Have you experienced derealization as a child bipolar?

April 12, 2015 11:33 AM

As an adult bipolar (BPD II) at 32 I'm still trying to make sense of odd things from my childhood. I have been able to figure out that a lot of incongruent behaviors as a kid relate to childhood manifestation of BPD: Night terrors, a certain precocious tendency, bouts of mania and depression, generally boilerplate things. But as an early teen I had some interesting derealization/quiet euphoria experiences that don't fit my notions of how Bipolar and I work together. More after the break.

I'm still trying to figure out a couple of child experiences that no one ever had an explanation for (parents, friends, mental health professionals at the time). Both happened in different youth orchestra rehearsals. I would be playing a piece of music with the orchestra and fall into what we in music school affectionately called a "mugasm"; that moment where your entire consciousness is swept up into the music. This has happened to me many times in my life, but I always snap out of it rather quickly (usually around the time I stop playing). These times it would stick around for quite a while.

During these two incidents as a child (early/mid teens) I didn't snap out of it. I stayed in a weird dream-like euphoric state for the remainder of the day. It was like I was a foot behind my own head, and pulling puppet strings to control myself and the world around me. It wasn't that I lost any physical control of my body, or suffered from delayed reaction time or sensation. It was almost like being hypo-manic, but without the pressured speech, racing thoughts, and the CNS "hum" that I feel when I'm hypomanic...also it was way more dissociative than a normal hypomania.

I've read about "derealization" and it seems almost to fit the bill, except for the fact that most people's reaction to it is strongly negative.

Here's a previous AskMe that's similar, except this person yet again is filled with dread from the experience:
Lost Thought Lost Mind

Also a google search brought me to this. Also similar, but much more heavy on the manic symptoms. Mine was more of a quiet euphoria:
Does this count as a hypo-manic episode?

Keep in mind I have very extensive experience with hypo-manic and depressive episodes. I know how they have affected me for the last 15-17 years. These symptoms were markedly different.

Also, because it needs to be said, no history of mental or physical abuse.

I'd be interested to know if anyone else had experiences like this as a child or adult, bipolar or not.

I understand that while I am fully "outed" in my personal and professional life you may not be. Feel free to PM me.

posted by aloiv2 to Health & Fitness (7 answers total)

I had some very out-of-touch-with-reality experiences as a teenager (since been diagnosed with bipolar II).

The majority of them were depression-related - I once covered my face in blue makeup to try and make it feel real, because I didn't feel at all connected to it or to the world.

I also had something not depression-related when I was fourteen or so - I was sitting in class at school, and I'd been depressed around that time, but I was struck with a sudden, overwhelming calm. Total conviction that the world was peaceful and everything was going to be all right. No anxiety at all, which was very unusual at that point. My friends noticed it, as I was acting kind of dreamy (and, being the kind souls they were, tried to snap me out of it). It lasted for probably three or four hours, and then faded away.

The only similar experience I've had since was potentiated by hallucinogens, and my hypomanic episodes now are pretty different.
posted by terretu at 11:49 AM on April 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

The explanation might be as simple as being in a period of rapid brain development and hormonal fluctuation. I had many neurological events - intense deja vu, aphasia, echolalia, euphoria, aura migraines - that were most likely to flare up in the week before my period, and I had largely grown out of all of them except the migraines by 17 or so.

Puberty juice is a hell of a drug.
posted by Lyn Never at 12:24 PM on April 12, 2015 [4 favorites]

Not bipolar, but suffering from depressions. I've very often had similar experiences to yours, while playing music and also in nature. Sometimes also while working with visual arts. The calm..

I've since tried to induce it by self-medication (don't even go there), and also through meditation, which sometimes works, and always helps me move on from whichever state I am in.
posted by mumimor at 1:03 PM on April 12, 2015

Dx'ed BP II as adult, raised atheist. This calm above-it-all state happened a few times around 14 years old. Also occasionally happened when playing in a band in 20s. Then and now I assumed this was the mystical experience religions reference.

Much later read about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's ideas on "flow" states, and now think that's what the band experience was.
posted by Jesse the K at 2:13 PM on April 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

+1 to Jesse the K.

hyper-real experiences of the present moment facilitated by music. not 'symptoms' of anything destructive imho. ianad/ianyd.
posted by j_curiouser at 5:15 PM on April 12, 2015

I've never experienced derealization or depersonalization as a positive thing (more related to highly anxious depression or mixed states for me) but am on the BP I/II spectrum and have enjoyed "flow states" many times, which started for me around the age of 14 as well. There's a reason the expression "walking on a cloud of air" exists and that effortless floating euphoria feeling often comes with clean bursts of hypomania; experiencing it after a flow state almost sounds like your body/mind indulging in self-reward at an age where your own self-regulating mechanisms are learning too what it means to feel good, and rewarding a flow state in an "affected" person with a heavy dose of internal euphoria and endogenous stimulants (I bet) isn't out of the question. I play the piano infrequently and sometimes have such a welling of desire to pound on the keys that I cause significant pain and inflammation in my hands just from playing so hard without enough practice in between. Whatever that means.

For me it was either playing music or writing code or obsessing about specific high school girls that kept the intensity going, and it was highly correlated with the spring and summer.
posted by aydeejones at 1:24 AM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks everyone, these are all really excellent perspectives on the matter. I hadn't really heard of flow states before.

aydeejones - "clean bursts of hypomania" I used almost that exact phrase with someone the other day to describe the hypomanias that I had in my mid to late teens.
posted by aloiv2 at 12:21 PM on April 14, 2015