Autogenous Thought Detachment Disorder (ATDD) refers to a psychological condition in which thinking remains structurally intact while the subjective sense of authorship over thought is diminished or absent. Individuals affected by ATDD recognize their thoughts as internally occurring and logically coherent, yet experience them without the implicit feeling of “I am the one producing this.” Reality testing is fully preserved, and no external source is attributed to the thoughts.
The core disturbance lies not in what is thought, but in how thought is experienced. Cognition unfolds fluently, often with high verbal and analytical sophistication, but lacks pre-reflective ownership. Thoughts feel automatic without being intrusive, passive without being imposed. This creates a persistent internal distance between the thinker and the act of thinking itself.
Unlike depersonalization, the self is not experienced as unreal or absent. Unlike dissociation, memory, identity, and continuity of consciousness remain stable. Emotional life is present but displaced: affect follows cognition rather than arising simultaneously with it. As a result, mental life feels delayed, muted, and effortful, even in the absence of anxiety or depression.
Individuals often report a subtle temporal lag in awareness, as if thoughts are registered only after they have already occurred. This delay is not observable externally, yet it dominates subjective experience. Over time, it produces cognitive fatigue rooted not in overthinking, but in the constant effort to reattach to one’s own mental activity.
ATDD does not show consistent abnormalities in standard neurological assessment. Theoretical accounts point toward a disruption in forward-modeling mechanisms responsible for signaling self-generated cognition before conscious awareness. When this signal weakens, thoughts retain clarity but lose experiential immediacy.
Adaptive behaviors such as writing, speaking aloud, or structured reasoning often restore a temporary sense of authorship by externalizing cognition. In contrast, excessive introspection and meta-cognitive monitoring tend to intensify detachment, suggesting that hyper-reflexivity plays a maintaining role.
Because insight remains intact and articulation is often advanced, ATDD frequently goes unrecognized. It occupies a subtle clinical space in which intelligence, logic, and reality remain untouched, while the most implicit layer of mental life—the felt sense of being the thinker—quietly erodes.
