I was enjoying a midnight swim. Then my girlfriend kissed me – and the nightmare began | Mental health

S.Na Cold Winter Night, in “Nathan Dan and his girlfriend to swim in the middle of the night on Hampsted Heath in London. Dan says they were living together for a few months, and although he was dark and cold, they “had a summer feeling in that first relationship.” They threw their clothes and traded in shallow. After diving into ice water, Dan’s friend put her lips on his cheek, and while they separated, his life changed beyond all confession. “It was like a beating. Just as something fell,” he says. “The heart of the switch.”

Dunne’s transformation looks like a fictional story in the opposite direction: one kiss, and his life turned into a nightmare. Seventeen years have passed since that night, and he is often explaining the change in metaphors and analogies. His eyes are full of soot. His voice was a robot. He felt as if he was closed outside his body, which became a kind of “second body”. Any form of water, from a drop of rain to a warm bath, make everything worse. His horror and panic was so great that the next day he broke a vase and used a crust to cut himself. “Trying not to live anymore”, is how to describe it.

It will take three and a half years to know that what he has seen is the emergence of a personality disposal disorder, a Differential disorder It is believed to affect about 1.3 million people in the UK, a similar number of those with bipolar disorder, although the condition is less famous. When Dan suffered the disease, in 2008, it was believed that the NHS diagnosis was eight to 12 years old. Awareness has increased since then. In 2017, Representative Lin Brown I brought an experience consisting of attention to Parliament. Charitable Association, UnrealisticIt was launched two years later. Now, 45 -year -old Den wrote a book, when nothing he feels real: a journey to mystery of getting rid of the character.

It is a narration that provokes the eye and associated with a condition that Dan raises very clearly, not always behind it. “The truth is said, I still have” second body symptoms. “” I don’t know if they will leave, “he says.

In fact, the evolution of the terrible book is that although research in the history of the disease felt intensively verified, and the writing brought a sense of cohesion to the fragments of memory, it caused relapse. In 2022, it was without a nervous breakdown. “I couldn’t work in any reasonable way,” he says. “It was as bad as possible.” It is fair to say that healing is a largely continuous process.

We are talking about a video call. Den, who was in London studying for a doctorate in the history of art when she was ill, now lives in Sydney with his wife, a professor of philosophy. Last month they became a parent of a child. Dunne works as an independent writer, specializing in movies and art, and is recovered enough because he sometimes goes to swim. “I hope to take my daughter to the beach. It is really normal. This thought fills me with joy and hope in the future.”

One of the greatest challenges was ambiguity and not to repel his illness. While he knew something terrible that happened to him, he could not say what. The “second body symptoms” felt impossible to transfer without resorting to exaggeration and abstraction, which seemed to distort his illness even as he described it.

Every morning, he watched himself as he rises, wears clothes, makes breakfast, all from above himself – this should be taken literally – he looked at the top of his head, and his front body, from within the boundaries of the bowl that is similar to a black water box. He knew something of the pole bilateral disorder, after he was very annoyed by a family member’s visit in a psychological wing. But he knew he had no, because he was unlike them, he says: “I had a sharp feeling of what was happening to me.” He looked at his hands for reassurance, but he only saw “hands of a ghost”.

Google: “Why do I feel outside my body?” “What happens to me when I see myself from the top?” “Am I angry?” Doctor after the doctor raised their eyebrows. His girlfriend was desperate, and soon she came out.

In the weeks and months that followed, Dunne underwent many diagnostic tests including magnetic resonance imaging, x -rays on the chest and checking his eyes from his eyesight, blood and stool. All of them are naturally returned. The personality removal process is usually diagnosed with depression and before the long antidepressants are prescribed. Although he was wrong, he did not argue. “I felt as if you needed a drug. I can take birth control pills:” Maybe it would be a different tomorrow. “

In less symptoms, he continued to study, but his pursuit of recovery has become more despair. He went to stay with a friend in Los Angeles and went to the Mohafi Desert, looking for “a more expansionist space, to try to open this narrow view.” But he saw everything from the wet black box over his head. Some things briefly helped: Listen to Dylan Thomas under milk wood to repeat; Draw pictures of himself in the womb. Make a mosaic from the Robbins painting. He picked up the skin of his comfort, to find out where his edges were, something he found “very foundations, very physical.”

