Depersonalization and social anxiety

Although the literature on depersonalization (DP) indicates links between DP and anxiety disorders, there has been no systematic investigation of the association of DP with social anxiety. The present study explores a hypothesized connection between DP and social anxiety by using correlative and regression analyses in a sample of 116 psychotherapy inpatients, 54 outpatients with epilepsy, and 31 nonpatients. Corresponding to our hypothesis, we found a connection of medium to large effect size between DP and social fears exceeding the impact of general psychopathologic symptom severity both for the psychotherapy patients and the nonpatients. The association of social anxiety with DP merits further research. A general consideration of DP in clinical and neurobiological trials on anxiety disorders like social phobia is warranted.