* * *
I pull into a tiny back street, lined with colorful terrace houses. The rain is lashing down and the cobbled road is so small even my Mini is struggling to make a three-point turn. I’m in the seaside town of Brighton, down on the south coast of the UK. I lock up the car and dive for cover as the door to the nearest house opens and a small child grins out at me. “Are you Helen?” he says.
I follow the child into his house. “Hello?” I call. Louise suddenly appears at the top of the stairs and beckons me up. From the living room, two more kids stare out at me.
“Hi,” she says brightly. “Sorry, it’s a bit hectic around here. They’re not all mine. Tea?”
This was not the same Louise that I had met a few years previously. Back then, sitting in the Tate Gallery in central London, she had seemed distracted, wary, exhausted. She had gazed blankly at the people around us. She had said that she felt like she was in a play and that everyone around her, including me, were the actors. She felt completely detached from the world. “I can hear myself speaking to you,” she’d said. “I know rationally that this is my voice, but it doesn’t feel like it’s mine. None of this feels real.”
Now, standing in her kitchen with the kettle boiling, Louise looks like a different person. Her blond wavy hair has changed to a deep shade of brown for a start. But the real difference is in her eyes: a year before they had seemed distant and unsure of the world, now they are clear and focused and she is smiling, confident and cracking jokes about the havoc in the next room. Louise pours out two cups of tea and then points me back down the narrow flight of stairs.
When we are out of earshot, Louise says, “When I get depersonalized now, I don’t panic, I just tell myself, it’s not real, it’s just my brain, nothing has changed, this is still my arm, this is still my house, and just get on with the day.”
She opens what I had assumed was the garage, and welcomes me into a brightly decorated tiki bar. “I converted it a few years ago,” she explains.
The room is filled with glasses and candles and strings of lanterns, with tribal masks and leis hung on the wall. I settle myself on a barstool and ask Louise to take me right back to the beginning.
SHE WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD and off sick from school the first time it happened.
“I woke up that morning, and suddenly felt like I’d been dropped into my body,” she says. “It’s really hard to describe, but it was like I was just born. Everything around me felt new. It’s like you are completely different to what you were a second ago. A completely different you. You’re suddenly really aware of where you are and who you are, and everything around you feels foreign . . .”
She pauses. “Everything about yourself and everything around you feels alien. You know rationally that it can’t have changed, but it’s like you’re walking around in this world that you recognize but no longer feel. It’s like this unshakable sense of detachment from your body and the world.
“Agh!” she groans. “It’s so hard to explain.”
Louise, like many with depersonalization, has great difficulty describing her state of mind; no eloquent metaphor seems to sum up her feelings accurately. She tries one more time: “It’s like you’re watching the world but are no longer part of it.”
Her first few bouts of depersonalization were brief. “As a child, it only happened for a few minutes at a time,” she says. “I would panic and run to be around others, but I never talked about it with anyone.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, I just thought it was really weird. I didn’t want anyone to think I was crazy.”
This is where depersonalization differs from schizophrenia. This disturbing feeling that your experience of yourself and the world around you has changed is not accompanied by any kind of psychosis. The people who suffer from this disorder never lose the ability to distinguish what is real and what is not.
“You never truly believe that you’re part of some alternate reality, but that’s part of the problem,” says Louise. “You know rationally that these weird feelings that you’re experiencing can’t be real, that the world you are in hasn’t suddenly changed, but it still feels like it has. That’s why it’s so frightening. It’s worse than being away with the fairies—it’s like being a sane person who is mad.”
THE FIRST TIME that Louise’s depersonalization became really bothersome was at university. She had been suffering from a migraine when suddenly her world became distant, separate from her body. She was floating around, she says, in a world that she was no longer part of. This feeling stuck around for days at a time.
“Then it started lasting a week, and then longer. Eventually it just set in and wouldn’t lift. Finally I had to leave university. I became permanently anxious, like that feeling you’d have if you tipped backward on a chair and are about to fall. I’d feel like that all the time. I couldn’t stop thinking about how weird everything felt. I thought I was going mad—it was just terrifying,” she says.
Despite this inner turmoil, it was not immediately obvious to those around Louise that there was anything wrong. She knew rationally how she should be behaving, so her actions appeared perfectly normal to others. Yet she spent years feeling isolated, frustrated and fearful. After countless visits to doctors who shrugged their shoulders in response to her weird concoction of symptoms, Louise became depressed, terrified of the constant anxiety attacks that would coincide with these bouts of unreality.
