Latest news with #NathanDunne
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
A kiss that led to a years-long nightmare, the Dull Men's Club, and a famous feminist mother
Happy Saturday! There was a lot to take in this week. Spacing out for a whole 90 minutes is the kind of challenge I need. Or perhaps a trip to the cinemas. But before I do that, let me bring you five stories worth your time. After a heart attack, Andrew McKean moved to a care facility. While stuck in the confines of a room for most of the day, McKean started writing about 'the slow unfolding of a life'. Sounds dull, right? Well, no actually – not once he started posting about it in the Dull Men's Club. What is it? An international club where people share online the tedium of everyday lives. Where? The idea originated in the 1980s in New York, when founder Grover Click and some friends decided to 'embrace their dullness', Susan Chenery writes. And now? It is immensely popular, with 1.9 million Facebook members on Click's original page. How long will it take to read: three minutes. Further reading: and then you must meet 'the dullest man in Britain'. Since retaking power in Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban have enforced repressive laws on Afghan women through their 'morality police'. But now Afghan fathers, brothers and husbands say they are under pressure to ensure women in their families observe the restrictions. 'Changing attitudes and behaviours': the Guardian, with Rukhshana Media, interviewed men and young women about how morality laws are affecting families. One man from Bamyan province said: 'Men have become unpaid soldiers of the Taliban.' How long will it take to read: three minutes. Seventeen years ago, Nathan Dunne took a midnight swim in the icy waters of Hampstead Heath in London with his then girlfriend. As she kissed him in the cold, something inside him abruptly shifted. *** 'It was like being struck. Like something came down … The flip of a switch.' – Nathan Dunne. Dunne was locked out of his body, or at least that's how it felt, and had a sudden fear of water. Years later, he was diagnosed with depersonalisation disorder. How long will it take to read: five minutes. Guardian readers love architecture, but throw in some 'weekend-long parties and carnal pleasure', as Oliver Wainwright suggests, and you've got yourself a fabulous read on the hedonistic party palaces of New York's Fire Island. A 'queer Xanadu': Wainwright celebrates the legacy of late architect Horace Gifford, who defined the area's modernist beach-houses. 'It was made for sex': Calvin Klein is name dropped, including the time he bought one of Gifford's houses and had it renovated into a home 'made for sex'. How long will it take to read: four minutes. When Erica Jong's autobiographical novel Fear of Flying was published in 1973, it catapulted her to fame. The American author broke ground by writing openly about women's sexual desires – rarely done at the time. She quickly became known for her candour and wit. But for her daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, growing up as Erica's only child told a different story. A compelling read: In this excerpt from her new memoir, Jong-Fast reflects on the lingering pain of being 'still stuck in the mire of childhood', despite having 'created a different life' as an adult. How long will it take to read: nine minutes. Enjoying the Five Great Reads email? Then you'll love our weekly culture and lifestyle newsletter, Saved for Later. Sign up here to catch up on the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture, trends and tips for the weekend. And check out the full list of our local and international newsletters.
The Guardian
08-06-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
I was enjoying a midnight swim. Then my girlfriend kissed me – and the nightmare began
On a cold winter's night, in a 'fit of spontaneity', Nathan Dunne and his girlfriend went for a midnight swim on Hampstead Heath in London. They had been living together for a few months and, although it was dark and chilly, they 'had a summer feeling in that first flush of the relationship', Dunne says. They shed their clothes and waded into the shallows. After diving into the icy water, Dunne's girlfriend put her lips to his cheek, and as they pulled apart, his life changed beyond all recognition. 'It was like being struck. Like something came down,' he says, slicing the air with his hand. 'The flip of a switch.' Dunne's transformation sounds like a fairytale in reverse: one kiss, and his life turned into a nightmare. Seventeen years have passed since that night, and he still mostly explains the change in himself in metaphors and similes. His eyes filled with soot. His voice was a robot's. He felt as if he were locked outside his body, which became a sort of 'second body'. Any form of water, from a raindrop to a warm bath, made everything worse. His terror and panic were so great that the next day he smashed a vase and used a shard to cut himself. An 'attempt to not live any more', is how he describes it. It would take Dunne three-and-a-half years to learn that what he had experienced was the onset of depersonalisation disorder, a dissociative disorder believed to affect about 1.3 million people in the UK, a similar number to those with bipolar disorder, though the condition is far less known. When Dunne became ill, in 2008, the wait for a diagnosis on the NHS was thought to be between eight and 12 years. Awareness has since increased; in 2017 the MP Lyn Brown brought a constituent's experience of depersonalisation to the attention of parliament. A charity, Unreal, was launched two years later. Now Dunne, 45, has written a book, When Nothing Feels Real: A Journey Into the Mystery Illness of Depersonalisation. It is an eye-watering and disorienting account of a condition that Dunne evokes so vividly, it doesn't always appear to be behind him. 