“I'm not ignoring you, I'm dissociating”: why a mental disorder has become a meme

Being and not being at the same time: dissociation has literary echoes and many viral possibilities, but it is also a disorder that must be treated.

“Girls, I'm so dissociated!”

academy on January 14

: she was about to start a talk that would be one of the most viral moments of the month.

But before, she declared herself dissociated.

Not literally at least.

In other words, that moment (meeting the Amazon Prime Video

) was so intense that her head was unable to process it in real time.

Her body was there, the head was not.

Dissociated.

For some time now, according to social networks, everyone dissociates a little.

“I wasn't ignoring you, I was just dissociating,” says one meme.

“This is dissociating,” she reads in a TikTok video with a woman who looks at a fixed point without paying attention.

What is dissociation?

Literally: separating two elements that were joined.

Clinically: being in a place physically but not mentally (involuntarily) and feeling the actions as foreign.

It is a defense mechanism and a potential disorder after experiencing traumatic events.

It is not dissociating to lose concentration when another person speaks to us, the common use that the concept has gained on the internet.

But psychologists warn that taking a mental problem “with too much humor” can lead to trivializing it.

“I realized that in certain conversations I dissociated.

"I didn't know anything," declares Elena González, 26 years old.

Her psychologist diagnosed it after confinement.

“I dissociate when I am faced with a stimulus in which I am not able to organize my ideas.”

“It's like a feeling of unreality, that your body is not yours, neither is your life and you are not where you should be,” describes Alicia (false name), a woman in her thirties also affected by the disorder.

She just gave birth to her first child.

Motherhood and her stress lead her to have more dissociative episodes.

“There is no specific moment.

It’s more of an emotion, something automatic,” she says.

Adulthood and entering the world of work have a lot to do with it.

“Dissociations increase and it becomes necessary to treat it,” she defends.

Suffering from the separation of the earthly and mental world may sound like Buddhism or metaphysics.

But nothing further.

It is a brain resource “in a situation of stress or oversaturation,” indicates Tauana Matias, director of Implica Psicología.

According to the SM5, psychologists' manual for diagnosing mental disorders, there are three types of dissociative disorders.

This is depersonalization: “It is like feeling your own actions from a distance, not like you are another person, but like moving away from the body and returning.

“It is still an escape.”

Depending on the severity, we can talk about serious consequences, such as “self-harm, suicidal thoughts or attempts, drug abuse, sexual dysfunction, depression, anxiety, problems with sleep, eating or social relationships and other physical events,” it lists. Juan G. Castilla, doctorate in clinical and health psychology from the UAM.

“It is difficult for the person who suffers from it to be aware because it has an amnesiac component.

It is not the one who lives or suffers that reality, it is another.”

The buzz of the term has, therefore, become a double-edged sword: it is made visible at the same time that it becomes a fashionable catchphrase, as anxiety was, which sometimes leads to it being frivolized, romanticized, or, worse, self-diagnose.

“We can all have symptoms of a disorder, low mood, phobias or fears.

The important thing is the intensity and duration, how it affects daily life,” recalls Alicia Rodríguez.

For Castilla, it is positive that there are famous people who “destigmatize mental health,” but she warns: “They are individual experiences that do not follow general rules.

For example, anxiety manifests itself in different ways depending on who suffers from it.

"You don't have to diagnose yourself based on what people with many followers say."

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