Is derealization a part of psychosis?

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I was wondering if this could be a part of my psychosis because it is coupled with anxiety and paranoia.

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Depends on who you talk to. It is supposed to not be. But a psychologist said it was part of my positive symptoms.

I sometimes doubt I have schizophrenia. I do have really bad anxiety and paranoia sometimes.

It is common to think you’re going insane with DP/DR.

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Yes it can be. 15

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Certainly derealization can be a significant part of psychosis.

A lot of people who have anxiety attacks (whether or not they meet criteria for “panic attack”) experience a sense of “things didn’t seem real” or “I felt like I was somehow outside looking in” or “like I was stuck in water while the world went on around me.” In old movies, this was sometimes portrayed by showing us the room from the anxious person’s point of view, and quickly panning the camera around, sometimes with a fisheye lens to exaggerate faces. Sometimes they would speed up the panning until the images were no longer recognizable. All of these things seem to be approximations of how some people with terrible anxiety experience a sense of depersonalization and or derealization.

If this experience is constant and the patient begins to believe that the world/people around them are not real, or that they themselves are not real, this becomes a delusion. If the person senses people and places as real but feels sure that family/friends are “imitators” or “imposters” of the real family/friends, then it is “Capgras syndrome” (did I spell that correctly?). Sometimes this is a result of a stroke, sometimes psychosis, and sometimes it is a remake of the classic film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

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Depersonalization is usually independeny of any thing

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I’ve gotten really bad derealization and depersonalization before. It happens sometimes but I’m certain it’s part of my schizoaffective. That is actually the symptom that first got me researching into what was wrong with me…

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