Returning to London, feeling outside himself and the world, and increasing his ex -girlfriend, making business cards saying “Call me”, with his phone number. The sex factor, who brought his card from the phone box to provide space for him, was one of the angry respondents. He was the last man of suicide poetry. He spoke without hours, and then, he changed his phone number. In the book, it appears to do it without fears. Along with his eradication, it was a severe absorption, and often created the sympathy gap between Dan and the reader. When his mother told him on his birthday how great he was to carry, he answered: “This is not what it was for me … I was besieged.”

What is his understanding now why he became sick? “I thought I was much more powerful than I was,” he says. “I don’t think I found life very easy.” He was born in Brisbane, Australia, and grew up in Bangaluru, India, where his parents were Protestant missionaries. “This makes a certain type of intensity in the family,” he says. Instead of searching for one reason to remove the character, it was found that it is interesting to think about it as a trauma accumulation – “a biological, biological experience”.

Every day he wonders, and whether he will return until the whole person was. The first big turning point came when the eyes were closed with a woman in Rodin’s lecture. She was in her sixties. “We did not fall in love in a romantic way, but it was an understanding of each other at first sight,” says Dan. Something about our experiences in life [made us] Immediately trust each other. “

They returned to her home, and in one of the most moved sequences in the book, I asked him: “What is your greatest fear?” “After a bath,” he answered. In this, she rose and moved to the hot tap in the bathroom, then sat in the room while taking off his clothes and climbing the pelvis. “Take off your clothes and move to a bath with an older woman, I just met is not very natural,” says Dan. “But something in her personality strengthened an atmosphere that was possible.” And something in Den disease, his view of the world, created an openness to the stranger.

Dan says the friendship has grown “I helped rebuild my ability to love.” I told him: “You are thinking about this thing you have forever. But I lived enough to know that there are bad seasons in life. Then, one day … the world is new again.”

In 2011, with no money, job, or strength to study, Dan complied with his mother’s proposal to return to Sydney. He moved to the garage of his parents, and pointed to a number of a specialist commented on the refrigerator. After a few weeks, he got a referral, and in the office of this doctor, Den was diagnosed with the cancellation of the character. “It was great when he said the word. Relief – suspicion:” I can’t really hope this is so much, can I do that? “

Dunne left consultation with three objects: a bottle of water, towel and the Hessian bag to preserve it – an exposure and response set (ERP). Every morning he was dipping his fingers in the water, and every day he wrapped the wet towel around his hand. The idea is that the person carrying a small piece of their greatest fear will reduce this fear over time. The doctor said: “You are allowed to cry, but not where.” “It can make you resistant to treatment.”

Dunne merged his ERP with magnetic stimulation through a frequent skull in a private clinic – something else in which his mother appeared – where a magnetic file is placed on the patient’s head so that magnetic impulses can target parts of the brain that hinders the disease; In the case of Dan, the wall lobe, which helps to maintain a uniform feeling of the body. Six months later, he went out of his parents’ garage to break breakfast one morning, and told his mother: “I have become myself again.”

Dan completed the doctorate, and he is no longer in the books of specialists. It continues to take the medicine and attend treatment. More importantly, he knows the tools to be used when symptoms are repeated. “When you look at yourself, you are taught to talk to her. You live with her, you are writing with her. You are helping to reduce her grip on you. You accept this distorted perception, this simple confinement.”

Nevertheless, in fact, more than acceptance, it is the idea of ​​”surrender” that he found more useful. He says: “Radical acceptance ideas – I have tried all these things, I can’t get stuck in this language. Maybe” surrender “is working because it is the last thing I want to do.” “Surrender means that this thing will make his way with you. When I am in your thickness of difficult symptoms, I imagine that I have been assembled, and that I agree on that. The other word that helped me over the years is“ float ”. The last thing I want to do is float with the second body symptoms.

He carries the comfort of his hand, cream after all these years with the chosen skin. Sometimes, the wounds become very bad for him to go to the doctor. But he finds it “very fun to go to something normal.”

Emotional heritage may be more difficult to confront it. When Dan began dating again, he was worried that he was “limited love” to present it. He and his wife were 11 years ago. “I think I am more limited than I was, and I hope this is the case,” he says. “My daughter is a week old. I wonder about the amount I can offer, and I hope I can give everything.

“Many people may suspect whether they can give enough to the people they love. However, I feel that the disease has limited me. Like, I will not be able to get to know when I need to give more. I have to believe in others who managed to do this.”

He and his wife have developed a phrase to support themselves during the most difficult times. “There is always The essence of the United States“They say they are each other,” Dan says.

When there is nothing real: a journey to the mystery of Nathan Don is published Murdoch wrote (16.99 pounds).