'Truth be told, I still have 'second body symptoms',' he says. 'I don't know if they will ever leave.' Indeed, the book's awful twist is that although researching the history of the illness felt intensely validating, and writing brought a sense of coherence to fragments of memory, it also triggered a relapse. In 2022, Dunne had a nervous breakdown. 'I was not able to function in any reasonable way,' he says. 'It was about as bad as it can get.' It's fair to say that healing is very much a continuing process. We are speaking on a video call. Dunne, who was in London studying for a PhD in art history when he fell ill, now lives in Sydney with his wife, a professor of philosophy. Last month they became parents to a baby girl. Dunne works as a freelance writer, specialising in film and art, and is sufficiently recovered that he sometimes goes for a swim. 'I hope to take my daughter to the beach. Something really super-normal. That thought fills me with joy and hope for the future,' he says. One of the greatest challenges has been the mysteriousness and unrelatability of his illness. While he knew something terrible had happened to him, he couldn't say what. The 'second body symptoms' felt impossible to convey without resorting to hyperbole and abstraction, which seemed to discredit his illness even as he described it. Each morning, he watched himself get up, dress, make his breakfast, all from above himself – this should be taken literally, he says – looking down on the top of his own head, his foreshortened body, from within the confines of a vessel that to him resembled a waterlogged black box. He knew something of bipolar disorder, having been very troubled by a visit to a family member in a psychiatric ward. But he knew he didn't have it, because unlike them, he says: 'I had an acute sense of what was happening to me.' He kept looking at his hands for reassurance, but saw only 'the hands of a ghost'. He Googled: 'Why do I feel outside my body?' 'What is happening to me when I see myself from above?' 'Am I going mad?' Doctor after doctor raised their eyebrows. His girlfriend despaired of him, and soon moved out. In the weeks and months that followed, Dunne underwent many diagnostic tests including an MRI, a chest X-ray and checks on his eyesight, blood and stool samples. All came back normal. Depersonalisation is commonly misdiagnosed as depression and before long Dunne was prescribed antidepressants. Although he sensed the error, he didn't argue. 'I felt as if I needed medicine. I could take a pill and think: 'Maybe tomorrow will be different.'' On less symptomatic days, he continued to study, but his quest to heal himself became more desperate. He went to stay with a friend in Los Angeles and drove into the Mojave desert, looking for 'a more expansive space, to try to open up this narrow view'. But he saw it all from the damp black box above his head. Some things helped briefly: listening to Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood on repeat; drawing pictures of himself in the womb; making a mosaic of a Rubens painting; picking at the skin of his palms, to know where his edges were, something he found 'very grounding, very physical'. Back in London, feeling outside himself and the world, and increasingly obsessive about his ex-girlfriend, he made business cards that said 'Call me', with his phone number on. A sex worker, whose card he took down from a phone box to make space for his own, was one angry respondent. Another was a man who felt suicidal; he and Dunne spoke for hours, and afterwards, Dunne changed his phone number. In the book, he appears to do this without qualms. Alongside his self-estrangement was an intense self-absorption that often creates an empathy gap between Dunne and the reader. When, for instance, his mother told him on his birthday how wonderful it had been to carry him, he replied: 'That's not how it was for me … I was trapped.' What is his understanding now of why he became ill? 'I thought I was far more robust than I was,' he says. 'I don't think I've ever found life very easy.' He was born in Brisbane, Australia, and grew up in Bengaluru, India, where his parents were Protestant missionaries. 'That makes for a particular kind of intensity in the family,' he says. Rather than look for a single cause of his depersonalisation, he has found it more fruitful to think of it as a buildup of traumas – 'neurological, biological, and just life experience'. Each day he wondered who he was, and whether he would ever go back to being the whole person he had been. The first big turning point came when he locked eyes with a woman at a Rodin lecture. She was in her 60s. 'We didn't fall in love in a romantic way, but it was an understanding of one another at first sight,' Dunne says. 'Something about our experiences of life [made us] instantly trust each other.' They went back to her house, and in one of the book's most moving sequences, she asked him: 'What's your greatest fear?' 'Having a bath,' Dunne replied. At this, she rose and turned on the hot tap in the bathroom, then sat in the room while he undressed and climbed in the tub. 