped. I want people to be able to experience the same improvement in those *really fucking bad* symptoms that I experienced, to whatever degree that applies to them. It was so significant an experience in my life that I want other people, when applicable, to be able to access it.
I used to read Greg Egan's "Permutation City", about uploaded human minds run in rough models and simulations, when I was 17-18 and half a fucking decade off from transitioning. Do you want to walk out into reality? Throw a few switches and blow it all apart?

Because that's fully, one hundred percent what happened to me over the course of just a couple weeks after estrogen passed my lips. After a *lifetime*. There's such a favorable risk/benefit balance to questioning people interested in possibly transitioning to try HRT for a brief period, no commitment needed. There is a possibility of finding some relief from seriously impairing mental health conditions that may be related. When I've heard from people on this they've typically reported they noticed a clear difference in DPDR or broader dissociation within 1-4 weeks of starting HRT. Less than a month is a fine window to make a decision with no lasting physical results.
[End googleshng]
The Dynamic Duo visited an art gallery:
Various random bullshit: