Social DPDR: A Framework for Understanding Collective Alienation in the Digital Age

This paper introduces the concept of Social DPDR — a framework extending depersonalization/derealization (DPDR) from the individual to the societal level. Based on the phase model of consciousness (Alive), it shows how cultures, like individuals, can lose their supports: embodiment, selfhood, discernment, and transcendence.

Through cultural portraits (USA, Germany, France, Russia, China, Japan, India, Brazil), the paper illustrates how different societies express Social DPDR in unique ways, yet converge on the same symptom: functioning without feeling alive.

The work is not a clinical diagnosis but an analytical lens that bridges psychiatry (DPDR, DSM-5, neuroscience of DMN), sociology (alienation, collective trauma), and digital studies (AI, attention economy). It offers both a risk (deepening collective alienation) and an opportunity: restoring presence in culture and embedding human supports into the design of future technologies and AI.

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