'To take off your clothes and get into a bath with an older woman you've just met is not a very normal thing to do,' Dunne says. 'But something in her personality fostered an atmosphere where that was possible.' And something in Dunne's illness, his foreshortened view of the world, created an openness to oddity. A friendship grew that 'helped to rebuild my capacity to love', Dunne says. She told him: 'You think of this thing you have as for ever. But I've lived long enough to know that there are just bad seasons in life. And then, one day … The world is new again.' In 2011, with no money, job, or strength to study, Dunne complied with his mother's suggestion to return home to Sydney. He moved into his parents' garage, and she pointed out a number for a specialist she had stuck on the fridge. After a few weeks, he got a referral, and it was in this doctor's office that Dunne was diagnosed with depersonalisation. 'It was amazing when he said the word. Relief – and scepticism: 'I can't really hope this much, can I?'' Dunne left the consultation with three objects: a bottle of water, a towel and a hessian bag to keep them in – an exposure and response prevention (ERP) kit. Each morning he was to dip his fingers in the water, and each afternoon wrap the wet towel around his hand. The idea being that a person who carries a small piece of their greatest fear will dilute that fear over time. 'You are allowed to cry, but not to whine,' the doctor told him. 'It can make you treatment-resistant.' Dunne combined his ERP with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation at a private clinic – something else his mother came across – in which a magnetic coil is placed on a patient's head so that magnetic pulses can target parts of the brain impaired by illness; in Dunne's case, the parietal lobe, which helps to maintain a unified sense of the body. Six months later, he emerged from his parents' garage for breakfast one morning, and told his mum: 'I'm becoming myself again.' Dunne completed his PhD, and is no longer on the specialist's books. He continues to take medication and attend therapy. Most importantly, he knows which tools to use when symptoms recur. 'When you're looking down on yourself, I've been taught to speak to it. You live with it, you write with it. You help to diminish its hold over you. You accept this distorted perception, this minor confinement,' he says. Though, in truth, more than acceptance, it is the idea of 'surrender' that he has found most helpful. 'Ideas of radical acceptance – I've tried all of those things, I can't relate to that language. Perhaps 'surrender' works because it's the last thing I want to do,' he says. 'To surrender means this thing will have its way with you. When I'm in the thick of difficult symptoms, I imagine myself being steamrolled over, and being OK with that. The other word that really helped me over the years is 'float'. The last thing I want to do is float with the second body symptoms. But the word itself, the sensation – it allows you to surrender to it, by joining it.' He holds up his palms, flaky after all these years with picked skin. Sometimes, the wounds get so bad he has to go to the doctor. But he finds it 'very pleasant to go for something ordinary'. The emotional legacy is perhaps harder to confront. When Dunne started dating again, he worried he had 'limited love' to give. He and his wife have been together for 11 years now. 'I do think I am more limited than I was, and I wish that wasn't the case,' he says. 'My daughter is a week old. I wonder about how much I can give, and I hope I can give everything. 'Maybe lots of people doubt whether they can give enough to the people they love. However, I feel the illness has limited me. Like, I won't be able to recognise when I need to give more. I have to have faith in others who have been able to do it.' He and his wife have developed a phrase to support themselves through the hardest times. 'There's always the core us,' they tell each other. 'It is,' Dunne says, 'both a memory of our love and an acknowledgment of our efforts to sustain it.' When Nothing Feels Real: A Journey Into the Mystery Illness of Depersonalisation by Nathan Dunne is published by Murdoch Books (£16.99). In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@ or jo@ In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at
Sydney Morning Herald
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘I felt like a puppet': A midnight swim leads to a long-term mystery illness
This story is part of the May 31 edition of Good Weekend. See all 14 stories. On a winter night in London, my girlfriend and I decided to go night swimming. On Hampstead Heath, we shed our clothes at the edge of the pond and waded into the shallows. Stars shimmered on the water and a half-moon bobbed in the inky black. It was so cold we could see our breath. Swimming out to the middle, we fingered mosses and reeds, then began diving under the water and coming up in wild leaps, splashing one another. In the midst of our game, something happened. I was hit with a great force, torn in two, ripped from myself. I swam frantically towards the bank, trying to reach solid ground. Even though my head stayed above water, it was like a great hand was trying to push me down to the bottom of the pond. Bent over in the shallows, I clutched my chest, trying to hold my sense of self together. I was leaving my body. There was nothing I could do. I cried, tears streaming. I couldn't stop. My whole face began to shake, my cheeks going into spasms and my limbs shaking violently. My girlfriend's voice was far away. 