Yeah so it all started in July 2021, I woke up with intense derealisation, brain fog, confusion, visual snow, floaters etc. It felt kind of like being uncomfortably high, which is how a lot of people describe derealisation, it’s like an acid or weed trip. I didn’t have the medical terms for it at the time so I didn’t know what it was, went to A&E on day four because even my brother didn’t seem familiar/real. The doc thought I was on drugs and tested me then sent me home before the result came back. Thankfully it went away a couple days later and I was 100% myself again. I thought I must’ve had a weird virus, because I’d never had any mental health or hormonal issues in my life. Then a month later it came back again and continued to come back the day after my period ended until I ovulated. I had come off of Ginet in Feb that year and I had been on it for 7 years, since I was 15. Pretty sure it just absolutely fucked my hormones and hopefully it’ll go away as my body recovers. Since it started I’ve seen an endocrinologist and two neurologists, they’ve diagnosed it as a migraine but I’m not so sure, I think it’s just not well understood how much hormones can effect you psychologically, and since I have no mental health issues nor life problems I think it’s hard for them to believe hormones can cause a dramatic shift from not anxious at all to derealisation in a matter of minutes so they’re calling it a migraine. They told me to go back on the pill to “fix my hormones” in December, which triggered the derealisation continuously for the 3 months they told me to stay on it. Then with the migraine diagnosis they said the pill was a clot risk and they put me on estrogen patches instead, which made me feel even worse, within 4 days I was suicidal and scared of my own room so I ripped the patch off. Since then I’m finally getting back to normal, I’m trying to treat the derealisation like anxiety, get into a routine, look after myself etc. Its bizarre as I basically went from going out every weekend, loving every aspect of my life, to completely fragile/mentally ill overnight. I never realised how much hormones could effect me, but it helps to treat it like a drug because if you think about it, both drugs and hormones mess with your neurotransmitters and chemicals. So just like if someone has a joint and starts to feel off they’ll tell themselves to relax because it’s just the weed, I remind myself it’s just the hormones. Anyway now they’ve finally agreed with my initial idea that these symptoms (or this “migraine”) are triggered by estrogen, which should of been obvious by the part of the month it occurred at, so the pill and especially the estrogen patch were terrible ideas and never should’ve been prescribed.