What we do

About Us

Unreal is a small charitable organisation officially founded in 2019. 

One of our founding members, Jane Charlton, started to experience DPDR in the early 2000s. She found that there was very little awareness of the condition from clinicians and found it difficult to access resources, care and support. She then went on to experience DPDR again some years later, to discover that the clinical landscape was much unchanged. 

This led to the establishment of Unreal, together with the other founding members, Dr Elaine Hunter, Mary Charlton and Heather Perkins. 

Despite our size and how young we are, we are proud of our achievements to date which include:

  • Having DPDR spoken about in the national mainstream media (including The Metro, The Guardian and BBC 4).

  • Co-writing the DSM chapter on DPDR.

  • Initiating an adjournment debate in the House of Commons in UK Parliament, leading to a roundtable with key clinicians and policymakers which led to the commissioning of a training course.

  • Dr Elaine Hunter and Prof. Anthony David of UCL, two of our Ambassadors, have now created that training module on the “Assessment and Treatment of DDD” which is available on the Royal Collage of Psychiatrists’ website.

  • Our flagship Peer Support Programme.

  • Our involvement with academic studies including advertising and recruitment, being a co-applicant on a feasibility study for CBT for DPDR, providing lived-experience advice, and providing letters of support for funding and ethics applications.

  • Speaking at numerous national and international conferences to raise awareness.

“Thank you for this charity. It helps so much to know I’m not alone.”

Unreal Annual Round-Ups

  • PUBLISHED: APRIL 2023

    This reporting period was the first in Unreal’s history that was largely free of restrictions from the Covid pandemic, which meant that we have been more able to push forward with objectives that had previously not been able to be moved online.

    Our Peer Support programme remained our flagship offering to the community, with the online sessions remaining overwhelmingly popular – we ran 19 sessions during the period, with 299 free tickets used by attendees, all advertised via our 1100+ strong mailing list. We have received regular contact from members of the community expressing how important the sessions are for them (for many, all over the world, they are the only form of DPDR support they can access). The programme did suffer a few minor setbacks, with a couple of volunteer facilitators and our Peer Support lead board member stepping back due to their increasing commitments following the easing of pandemic restrictions. But to counter this, we have been advertising via the Charity Jobs website for new volunteer facilitators – with approximately 12 strong candidates having already submitted applications – and the board has elected a new Peer Support lead to head up the programme. They are currently interviewing the applicants and establishing who will be suitable to join the programme. We have also continued running our internal peer support groups reserved for members of Unreal to look after the wellbeing of our trustees, board members and volunteers, as well as introducing a rolling programme of ‘Check-In Chats’ for everybody involved with the charity to allow new ideas or concerns to be communicated effectively, whilst also monitoring wellbeing and improving pastoral care.

    Aligned with our key objective of raising awareness of the condition, another project that the charity has been working on is the production of a DPDR documentary following discussions with the Head of Development of a BBC-linked production house. In November 2022, trustees Michael Down and Joe Perkins spent 15 days travelling around the UK filming interviews with clinicians working in the field and a selection of people of lived experience. This has now been edited into a 6-minute ‘Teaser’ which is currently being used to attract potential interest from broadcasters and/or funders to help us turn it into a feature-length programme or film.

    One of the most major events for Unreal during this period was being invited by Dr Anna Ciaunica (CFCUL) to give a presentation about DPDR and our work at a major academic conference in Lisbon in March 2023. Joe Perkins was already booked to speak in a personal capacity, giving his lived-experience perspective on the condition, but after discussions with Dr Ciaunica, Michael Down and (new board member, as of July 2022) Gwendalyn Webb also travelled to Lisbon to formally represent Unreal, and speak about our work as well as showing the documentary teaser - with artist Jodie Howard also travelling to exhibit her Unrealities illustrations. The response from the largely academic audience was strong and invested, and many new connections were made that we hope will lead to similar public speaking opportunities and future charity involvement in studies going forwards.