'Nathan, Nathan. Can you hear me?' Naked before her, dripping with water, I said nothing in response. I couldn't. I stared at my wet hands. They were ghostlike, not my own. I had disappeared, and what was left of me was only a shell. One part of my elf was empty: a dusty, windswept space. The second part of myself was in a state of confinement. I felt like a puppet, manipulated by something, or someone, outside my body. I turned around to brush away this feeling of being watched, but my second self stayed behind my back. It was looking at me but I couldn't see it. I had no sense of its form or how this second self was moving me around, only that the awareness of 'me' was now gone. 'I am 28 years old,' I said to myself, trying to believe it. 'My name is Nathan Dunne.' Three years passed before I understood what was happening to me: I was experiencing depersonalisation. Its onset provoked a profound loss of identity. Like many with the illness, my response was to say, 'I'm not me', 'I have no self' and 'I am no one'. This was an attempt to describe the feeling of a severe dissociative state, the onset of mental illness, pure terror. My identity had always been intrinsically tied up with my body, fundamental to my self-consciousness. But with depersonalisation, being in its vice meant a terrifying challenge to long-held assumptions about my existence – the notion of 'me'. I struggled to explain my symptoms to doctors. Phrases like 'I feel invisible' and 'I have a dark pain' led to a misdiagnosis of anxiety-related depression. The prescribed blue pills I took caused terrible side-effects – stomach cramps, heartburn, vomiting, a stiff jaw. I sweated uncontrollably, lost my appetite, and became even more exhausted, legs tangled on the lounge. In Australia, it affects 2 per cent of the population – 500,000 people. Yet a correct diagnosis can take years. In my confusion, I searched medical journals for clues and stayed up late pondering rare diseases, compiling a Word document I saved as 'The Possibles'. Rearranging the document was like prodding a wild animal. I'd move one disease into a new column, or onto a new page, and it would immediately lash out, more alive in me than ever. I was constantly rating them. Bipolar disorder would get 8/10, then I'd bump it down to 6/10. Wolfram syndrome would be flying steady at 3/10, only to abruptly climb up to a bewildering 7/10. I'd print the document out, underlining symptoms with fat blue lines and scrawling notes to myself across the top of the pages. Things like: Blood thing probable, but check page 7. Could be muscular and optical combined, see page 14. It was not until I returned to Australia and found Dr C, a man of great clarity and insight, that I came to understand the true nature of my illness. The swim was the catalyst for my acute stress and genetic predisposition. 'Reading your file has convinced me that your accurate diagnosis is a mental illness called depersonalisation.' For the first time, I said the word aloud. How had I never heard of it before? Now that it was on my tongue it seemed so obvious. The person I knew was in confinement. According to research conducted by the Pew Research Centre in Washington DC, the global DSM-5 Research Group and a team of international doctors who specialise in depersonalisation, it is estimated that more than 75 million people worldwide suffer from the illness. In Australia, it affects 2 per cent of the population – about 500,000 people. In the United States – 6.4 million. In Britain, it's 1.3 million. 'It isn't depression, or anxiety,' says psychiatrist Daphne Simeon. 'Often, it emerges with cruel ferocity as a chronic disorder completely unto itself. Its destructive impact on an individual's sense of self is implied in its very name – depersonalisation.' My feeling of having no self meant that I remained outside my body as a detached observer. For me, the vantage point of this detachment felt like being in a specific place, a damp, black box. But for other sufferers, like Amanda, a 43-year-old office assistant, 'It is as if the real me is taken out and put on a shelf or stored somewhere.' Alex, a merchant marine, says: 'It was something like waking up to find that you're in a coffin, buried alive. Only the coffin is your body, your very existence.' Based on National Health Service data from the UK, a diagnosis for depersonalisation typically takes between eight and 12 years: a shocking statistic. The long wait occurs because doctors are trained to be sceptical of potential outlying diseases. When someone presents with a cough, it's usually a cold. Ankle pain? Probably a sprain. There's little incentive to search for obscure explanations when a common one will do. But with an illness like depersonalisation, which is easily mistaken for depression, patients like me are misdiagnosed and wait years, through trial and error, for a correct diagnosis. Although it was first named in the 19th century, depersonalisation has long been misunderstood and dismissed by the medical establishment. Until 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) described it as merely a symptom of dissociation. Only in its most recent edition was it recognised as a disorder in its own right. Yet the DSM is a clinical resource used primarily by doctors, so the delay in identifying the