“Sometimes,” she says, “when it’s at its worst, I can’t have any noise in the house. When you’re in this state, everything around you feels like it is screaming at you to get noticed. But at the same time your whole world seems like it’s happening to someone else, someone you’re not in control of. It’s like walking through tar. It’s exhausting.”
“And there’s no way of ignoring it?” I ask. “By concentrating on the rational part of your brain that’s telling you everything is okay?”
“No,” she replies. “Saying ‘think positively’ is like trying to fix a leg that’s been blown off with a plaster.”
She’s quiet for a while. “Have you seen that painting by Edvard Munch?” she says, suddenly. “With the face screaming against an orange sky? Some say it is about depersonalization.”
In the 1800s, Munch created four pieces of artwork called The Scream in Nature. The pieces are made from oil, pastels and crayon and each shows a ghostly figure with a skull-like face looking out from the canvas, its mouth wide open and hands either side of its cheeks. The sky behind the figure is made of red swirls and there appears to be water in the distance. Two people stand close by, seemingly oblivious to the figure’s turmoil. Expressionists of the time often placed emphasis on painting their inner feelings and emotions rather than a realistic image. “It’s not the chair that should be painted,” said Munch, “but what a person has felt at the sight of it.”2
In a poem Munch painted onto the frame of The Scream in Nature, he said: “I was walking along the road with two friends—The Sun was setting—the Sky turned blood-red. And I felt a wave of Sadness—I paused, tired to Death—Above the blue-black Fjord and City Blood and Flaming tongues hovered—My friends walked on—I stayed behind—quaking with Angst—I felt the great Scream in Nature.”3
“That painting makes perfect sense to me,” says Louise. “The person and the landscape are screaming at you. It’s exactly like depersonalization—when it happens you can’t get any peace. It’s not only the outside world that seems strange, but your internal one too. Everything you’re familiar with becomes alien. You’re detached from everything—even your memories. Memories of things you’ve done suddenly don’t feel like they belong to you. It robs you of your past. It takes away the core of who you are.”
“Your memories don’t feel like your own?”
“Yeah, you just feel separate from everything that you thought you were. Your memories, your voice. I mean I know this is my voice and these are my memories, but when I’m in that state, they don’t see
m like mine. I know I’m controlling what I’m saying but it’s like I’m in a film, like it doesn’t belong to me. It’s like I’m on my own in the center of everything and no one else is real. It makes you feel very separated and lonely from everything, like you’re the only person in the world that is really here.”
A few years before we first met, Louise ended up in the hospital. She had just given birth to her second child.
“I’d had illnesses running up to the birth and I’d felt really odd throughout the pregnancy,” she says. “When you’re in charge of someone else and you’re not feeling like you’re in charge of you, it’s just the worst. After the birth, it was the first time I really relaxed. But then I went into the shower and suddenly the weirdness hit me again. I had this massive panic attack. My whole world closed in on me and everything went black.”
Two months passed, which Louise says were a blur. “I can’t really remember anything between giving birth and having to go back to the hospital. I just couldn’t manage anymore. It had come to the forefront of my mind and I was so overwhelmed by it all I couldn’t think of anything else.”
Her husband could see there was something wrong, but it wasn’t obvious to him what it was. “Everyone kept asking about depression and whether I had suicidal thoughts. I told them that any bad thoughts were only there because I wanted these weird feelings to stop. I had a little baby and I wanted to get on with my life. It was just one massive nightmare. It was like being in hell. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”
* * *
After first meeting Louise, I paid a visit to an online forum for people who suffer from depersonalization to learn more about the disorder.4 I browsed through some of the posts. One member said he had an acute feeling of forgetting who he was and the way that humans live. “I feel like I’m just an alien from another dimension pretending to be human the best I can,” he said. “All my memories are there but it’s like I can’t trust them, my brain won’t accept and assimilate them.” Another described themself as “a frame, not even a shell. All that was me is no longer there.” Some appeared to be confined to their houses, unwilling to spend their day interacting with people who didn’t feel part of their world. One regular contributor did the opposite: he walked ten miles a day, yet still felt nothing. “I’m so fucking numb I can go anywhere, do anything and I won’t feel a damn thing.”
There seemed to be a common theme of emotional numbing of one sort or another. I ask Louise whether she too felt she lacked emotions toward people and her surroundings.
“When I think about it rationally, I do have an emotional attachment to others, my parents or my husband, for example, but if they are around and I’m feeling depersonalized then it’s like the room is your play, and the space in front of you is your set. They’re all just actors. So at that point I don’t feel any particular attachment or emotion toward them or the things around me.”