    On this front, Unreal has continued to support academic research being done into the condition. The charity remains a co-applicant on the NIHR-funded feasibility study (being run through UCL and headed by trustee Dr Elaine Hunter), and we regularly meet with other academics and promote their studies through our website. Two such new connections made during this period have been with Dr Emanuele Fino (Nottingham Trent), with us helping to advise & promote his research into DPDR and Social Identity

    Theory; and Matt Gwyther (Anglia Ruskin) who ran a collaborative art installation on DPDR at the Cambridge Festival, including an eBook of essays on dissociation that Gwendalyn Webb & Joe Perkins contributed to, and is now being sold in conjunction with Unreal.

    Reflecting our growing audience worldwide – largely due to our social media presence and online Peer Support being globally accessible – in October 2022 we took on a new USA-based ambassador: musician Foster. We are hopeful that by having people in different territories formally linked to Unreal and actively using their platforms to promote our work, we can increase our messaging reach significantly. We are also continuing with the previously-planned redevelopment of our website so that we can offer more information in a more accessible format – we now have a web developer involved with us, and a subgroup is liaising with him to structure the new site and consult on its design.

    Our online presence remains the primary way in which we communicate with our community. We previously noticed a significant surge in web traffic during Covid, but this period has seen those raised statistics largely maintained despite the easing of restrictions: 15k overall visits, 12k unique visitors, and c.34k page views match the previous period, suggesting that we have been both retaining engagements and remaining at the forefront of DPDR awareness as the condition gains further global interest and awareness. However, our social media scores have continued to increase significantly –using Twitter as an example, Average Impressions of our posts have increased tenfold compared to 2021-22; suggesting further the vital importance of using our social media efficiently and effectively.

  • PUBLISHED: APRIL 2022

    This period was again overshadowed by the Covid-19 pandemic and the corresponding restrictions, meaning our charity’s operations remained almost entirely virtual. The most major adjustment we made during the previous period was to move our peer support program online when in-person spaces became closed – running free sessions on Zoom for members of the community. What we quickly realised, however, was that by making the groups not London-centric, they were then available to a much larger audience. This was positive in that we began to attract participants from all over the world (including Europe, America, Canada, Australia, and India), but it came with the problem of the monthly sessions becoming oversubscribed and the 20 free tickets were typically running out within minutes. We committed to monitor this situation last year, and ultimately made the decision to recruit and train new volunteer facilitators, with the aim of doubling the number of sessions we could offer – something we successfully implemented at the start of 2022. After one of the sessions, a participant emailed us stating: “In peer support sessions, I’ve felt more emotionally connected…these are the only people who understand what I’m going through.” During this reporting period we have run a total of 15 virtual peer support sessions, with 271 free tickets used by members of the community. We have also continued running our internal peer support groups reserved for members of Unreal to look after the wellbeing of our trustees, board members and volunteers.

    We successfully hosted our planned virtual launch event for Unreal in May via a Zoom Webinar, which saw some of our board members and ambassadors taking questions from invited members of the press, as well as footage compiled from interviews with members of the DPRD community and some animated illustrations created for us to help depict what the condition is like to live with. We then made the footage of this event available on our YouTube page and participated in a ‘Replay Premiere’ allowing us to chat directly with our charity followers as the recording was played out.

    Our online presence has continued to grow, with overall website visits up approximately 15% on the previous 12 months, and overall page views up nearly 10%. But, most interestingly for us, we’ve found a dramatic increase of 64% in the number of overall hits that have come directly from a Google search – which suggests both a continuing global increase in the awareness of DPRD and that more people are searching about the condition; and also that we’re playing a big part in the awareness-raising process by having the most current medically-validated information available online, as people are clearly discovering us directly from their internet searches. Activity on our social media channels also increased significantly, with our Facebook ‘impressions’ up 14% on the previous year, and Instagram ‘impressions’ up over 600%(helped by a couple of particularly popular posts).

