depersonalization

I read that this was part of schizotypal personality disorder. I often feel like life is not real and that I'm not even alive. I sometimes worry that I will slip into a acutely depersonalized state. Time flows oddly; like one moment it is last wednesday and now it is this wednesday. Sometimes I wake up and cannot recognize the objects in my room. When I got sick a couple of months ago and was vomiting a lot and getting dizzy, I felt so surreal I almost passed out. I also get a lot of bizarre philosophical ruminations, but they seem to come and go quite a lot. I was recently reading Theodor Adorno (a philosopher) for a university assignment and his ideas clicked with me; they were just so original and surreal.

So does anyone with StPD often feel depersonalized?

You have no idea...

Yesterday I had to leave class because of this.

What do you study?

I was in Eglish 101 at the time. But I'm at college as a psychology major if that's what you mean.

I seem to have low grade depersonalization going on all the time, and sometimes it gets a sudden surge of power. My father had schizophrenia, and whenever I have a strong depersonalized phase I start to get the conviction that I'm going to become schizophrenic just like him. All the psychiatrists I have seen have explained to me that I have very little risk of developping schizophrenia and that many conditions far less debilitating also have an element of dissociation in them (schizoid personality disorder in my case). But still, whenever I gets strong I get this odd feeling that I'm experiencing the last few minutes of my life as a sane person... especially when the odd perceptions become intense, like wondering if the things you did 5 minutes ago were really things you did or things you imagined doing.

I have similar experiences. Low-grade depersonalization/derealization most of the time, and extreme bouts of it on occasion, which often leave me almost incapable of functioning. I had a classroom incident, where I was called to conjugate Spanish verbs on a whiteboard. I soon zoned out, said "I'm not here," and passed the marker to a classmate. In one incident my first year in college, after a long nap on campus, I was certain I was going insane, as I started to have mild hallucinations.

My grandmother is schizophrenic, so I've sometimes feared it for myself, but I doubt it's much of a worry.

I get this quite often, but it's only recently it's been more obvious to me. I find myself doubting my own existence and thus, that of the world around me. It's a spacey feeling.
In the most extreme form I feel invisible or non-existent one moment and in the next, realise I have a physical body and thoughts. That happens about once every two weeks.

Consider this passage on Schopenhauer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schopenhauer%27s_aesthetics :

Schopenhauer believed that while all people were in thrall to the Will, the quality and intensity of their subjection differed:
"Only through the pure contemplation . . . which becomes absorbed entirely in the object, are the Ideas comprehended; and the nature of genius consists precisely in the preëminent ability for such contemplation. . . . This demands a complete forgetting of our own person."
The aesthetic experience temporarily emancipates the subject from the Will's domination and raises them to a level of pure perception. "On the occurrence of an aesthetic appreciation, the will thereby vanishes entirely from consciousness."
The personality of the artist was also supposed to be less subject to Will than most: such a person was a Schopenhauerian genius, a person whose exceptional predominance of intellect over Will made them relatively aloof from earthly cares and concerns. The poet living in a garret, the absent-minded professor, Vincent van Gogh in the madhouse, are all (at least in the popular mind) examples of Schopenhauer's geniuses: so fixed on their art that they neglect the "business of life" that in Schopenhauer's mind meant only the domination of the evil and painful Will. For Schopenhauer, the relative lack of competence of the artist and the thinker for practical pursuits was no mere stereotype: it was cause and effect.

I feel that depersonalization is akin to what Schopenhauer is saying. Some individuals escape from the demands of the will, either through excitement, anxiety, or a sheer absorption in what they are doing. The intellect, or something quite beyond the individual will, is so absorbed in something, or detached from the will, that the will to engender desire vanishes from consciousness, causing a comprehension of unique ideas.

I have begun to believe that I am a mind that exists in this body and other minds in my body do ALL the talking and actions and that I've never spoken a word ever.

Fascinating theory albie

It could be that I've trained my mind to speak on its own though. It says some odd things;the sort of things you wouldn't want to say to people. And out loud too, using my mouth. It also seems to have gained some control of my body too as I keep finding myself trying to make rude gestures with my fingers. Flipping the finger. This is always directed at people near me and not random. It's like my mind or soul has become too big to be contained by my physical brain and leaks out. But why it is the sort of thing that you wouldn't want to do or say that leaks out I don't know. I suppose we are not meant to suppress things: that's all part of being human instead of animal.

I like the idea that my mind has more than one center and more than one focal point. Simultaneous co-consciousness. Science is close to proving this, I bet.

I hope it finds a cure because I am also experiencing my own mind being taken over by this other, just for a second or two, in which I go mad. It's almost impossible to get a grasp on what IS going on though. Bloody invisble minds! Should make them solid and visible like a machine. Then we could see what's going on.