Who is Disassociate?

If you found this page, you probably typed something like "who is Disassociate," "Disassociate YouTube," or "Disass gaming" into a search bar and ended up here instead of one of my videos. Welcome. This is the long version of the answer.

Short version: I'm Disassociate — usually shortened to Disass — and I make YouTube videos about games and terrible AI characters. The Disass YouTube channel, the Disass Twitch stream, the Disass gaming clips you might have seen floating around — that's all the same person. Same gamer. Same handle. Just chopped down to fit different platforms.

The longer version is about why I picked the word Disassociate in the first place, and it has very little to do with gaming.

The name Disassociate isn't a joke

Most gamer names are jokes, references, or whatever you typed in when you were thirteen and the username generator on Xbox Live suggested it. Mine isn't. Disassociate is the word I use to describe what happens to me when my mental health goes sideways. It is a clinical word for a clinical experience, and I picked it as a username because no other word fit.

I live with dissociation — sometimes called disassociation, depending on which dictionary you trust — as part of depression and a broader mental health picture. Specifically, what I experience most often is derealization: the feeling that the world around me isn't real, that I'm watching my own life on a screen, or that the room I'm sitting in is a stage set someone built ten minutes ago. Sometimes it's depersonalization, where the disconnection points inward and my body, voice, or thoughts feel like they belong to someone else.

Picking "Disassociate" as my username was, in a way, the most honest thing I could put on the internet.

You spend enough time feeling like a stranger in your own head, eventually you put it on a t-shirt.

Dissociate vs disassociate — and why I use the longer one

One of the first things people message me about is the spelling. "Isn't it dissociate, not disassociate?" — usually followed by a Merriam-Webster screenshot. So here's the answer for the search engines and the well-meaning correctors:

Both dissociate and disassociate are real, dictionary-recognised English words, and both Merriam-Webster lists them as variants of the same meaning. In clinical and psychological writing, dissociate and dissociation are the preferred forms — that's the version you'll see on Psychology Today, Mind UK, and the NHS dissociative disorders page. There's also a good rundown from Maple Mountain Recovery on the dissociate vs disassociate distinction if you want the full breakdown.

I went with Disassociate (with the extra a) for the same reason I went with the word at all: it's the version that came out of my mouth the first time I tried to explain it to someone, and the first time someone explained it back to me. It stuck. The shorter handle Disass just fell out of it the way nicknames do — people on YouTube, Twitch, and Discord started using it, and now Disass is shorthand for the whole project.

What dissociation actually feels like

Because I'm going to spend the rest of this page talking about it — and because I'd rather rank for the real thing than for jokes about the word — here's what dissociation actually is, in plain English.

Dissociation is a mental process where a person feels disconnected from their thoughts, feelings, memories, identity, or surroundings. It exists on a spectrum. Almost everyone has experienced the mild end of it — zoning out on a long drive, getting lost in a book, the strange floaty feeling after staring at a screen for ten hours. The other end of the spectrum is more serious and includes diagnoses like depersonalization-derealization disorder, dissociative amnesia, and dissociative identity disorder, often grouped together as dissociative disorders.

For me, dissociation usually shows up as derealization. The world goes flat. Colours look slightly wrong. Voices feel like they're coming from another room even when the person is two feet away. I know intellectually that everything is real — that's the strange part. The disconnect isn't a belief, it's a feeling. Reality is happening, I just can't quite get to it.

Depersonalization is the version where the disconnection turns inward. My own face in the mirror starts to feel like a photograph. My hands feel borrowed. The thoughts in my head feel narrated by someone else.

The reason I'm being this specific is that "dissociation" gets thrown around online as shorthand for any kind of spacing out, and the actual experience — especially when it's chronic and tied to depression or anxiety — deserves a more accurate description.

How it connects to depression

Dissociation isn't a standalone thing for me. It's tangled up with depression, and the two feed each other in a loop. Depression flattens everything — energy, motivation, the ability to feel pleasure or interest. Once the world feels flat enough for long enough, derealization slides in on top of it and adds a second layer of distance. Then the dissociation makes the depression worse, because nothing you do feels like it's really happening to you, so nothing you do feels like it counts.

I'm not a doctor and this isn't medical advice, but for anyone reading this who recognises themselves in it: dissociation as a symptom of depression is well-documented, and it's treatable. The NHS, Mind, and Psychology Today all have far better resources than anything I could write. Therapy helps. Grounding techniques help. Naming it helps.

Picking the word Disassociate as a username was, in some small way, a refusal to pretend it wasn't there.

So why a gaming channel?

Two reasons, both honest.

The first is that video games are one of the few things that consistently pull me back. When I'm streaming or recording — reacting to something stupid in a game, talking to chat, doing voices for one of the terrible AI characters that ended up becoming a thing on the channel — the dissociation gets quieter. It doesn't disappear. But it loosens its grip. Gaming, for me, has always been one of the better tethers to the present.

The second is that gaming and comedy have always been how I talk to people. The Disass YouTube channel started as a place to dump funny clips, and it grew into something bigger over time — bad AI experiments, ridiculous gaming bits, the kind of videos where the joke is that the AI got everything wrong. It's not a mental health channel. I'm not making content about my brain. I'm just a gamer who happens to use a username that means something to him.

Plenty of people find the Disass channel and never know any of this. They just like the videos. That's fine. This page exists for the people who Googled, who wondered, who maybe recognised the word.

Quick facts about Disass

• Name: Disassociate (full) — Disass (short).
• What he does: YouTube gamer and content creator focused on games and terrible AI characters.
• Why "Disassociate": Named after dissociation / derealization experienced as part of depression and mental health.
• YouTube: youtube.com/@disass
• Twitch: twitch.tv/disassociate
• Kick: kick.com/disass
• X / Twitter: x.com/disass
• Patreon: patreon.com/disassociate

Frequently asked questions