I’m struck by this peculiar paradox: Louise and those in the depersonalization forum all talk about an emotional numbness and disconnection with themselves and the outside world, yet all suffer strong feelings of subjective distress over this weirdness. As in Munch’s painting, they say that the world seems to be screaming at them, yet they feel like they’re not part of it. How is it possible to feel nothing and everything all at once?
The answer, it seems, begins with a rather unusual murder.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1921, William Hightower told a newspaper reporter that he had been digging in the sand at a popular spot at Salada Beach in California, hoping to find some bootleg whiskey that he had been told was buried there. While digging, he said, he had uncovered a black prayer scarf that he believed belonged to Father Patrick Heslin—a local priest who had gone missing a week earlier and who had been the subject of several ransom notes.
Eager to claim a reward for having found Heslin, Hightower returned to the spot with a reporter, who brought with him a team of police. They started digging. One of the policemen told Hightower to be careful where he was digging as he might strike the face of anyone buried below. Hightower told the policeman not to worry as he was digging at the priest’s feet. Hightower was arrested, and Father Heslin’s body was uncovered.
The San Francisco Call and Post arranged for Hightower to be hooked up to a new piece of machinery, the cardio-pneumo-psychograph, invented by John Augustus Larson, which was quickly renamed the “lie detector” by local press. Larson’s technology incorporated a test for blood pressure with tests for skin conductivity, pulse and respiration. He believed that fluctuations in these bodily functions were an excellent means of detecting guilt. Hightower was the first person to trial the technology. On August 17, the newspaper’s headline read, “Science Indicates Hightower’s Guilt.” Police later found in Hightower’s hotel room the pistol used to shoot the priest, the typewriter used to write the ransom notes and some sand.
While the wild gyrations of the lie detector were never reliable enough to be fully accepted by the scientific community, it was one of the first demonstrations that our unconscious bodily functions are linked with our thoughts.
Have you ever been told to “go with your gut”? Or to “follow your heart”? We talk about leaning on our bodily sensations all the time, but there’s more to this than a figure of speech. Take your heartbeat, for instance. Think about it now. Can you feel it pumping softly against your breastbone? Perhaps it’s pounding. Or maybe you are struggling to feel it at all. Take a moment and try counting it without touching your chest or feeling for your pulse. Is it more difficult than you thought? When asked to count their heartbeat for a short time, one in four people are off by about 50 percent.
Our ability to sense the physical condition of our body is called interoception. You should be familiar with this concept even if you don’t realize it, since with the exception of a few, most people can sense whether they are cold or hot, where a pain is coming from, whether they are thirsty or hungry. These are all interoceptive feelings.
Scientists tend to use the heartbeat test as a way of measuring our interoceptive capability. Each of us has a different capacity for such bodily awareness and we now know that this ability is intimately connected with our thoughts, feelings and social behavior. People who are more in tune with their heartbeat, for instance, are better at reading their own emotional feelings. People who are better at interpreting their own feelings are also subsequently better at interpreting the emotions of others. People who have greater interoceptive abilities also make better decisions based on subtle cues in their environment, and can make intuitive choices more quickly. They can judge the passing of time more accurately and also perform better in tasks that require them to divide their attention.
One noteworthy example of how interoception affects our thoughts comes from the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, in which the Argentinian neuroscientist Agustin Ibáñez describes “the man with two hearts.”5 The gentleman in question had heart disease, and so Ibáñez replaced his failing heart with a mechanical pump. Unfortunately, his patient disliked the sensation of his second heart, which was implanted just above his belly button. The mechanical throbbing sensation made it feel as if his chest had fallen into his abdomen, he said. But, interestingly, the sensation of his second heart also affected his behavior. His new heart did not react to external events like his original heart. Before his operation he had no problems empathizing with others. Now that his mechanical heart ruled, he had problems reading other’s motives, he lacked empathy when looking at painful images and even had difficulty making decisions.
It supports a theory first proposed by William James in the nineteenth century, that we may be able to register what’s happening in our external world in an intellectual and rational manner, but it is an awareness of our body’s reaction to the world (our beating heart and sweaty palms) that conjures up our rich emotional response to that world.
Some of the most influential work in this area has been carried out by the Portuguese-born neurosci
entist Antonio Damasio, who describes emotions and feelings as two separate things.6 Emotions, he says, are the brain’s reaction to certain physical stimuli. For example, if a rabid dog starts barking at us, our hearts might race, our muscles contract and our mouths go dry. This emotional reaction happens automatically. Our brain then attaches value to this emotion—is it rewarding, strong, negative? Our feelings occur only after we become aware of the physical changes to our body and start to form a conscious representation of that emotion—something we then attach a word to and call our feelings.7
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