Man suffers déjà vu so extreme he has stopped watching TV and reading

If you feel you have seen it all before, spare a thought for the young man convinced he is trapped in a time loop.

The feeling of constantly reliving his actions became so severe he stopped watching TV, listening to the radio or reading newspapers. The 23-year-old even had to drop out of university and was tormented by further attacks when he holidayed abroad. Even though he knew that what he was experiencing was not real, over three years the episodes gradually grew in intensity until they became debilitating.

Psychologists diagnosed him with severe déjà vu, an extremely rare condition and the first known case to be triggered by anxiety.

The feelings he experienced were stronger and far more frequent than the normal sense of déjà vu, which is French for ‘already seen’.

The man said that rather than just a feeling of familiarity, he feared he was reliving the past moment by moment in a real-life enactment of the movie Groundhog Day.

Details of the extraordinary case have been revealed in a report published by the Journal of Medical Case Reports.

Although sporadic cases of severe déjà vu have been encountered before, all previous cases were triggered by neurological conditions such as epilepsy or dementia.

However, in this case the trigger was the man’s anxiety, leading scientists to believe that anxiety disorders could be more related to déjà vu than previously thought, and the peculiar feeling could be triggered in the same way as panic attacks.

His case was analysed by experts from the universities of Sheffield Hallam, Exeter, Leeds, King’s College London and universities in Canada and France. All found his brain scans appeared normal.

Report author Dr Christine Wells, from Sheffield Hallam, said: ‘Rather than simply the unsettling feelings of familiarity which are normally associated with déjà vu, our subject complained that it felt like he was actually retrieving previous experiences from memory, not just finding them familiar.

‘Most cases like this occur as a side effect associated with epileptic seizures or dementia.

‘However, in this instance it appears as though the episodes of déjà vu could be linked to anxiety causing mistimed neuronal firing in the brain, which causes more déjà vu and in turn brings about more anxiety.’

The patient’s anxiety had been so serious he would take two or three showers a day because he felt ‘contaminated’ and repeatedly washed his hands.

He began experiencing severe and frightening cases of déjà vu at 20.

The early episodes sometimes lasted only for minutes, but other attacks could be extremely prolonged. At university he took the hallucinogenic drug LSD once, and from then on the déjà vu would last for several minutes at a time.

Without knowing for sure exactly how the severe symptoms have been caused, there is no way to treat the young man. 

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