condition contributed to a lack of public awareness and leaving most patients in the dark. Recent research suggests that the rapid growth of virtual reality (VR) has led to an uptick in cases. VR headsets immerse users in an unreal world. Much of digital culture relies on masks: avatars, emojis and filtered selfies. But these headsets are literal masks that plug into an alternative reality. Some behavioural scientists predict that by 2030 we will spend more time in simulated digital environments than in the physical world. With this profound shift in our way of life, depersonalisation cases are expected to increase dramatically. Loading The process of writing When Nothing Feels Real took many years. In June 2022, it felt impossible to keep going, and I suffered a major breakdown. I interpreted this as a warning not to continue, that the cost of my scribbling was too high, that my poor health simply wouldn't allow it. But several people in the community of depersonalisation sufferers assured me of the book's worth, and supported me, day and night, through the worst of the hours. Some literally sharpened my pencils. Their unwavering devotion and belief in my story, and the need for our collective stories to be heard, is what ultimately gave me the strength to finish. My hope is that with greater public awareness, there will be improved treatment options and funding for research. Most importantly, there needs to be a shift in how doctors are trained to identify the illness. We need to change the conversation from one of limited engagement and indifference to one of urgent need. Only then will there be a 'cure'. Since the onset of my illness in London, I've been through numerous stages of relapse. As I sit at my desk today, the best way to describe my current state is that I have partially recovered. Some trace of the illness will likely always remain. One of the hardest things has been accepting this – not just the symptoms, but the inability to go back in time. In therapy, I've sifted through every inch of sand: childhood, work, relationships. Only recently have I been able to reframe my need for answers. These days, I carry a realisation: acceptance is never really acceptance – it's surrender.
The Age
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘I felt like a puppet': A midnight swim leads to a long-term mystery illness
This story is part of the May 31 edition of Good Weekend. See all 14 stories. On a winter night in London, my girlfriend and I decided to go night swimming. On Hampstead Heath, we shed our clothes at the edge of the pond and waded into the shallows. Stars shimmered on the water and a half-moon bobbed in the inky black. It was so cold we could see our breath. Swimming out to the middle, we fingered mosses and reeds, then began diving under the water and coming up in wild leaps, splashing one another. In the midst of our game, something happened. I was hit with a great force, torn in two, ripped from myself. I swam frantically towards the bank, trying to reach solid ground. Even though my head stayed above water, it was like a great hand was trying to push me down to the bottom of the pond. Bent over in the shallows, I clutched my chest, trying to hold my sense of self together. I was leaving my body. There was nothing I could do. I cried, tears streaming. I couldn't stop. My whole face began to shake, my cheeks going into spasms and my limbs shaking violently. My girlfriend's voice was far away. 'Nathan, Nathan. Can you hear me?' Naked before her, dripping with water, I said nothing in response. I couldn't. I stared at my wet hands. They were ghostlike, not my own. I had disappeared, and what was left of me was only a shell. One part of my elf was empty: a dusty, windswept space. The second part of myself was in a state of confinement. I felt like a puppet, manipulated by something, or someone, outside my body. I turned around to brush away this feeling of being watched, but my second self stayed behind my back. It was looking at me but I couldn't see it. I had no sense of its form or how this second self was moving me around, only that the awareness of 'me' was now gone. 'I am 28 years old,' I said to myself, trying to believe it. 'My name is Nathan Dunne.' Three years passed before I understood what was happening to me: I was experiencing depersonalisation. Its onset provoked a profound loss of identity. Like many with the illness, my response was to say, 'I'm not me', 'I have no self' and 'I am no one'. This was an attempt to describe the feeling of a severe dissociative state, the onset of mental illness, pure terror. My identity had always been intrinsically tied up with my body, fundamental to my self-consciousness. But with depersonalisation, being in its vice meant a terrifying challenge to long-held assumptions about my existence – the notion of 'me'. I struggled to explain my symptoms to doctors. Phrases like 'I feel invisible' and 'I have a dark pain' led to a misdiagnosis of anxiety-related depression. The prescribed blue pills I took caused terrible side-effects – stomach cramps, heartburn, vomiting, a stiff jaw. I sweated uncontrollably, lost my appetite, and became even more exhausted, legs tangled on the lounge. In Australia, it affects 2 per cent of the population – 500,000 people. Yet a correct diagnosis can take years. In my confusion, I searched medical journals for clues and stayed up late pondering rare diseases, compiling a Word document I saved as 'The Possibles'. Rearranging the document was like prodding a wild animal. I'd move one disease into a new column, or onto a new page, and it would immediately lash out, more alive in me than ever. I was constantly rating them. Bipolar disorder would get 8/10, then I'd bump it down to 6/10. Wolfram syndrome would be flying steady at 3/10, only to abruptly climb up to a bewildering 7/10. I'd print the document out, underlining symptoms with fat blue lines and scrawling notes to myself across the top of the pages. Things like: Blood thing probable, but check page 7. Could be muscular and optical combined, see page 14. It was not until I returned to Australia and found Dr C, a man of great clarity and insight, that I came to understand the true nature of my illness. The swim was the catalyst for my acute stress and genetic predisposition. 