I Thought I Was Dead: My Struggle with Cotard's Delusion

Video transcribed and edited for better readability:

If you've been following me for a while, you may have heard me mention Cotard’s Delusion. This is a rare mental disorder that I suffered from, developing it around the age of 16 or 17 and dealing with it until I was about 21 or 22.

It’s not something I’ve really gone into depth about before, mostly because when you’ve suffered from this kind of mental disorder, it never really leaves you. For several years, this delusion was my life. It was a very dark, very challenging time, and it’s not something I’ve wanted to dwell on too much. When you’ve spent years believing in a completely false reality, it’s hard to ever feel entirely free from it.

When I was suffering from Cotard’s Delusion, I believed I was already dead. I thought my life was just a dream - that none of it was real. I was aware of the idea that when you die, your brain continues to function for seven minutes. I convinced myself that my real body was dying in a car crash and that everything I was experiencing was just my brain constructing a dream in those final seven minutes. If you’ve seen Inception, or even just thought about how time feels different in dreams, you’ll get the idea - how a short amount of real time can feel like years inside your mind. That’s what I thought was happening to me.

I woke up every day believing this. The only way I could cope was by staying high all the time. Whenever I was sober, my thoughts would just spiral even more, reinforcing the delusion, making it worse. It was like being trapped in a labyrinth - every attempt to prove to myself that it wasn’t real only led to another dead end, making the maze even bigger, making escape seem even less possible.

At the time, I didn’t know this was an actual, diagnosed condition. I saw doctors, I was put on medication, and on several occasions, they wanted to put me in a mental hospital. But I never told them the full extent of my delusion. In my mind, everyone I interacted with was part of the dream - figments of my subconscious designed to make me believe in this reality. I thought if I told them, they would just try to convince me this was real, which in turn would prove to me that it wasn’t. It took years before I actually admitted this part to anyone.

Even when I finally told a doctor, they didn’t name it or label it. They just saw it as psychosis and wanted to section me. I was lucky - my dad always stepped in, insisting that I be kept at home. That probably saved me, because if I had been institutionalised, I don’t think I would have come out of it in one piece.

I learned during that time just how much your internal world shapes what happens around you. I remember one night, I was walking home from work, completely trapped in the delusion, thinking to myself, No one will ever have a conversation about this with me, because my subconscious wouldn’t allow it. Then, the next day, I was sitting in silence with a friend, watching a movie, when out of nowhere, they turned to me and said, What if we’re already dead? That moment sent me spiralling. Now I thought, My subconscious is responding to me. It knows I think it wouldn’t do this, so now it’s doing it to trick me into believing it’s real. It was an endless loop, always finding a way to reinforce itself.

Because I was constantly high, self-medicating with whatever I could, I was a completely different person back then. I barely spoke. I was so quiet that I wouldn’t say more than a few words at a time. My anxiety was through the roof. When I was starting to come out of the delusion, I had to relearn how to speak properly - just stringing a full sentence together felt like a huge effort. I remember going to a job interview and messing up a sentence so badly that I just spoke gibberish. No idea what they must have thought of me.

People have asked if I thought my family and friends were dead too. No, it wasn’t that. I believed that everyone around me was just a projection of my subconscious, there to maintain the illusion of reality. No one was real - just extensions of my mind. I also get asked if I managed to stay grounded during this time. The answer is no. I was completely ungrounded, lost in my thoughts, and constantly battling suicidal ideation. But even suicide didn’t feel like a way out - because if this was just a dream, then dying would just lead to another dream.

The only way I eventually got out of it was by removing the power those thoughts had over me. You can’t think your way out of something like this - thinking is the problem in the first place. Trying to analyse it just fuels it further. That’s why I ended up getting into meditation and yoga in the first place.

I had never heard of Cotard’s Delusion while I was going through it. The doctors never gave it a name. Years later, I stumbled across an article about someone who had taken their own life because of it. That was the first time I saw a label for what I had experienced. By then, it had lost its grip on me. But if I had found that information while I was still in it, my mind would have found a way to make it part of the delusion itself.

So that’s something I used to struggle with. If anyone has any questions about it, feel free to drop a comment or message me. I know just speaking about this has already made at least one person reach out to say they’ve had similar experiences. I’m sharing this in case it helps someone else.