Everyone feels “detached” at certain times in their lives. It could be after a traumatic event, a significant event or even due to emotions. People can relate to not feeling like they belong, but a sense of not belonging to society or a community. Others are not so lucky and feel like they don't belong in themselves, their bodies and their minds. There is a disorder like this that many people call depersonalization disorder or DPD. It has many symptoms, but once diagnosed it can be treated with different types of medications and therapies. Depersonalization is a state in which a person experiences his feelings, thoughts, memories, or bodily sensations as not belonging to himself. DPD is present in many syndromes such as depression, hypomania, phobic anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, borderline disorders or schizophrenia (Trueman 1). It can also be linked to emotional or physical abuse in childhood. Depersonalization can affect 1-2% of the general population and 80% of psychiatric patients (Brown 1). There are many symptoms of depersonalization that patients suffering from this disorder face. JC Dixon studied the symptoms of DPD and found many recurring ones that people explained they had. Examples of this were: other people seemed changed or unfamiliar, things a person was used to seemed strange, the body seemed detached, no self-awareness, and no difference between self and non-self (Trueman 2). These are not the only symptoms, another is a type of obsession, such as obsessive compulsive disorder. A patient may resort to obsessing over their symptoms. They may continue to look at their hands to decide whether they seem more or less real than they did an hour ago, or they may repeatedly check hundreds... half of a sheet of paper... the right diagnosis and treatment can help reduce the disorder and get your life back. Works Cited Aliyev, NAAliyev, ZN "Lamotrigine Outperforms Placebo in Hard-to-Treat Depersonalization Study." Brown University Psychopharmacology Update 22.4 (2011): 1. MasterFILE Premier. Network. 12 February 2014.CBT, promising combined drug therapy for depersonalization disorder. Brown University Psychopharmacology Update [Internet serial]. (2005, May), [cit. February 12, 2014]; 16(5): 1. Available from: MasterFILE Premier.Simeon, Daphne and Jeffrey Abugel. Feeling unreal: depersonalization disorder and loss of self. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.Trueman, David. "Depersonalization in the non-clinical population". Journal Of Psychology 116.1 (1984): 107. MasterFILE Premier. Network. February 12. 2014.