Scared of these strange confusing feelings

I'm sorry . Is it something treatable and temporary? 

i believe so im on anti depressants at the moment its still here i read it goes away when your not focusing on it. its hard not to

Thanks for the optimism I really appreciate it. I have been thinking it could be that, just all stemming from the anxiety, and it feels like I'm slipping away from what I knew each and every day. I have luckily never experienced the visual effect, like a pane of glass or living third person, but I still just don't feel myself. I would like to stay in touch with you since you have experience 

please keep in touch too im going into my 2nd week of zoloft while dealing with depersonalization;(

Is there another way to contact you?

or on kik user is radley.patient

Hey man. Sorry to jump in on this, but I've been having the same experience for the past couple months. I'm 16 too, and my anxiety started in small bouts, and it just kind of grew into a background sensation, unfortunately. Recently, though, it's become worse -- like there's a constant feeling of tightness in my chest, and I've started feeling derealization every now and then (I think). It's like I get all wrapped up in the idea that there's no way to really verify that anything is truly real, and then I imagine that everyone and everything (including sensations) are just .... I don't know, illusions? Then I start to feel kind of distant from everyone, like I mean if I can't know that they're real, then I mean how can you connect with them? I'm not trying to set you off or anything, I just want to share my experiences.

Has the Zoloft helped the derealization at all?

Hi Zoloft is working pretty good tbh, kik me at johnreich12 if you need to talk

i feel the same way it sucks im on the 11th day of taking sertraline which is generic for zoloft and im hoping itll kick in soon

Alright so in all my worrying I found two ways of approaching this problem that made me feel a little better.

The first was to approach the philosophical problem itself. Basically, my biggest fear was that everything could be an illusion (aka nothing’s real or that it’s all made up of my brain). But what’s an illusion? It’s something that appears real, but has no real substance/meaning behind it. Let’s assume for a minute that this idea is true, that indeed everything is really just an illusion created by my brain. If you go by this philosophy, there’s nowhere left to go after establishing that it’s true -- if everything’s an illusion, then you can’t truly know anything, there can’t be wrong or right; in other words, nothing else follows. The most logical conclusion? This philosophy (that everything could be imaginary) has no real substance/meaning (as it doesn’t really get you anywhere), and is in of itself not real (although it appears that way) -- thus, the illusion isn’t life, but the philosophy itself.

The above is really only a temporary solution, though (at least in my case). Just bear with me and see if the following describes you. Even after I seemingly find a solution, my brain will keep turning over stones to try and find some hole to poke in the theory, or keep going so I can be 100% sure. A lot of these times, these thoughts will pop in out of nowhere, and when they do, the anxiety comes roaring back. These thoughts have been about all kinds of things: being gay, not choosing the right career (and thus being unhappy for the rest of my life), getting cancer, being impotent, none of my friends liking me. And I always knew these thoughts were irrational, or at the very least unproductive, but my brain would always doubt it with a “what if”. Like I knew I wasn’t gay, but what if I overlooked something and really was? How could I be sure? This would lead me to spend tons of time online researching these issues (whatever they were) or journaling to try and get to the bottom of them, or just turning them over again and again, but enough would never be enough. I’d even start working out a lot as a way to cope and just escape from the thinking for a little. But nothing would ever be enough -- I’d feel the need to keep researching and doing things to try and resolve whatever problem I had latched onto (be it how to lower cancer risks, or make sure I wasn’t gay, or finding philosophical loopholes to prove that reality is, in fact, real).

Now let’s say I latched onto the thought where I was going to get AIDS on my hands, and instead of researching ways to boost immunity I started washing my hands all the time to avoid getting AIDS, even if I knew the thought wasn’t rational (this is hypothetical BTW; I don’t do this). Starts to look like a disorder that’s a bit more familiar, right? It turns out that what I described (in the paragraph above -- not the hand washing) looks a lot like something called pure OCD, where you have obsessive thoughts, but no really outward compulsion. Instead, they’re more mental (such as doing tons of research or constantly ruminating), but the sufferer still doesn’t really have any control over it. Derealization is even a symptom of anxiety (which OCD can definitely bring on). And it makes sense to me, too; my dad has an anxious/compulsive personality, as does his mom.

So I don’t know if this is at all enlightening to anyone, but I just wanted to put out there what I found. Maybe it'll help someone.

thank you its just hard trying to get rid of the feeling of strangeness :\

Very true. I'll often be sitting there forgetting about it all, and then one second I'll remind myself of it and start obsessing over the feeling again. I have been scared of irrational things, in the past month I've been scared I will develop schizophrenia, or I'll be scared I will get into a severe depression, and forget about he current situation, the present, where I'm not actually like that. My mind wanders and tries to answer these questions rather than let them go. 

alot of wat ur describing here is wat here is wat i went thru when i was growing up ,i was lucky or unlucky maybe google was'nt around

Did you get rough it Declan? It might all just be a part of adolescence for me 

i have only realised in the last 3 wks i have been dealing wit wat im thinking is more an anxiety disorder than depression most of my life ,was never great in unfamilar crowds always feeling i was a bit out of place not funny enough or outgoing enough dat i was just abit strange around people ,my attacks were never that sereve usually just sick to my stomach, used drink as i became older trying to fit in , always suffered from erectile dysfunction but used to just blame this on drink but i now know dis was a due to anxiety, had massive attack bout 7 yrs ago after girl i was meeting on and off asked me not to be contacting her for a while ,she was the first girl i was ever really close wit, at the time i thot twas someting every1 one went thru when dey lose some1 they love , suffered another attack when some1 mentioned she was in  my area bout 3 wks ago, dis sent alarm bells ringing wit me as i hadnt had any contact wit her since my father was killed tragically at home it was like been thrown back in time feeling the same way about her as i did 7 yrs ago,ive been sizing up pros and cons of contacting her guessing and second guessing myself (which i am quite gud at now at this stage) ever since , i thot maybe it was part of growing up wit me too dat i took wat i deemed to be people putting me down , maybe being a bit shy or not very confident as tings i wud grow out off in time when it was something else altogether