'Reading your file has convinced me that your accurate diagnosis is a mental illness called depersonalisation.' For the first time, I said the word aloud. How had I never heard of it before? Now that it was on my tongue it seemed so obvious. The person I knew was in confinement. According to research conducted by the Pew Research Centre in Washington DC, the global DSM-5 Research Group and a team of international doctors who specialise in depersonalisation, it is estimated that more than 75 million people worldwide suffer from the illness. In Australia, it affects 2 per cent of the population – about 500,000 people. In the United States – 6.4 million. In Britain, it's 1.3 million. 'It isn't depression, or anxiety,' says psychiatrist Daphne Simeon. 'Often, it emerges with cruel ferocity as a chronic disorder completely unto itself. Its destructive impact on an individual's sense of self is implied in its very name – depersonalisation.' My feeling of having no self meant that I remained outside my body as a detached observer. For me, the vantage point of this detachment felt like being in a specific place, a damp, black box. But for other sufferers, like Amanda, a 43-year-old office assistant, 'It is as if the real me is taken out and put on a shelf or stored somewhere.' Alex, a merchant marine, says: 'It was something like waking up to find that you're in a coffin, buried alive. Only the coffin is your body, your very existence.' Based on National Health Service data from the UK, a diagnosis for depersonalisation typically takes between eight and 12 years: a shocking statistic. The long wait occurs because doctors are trained to be sceptical of potential outlying diseases. When someone presents with a cough, it's usually a cold. Ankle pain? Probably a sprain. There's little incentive to search for obscure explanations when a common one will do. But with an illness like depersonalisation, which is easily mistaken for depression, patients like me are misdiagnosed and wait years, through trial and error, for a correct diagnosis. Although it was first named in the 19th century, depersonalisation has long been misunderstood and dismissed by the medical establishment. Until 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) described it as merely a symptom of dissociation. Only in its most recent edition was it recognised as a disorder in its own right. Yet the DSM is a clinical resource used primarily by doctors, so the delay in identifying the condition contributed to a lack of public awareness and leaving most patients in the dark. Recent research suggests that the rapid growth of virtual reality (VR) has led to an uptick in cases. VR headsets immerse users in an unreal world. Much of digital culture relies on masks: avatars, emojis and filtered selfies. But these headsets are literal masks that plug into an alternative reality. Some behavioural scientists predict that by 2030 we will spend more time in simulated digital environments than in the physical world. With this profound shift in our way of life, depersonalisation cases are expected to increase dramatically. Loading The process of writing When Nothing Feels Real took many years. In June 2022, it felt impossible to keep going, and I suffered a major breakdown. I interpreted this as a warning not to continue, that the cost of my scribbling was too high, that my poor health simply wouldn't allow it. But several people in the community of depersonalisation sufferers assured me of the book's worth, and supported me, day and night, through the worst of the hours. Some literally sharpened my pencils. Their unwavering devotion and belief in my story, and the need for our collective stories to be heard, is what ultimately gave me the strength to finish. My hope is that with greater public awareness, there will be improved treatment options and funding for research. Most importantly, there needs to be a shift in how doctors are trained to identify the illness. We need to change the conversation from one of limited engagement and indifference to one of urgent need. Only then will there be a 'cure'. Since the onset of my illness in London, I've been through numerous stages of relapse. As I sit at my desk today, the best way to describe my current state is that I have partially recovered. Some trace of the illness will likely always remain. One of the hardest things has been accepting this – not just the symptoms, but the inability to go back in time. In therapy, I've sifted through every inch of sand: childhood, work, relationships. Only recently have I been able to reframe my need for answers. These days, I carry a realisation: acceptance is never really acceptance – it's surrender.