    Trustee Joe Perkins released his book Life On Autopilot: A Guide To Living With Depersonalisation Disorder, which was published worldwide by Jessica Kingsley Publishers on 21 June 2021 in conjunction with Unreal. The initial response has been positive, with it regularly being a to Life On Autopilot: A Guide To Living With Depersonalisation Disorderpic of conversation on social media and in our peer support groups, and Joe has promoted it on the likes of BBC Radio 4, the Mentally Yours podcast and in The Metro.

    Another exciting development was that the study into specialised CBT for DPRD, for which Unreal was a co-applicant, was approved and funded by the NIHR – meaning that the charity is now directly involved in running a two-year first-of-its-kind randomised feasibility study, involving the training of NHS clinicians to deliver specialised therapy for the condition. We envision the outcome(s) of this study acting as a basis to apply for greater funding to conduct a much larger trial into the efficacy of the treatment.

    We have been having many internal discussions about how we can begin to use more of our funds (kindly donated by our supporters) to further the key objectives of the charity – especially now that Covid-19 restrictions have largely eased. We have so far identified 26 actions for which investment would help them progress, but we’ve narrowed these down to a handful of key primary objectives to focus on.

    We are wanting to redesign our website, with an emphasis on improved user flow and include a wider variety of content – including new video footage (to reduce the reliance on heavy-text), introduce a community Blog section and give our content a more positive angle overall. To do this effectively, we will likely need to employ a professional web designer to work on the back-end and graphic design, as well as potentially hiring a space and camera equipment to create the new video content.

    Given the huge success of our virtual peer support program – and the sustained demand for places in the sessions – we’re also looking at how these could be even expanded beyond the doubling of sessions implemented at the start of 2022. Potential ideas currently include hiring a professional to offer more clinical sessions (e.g. mindfulness workshops), lunchtime and weekend sessions, and the realisation of our Young People’s peer support groups.

    Finally, we’re aiming to create, print and disseminate awareness-raising literature all about DPDR to the likes of doctors surgeries, mental health teams and university mental health societies. These plans will incur printing and postage costs.

  • PUBLISHED: APRIL 2021

    This period for us was naturally dominated by the Covid-19 pandemic and was a time where we had to adjust to operating almost entirely online. Aware that mental health support cannot stop (especially during a global emergency), when our London in-person peer support sessions were shelved during the first national lockdown we tried to stay connected with everybody by hosting YouTube livestream events. But we were also discussing internally whether it was realistic to reintroduce the peer support programme online, and in December began offering monthly virtual sessions – all of which have since quickly reached capacity, with substantial waiting lists forming for places. We will monitor these lists in the coming months and, if necessary, look to offer additional sessions to meet the demand. We also implemented internal peer support groups using this same format reserved for members of Unreal, to better look after the wellbeing of our trustees, board members and volunteers.

    The charity performed similarly healthily in terms of our online presence. Comparing the financial year 2019-20 to 2020-21, the number of visits to our website rose by approximately 235%, with overall page views up a similar 193%. The feedback to our virtual peer support sessions has been overwhelmingly positive – one early attendee emailing us afterwards to say, “I cannot stress enough how positive and important an experience this was for me. Finally, I had the chance to speak and listen in a forum of people who understand this condition.”

    Recently, Unreal has been a co-applicant for a NIHR-funded study into specialised CBT for DPRD, which we are currently awaiting the outcome of. Should this be approved and funded, the charity would be directly involved in a first-of-its-kind randomised control trial, involving the training of NHS clinicians to treat the condition. The results of this study would hopefully pave the way for larger studies of this nature in the future.

    We are now in the final stages of preparing to formally launch as a charity in May, when we will be hosting a live ‘webinar’ with our charity ambassadors for invited members of the press. We hope that this will result in more media coverage for both the charity and the condition, as well as making Unreal ‘official’ in the eyes of the public.

    One of our trustees, Joe Perkins, has also completed writing a self-help book for those living with DPDR this past year, which will be published globally by Jessica Kingsley Publishers – in conjunction with Unreal – later in 2021. We hope this will be a much-needed new resource for those living with the condition.