PSY 245 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Major Depressive Disorder, Depersonalization Disorder, Depersonalization
Document Summary
Most frequently in adolescents and young adults, hardly ever in people over 40. The disorder comes on suddenly and tends to be chronic. The central symptom is persistent and recurrent episodes of depersonalization. An alteration in one"s experience of the self in which one"s mental functioning or body feels unreal or foreign. They feel as though they have become separated from their body and are observing themselves from outside. Depersonalization is often accompanied by derealization the feeling that the external world, too, is unreal and strange. Depersonalization symptoms alone do not indicate a depersonalization disorder. ~50% of adults have transient feelings of depersonalization and derealization at some point in their lives. The symptoms of a depersonalization disorder, in contrast, are: persistent or recurrent, and cause marked distress and impairment in the person"s social and occupational realms. State-dependent learning: each thought, memory, and skill is tied exclusively to a particular state of arousal.
