“I felt like I was out of my body,” says Étienne Galloy. The young actor suffered daily depersonalization disorder for five months during the pandemic, which clouded his mind.
The impression of being outside of your body shell, blurred vision that prevents driving, loss of reality and distorted perception: the symptoms of depersonalization disorder that the 23-year-old comedian suffers from are numerous.
“One has the impression of living in the third person. You are functional but with a strange effect in my mind. “It’s not visible from the outside, but it’s a strong fear, kind of a bad trip, but it’s not due to drugs,” explains the actor of the series Armbroeger Rouge, season four of Plan B and Lou and Sophie”.
Fog
He explains that he experienced the first symptoms after seeing the film The Matrix. A great attack of anxiety began, which lasted a week. Then it turned into a kind of inner fog for several months.
Improvement was felt in the third month until a return to the natural state occurred after 5 months. A psychologist told her about depersonalization disorder.
“It’s the brain that protects you when you’re too scared. It was intensive psychotherapy that did it. Even with my friends, because the more I talked about it, the more I realized that people had experienced it. Talking makes you feel less alone, it helps break the isolation because I was very isolated,” said the actor, who then reconnected with his childhood friends in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu.
“They helped me,” says the actor, who will begin filming the third season of Red Bracelets next August.
Resuming work on the series “Lou and Sophie” helped the young actor. The concentration and presence on the film set allowed him to anchor himself in the present moment.
participation
He used to be eager to speak out about the disorder he was experiencing and agreed to become one of the ambassadors of the Fondation Jeunes en Tête, whose mission is to democratize the issue of mental health among young people.
Through video vignettes, podcasts, and social media interventions, he will share how he personally overcame the challenges of depersonalization disorder.
“I’m not an expert or a doctor, but I can speak about what I’ve been through. I’ll try to serve as a benchmark because if I’ve experienced it, I’m researching and there was nothing on the subject anywhere.
“One piece of advice that has really helped me is that everything passes eventually. When you experience something intense, it often takes up all the space, but everything always fades away in the end. I want to show that to young people with my experience,” he adds.
What is depersonalization disorder?
Depersonalization/derealization disorder is a form of dissociative disorder consisting of a prolonged or recurrent experience of detachment (dissociation) from one’s own body or mental function, usually with a feeling of having become an outside observer of one’s existence.
-To find out more about the Fondation Jeunes en tête: https://fondationjeunesentete.org/