goodgrief20 has not posted since Feb, 2017

Thank you Mark, I should have picked that up with the dates of his last post. May I ask for your assistance here with protocol on this support group? Should I make a first post and introduce myself and symptoms? I am struggling a lot alone with a host of terrible symptoms, with not much help from my GP who just wants to prescribe further medication(SSRI) ,which I am weary as prescribed medication (poly drugging) has been the cause of my brain injury, and I am sure that the members here would be able to assist me through their experience with healing the brain and central nervous system. The biggest question I have right now is which thread do I approach on this support group? I am a 53 year old male and have a brain injury caused by taking two CNS depressants in March 2019, i.e. Ambien and Alzam (Alprazolam benzodiazapene), where I had already developed sleep Apnea (without knowing at that stage) which brought on a sudden onset of terrible symptoms overnight due to a lack of oxygen to the brain.The follow up by my doctor was to put me on an SSRI, which made my situation even worse. I am still busy tapering off the benzo and stopped the Ambien and SSRI, which has left me with really bad insomnia and battling with a host of symptoms which fall in line with Sleep Apnea & Sleep Disorders and Traumatic Brain Injury and Post Concussion Syndrome. I have lost sense of taste, have poor fuzzy vision, have burning skin sensation, really high anxiety,apathy, derealisation, agoraphobia, lethargia, stay in bed and not functional. I have lost hope as cant seem to find anyway of getting out of being locked in physical and mental turmoil.

One possible cause of DPDR that is altered hormone levels after a concussion due to damage to the HPA axis. There is a video of a guy who cured his DPDR after a year of testosterone replacement therapy on Youtube. I cannot post links but it will show up with a search of "dpdr and hormones" on Youtube.

I am clinging on to the hope that this is the cause of mine, not seizures, because it is truly debilitating.

I realize that this an old thread, and that goodgrief20 is likely gone from the forum, but when I read through I thought I must post, because I've been experiencing something very similar to what goodgrief described, and also because it seems that goodgrief is a similar thinker to myself. Reading the words they wrote, I could see myself expressing myself and describing the situation the same way. I'm about six months out from the injury - sustained in a car crash. For the first few months, I felt a near-complete depersonalization similar to what goodgrief described. Since then I've been able to integrate more to an extent. I've been back at my (mentally demanding) work for a month, and I'm getting through it ok, but a job that I used to find easy is now very demanding and taking up most of my energy.

I still feel very dissociated. It feels like my consciousness, my thoughts, my perceptions, and my emotions are all disconnected from each other. They are still happening, but there is little integrated connection. And I feel the same feeling of mental blankness, with little inner dialogue. It's like my mind can still do a lot of things, but I can't "feel" it doing those things, feel disconnected from it, and my consciousness has to actively recruit my mind to do the things it wants, which can be difficult and tiring.

I might come back and describe my sensations and situations in more depth later. Also curious if anyone is feeling similar things.

That's a really good way to describe what I was feeling for a long time . Work was taxing in that It felt like I had to make a conscious effort to do anything analytical.

The first 6 months were very frustrating... I'd say around that time I started having good days occasionally, but then regressing into dissociation for weeks at a time. I can say that months 12-15 for me is when I really started to feel myself again, and that created sort of a positive feedback loop with my mental wellbeing, which in turn helped to sort of 'reactivate' my conscious. November will be 2 years, and I feel like I'm largely out of the woods, enjoying my math-y job once again, so hang in there!