Have you ever been gripped by the suspicion that nothing is real? A former student here at Stevens has endured feelings of unreality since childhood. “It feels like there’s a glass wall between me and everything else in the world,” Camille says. She recently made a film about this syndrome, for which she interviewed herself and others, including me. She calls her film “Depersonalized; Derealized; Deconstructed.”
Derealization and depersonalization refer to feelings that the external world and your own self, respectively, are unreal. Lumping the terms together, psychiatrists define depersonalization/derealization disorder as “persistent or recurrent… experiences of unreality, detachment, or being an outside observer with respect to one’s thoughts, feelings, sensations, body, or actions,” according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM. To reduce word clutter, I’ll call this disorder derealization.
Derealization can be a symptom of serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, or a reaction to hallucinogens such as LSD. Extreme cases of derealization, usually associated with brain damage, may result in Cotard delusion, also called walking-corpse syndrome, the belief that you are dead; and Capgras delusion, the conviction that people around you have been replaced by imposters.
Healthy people commonly experience derealization in stressful circumstances—for example, while speaking in public. Psychiatrists prescribe psychotherapy and medication when the syndrome results in “distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.”
Many people, I’m guessing, undergo episodes of derealization without knowing what it is. The feeling disturbs you, so you suppress it. You try to put it out of your mind, and you don’t mention it to others. “You’re afraid that if you do tell people, they won’t know what it is,” Camille explains, “and you don’t want people viewing you differently.” I understand these reactions, because derealization can be unsettling, even terrifying.
But I’m glad Camille has drawn attention to the syndrome, because it raises profound philosophical questions. Sages ancient and modern have suggested that the everyday world, in which we go about the business of living, is an illusion. Plato likened our perceptions of things to shadows cast on the wall of a cave. The 8th-century Hindu philosopher Adi Shankara asserted that ultimate reality is an eternal, undifferentiated field of consciousness. The Buddhist doctrine of anatta says our individual selves are illusory.
Modern philosophers such as Nick Bostrom postulate that our cosmos is a simulation, a virtual reality created by the alien equivalent of a bored teenage hacker. The philosophical stance known as solipsism insinuates that you are the only conscious being in the universe; everyone around you only seems conscious. Some interpretations of quantum mechanics also undermine the status of objective reality. Could derealization have inspired all these metaphysical conjectures?
Derealization has haunted me since I was a kid; it makes the world feel wobbly, flimsy, like a screen on which images are projected. Pondering derealization leaves me conflicted. I have moral misgivings about claims that reality isn’t, well, real. These assertions, whether Platonism or the simulation hypothesis, can easily become escapist and nihilistic. Why should we worry about poverty, oppression, environmental destruction, pandemics, war and other sources of suffering if the world is just a video game? I reject any philosophy that undercuts our responsibility to care for each other.
I’ve nonetheless come to value derealization as an antidote for habituation. Our brains are designed to accomplish tasks with minimal conscious effort. As a result, we get accustomed to things; we take them for granted. We become like zombies or automatons, carrying out chores and interacting with other people—even those we supposedly love–without being fully aware of what we are doing.
Derealization is like a slap across the face. It cuts through your habituation and wakes you up. It reminds you of the weirdness of the world, of other people, of yourself. By weirdness I mean infinite improbability and inexplicability. Weirdness encompasses all the bipolar properties of our existence, its beauty and ugliness, kindness and cruelty, good and evil.
Seeing the weirdness doesn’t negate our moral responsibility to others. Far from it. By estranging me from the world, derealization, paradoxically, makes it more real. It helps me see humanity more clearly and care about it more deeply. What once felt like a curse has become a gift, especially when I can share my sense of estrangement with others, like Camille.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings. This column is adapted from one originally published on ScientificAmerican.com.
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