Category: mental disorders

Hospitalizations: Fifteen Minutes of Fame

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, depression, mental disorders, mood disorders, suicidality, suicide

Hospitalizations: Fifteen Minutes of Fame

I had therapy. My therapist read my “Brick Wall” blog. She asked if we could talk about the bricks and we spent most of the session going over them. I also told her about my book problems, that I think it is disorganized. She said that it is her most prized possession, so I think she is biased in my writing abilities. She said my short story was heartbreaking to read. I haven’t gotten too many likes on it. I may have to play with the tags a bit. Anyway, talking about the bricks was difficult because it lead to where I was in my last hospitalization, where I wrote the story. I told her how no one was looking at the bricks, that they were just looking for the cement to dry before sending me home, so to speak. That is all they cared about. Stabilization and discharge were the key focus of what they wanted to do. What brought you in the hospital, they didn’t care about. Or if they did, it was always, “we’ll talk about it tomorrow” but never did. I hated that my needs were ignored and patronized. I flatly told them I was going to kill myself when I left the hospital during my initial few days when they wanted to discharge me. And it was true. I needed help and was going to stay inpatient to get that help. Except the help came back to me looking for help from outside services. The social worker that was working with me didn’t care about my needs. I ended up having to call places to look for outside support. I tried to get it but never had a call back or even an email back, though one place the email came back as undelieverable. It was a trying time. I wanted to kill myself so badly and yet I was supposed to make all these phone calls to show that I wanted to live? To do the work my team was supposed to be doing? I just don’t understand their mentality. Yet it has been nine months since I left the hospital. I am still here because the anti depressant they put me on really help stabilize my depression. Too bad it no longer works. I stopped taking it in December.

My therapist thinks I should write a blog about past hospitalizations and current ones. Thing is, I don’t remember much. I know things are different today than they were back then. For example, there are no longer any outside passes given. If you want outside passes, you are basically discharged. When I was in the hospital in August, they wanted to give me grounds privileges. This meant that I could go out for staff walks. I told them adamantly no because I was scared I was going to run. They gave it to me anyway. Granted that at the time, I was in an AFO so I know I wouldn’t get far, but they still took that chance of letting me go. Stupid, I tell ya. I should have gone away from the group and tried to escape. I don’t know what that would look like but I know it wouldn’t be good on either side. I would most likely get reprimanded like a child, even though I am an adult. But that would be on them. I told them I would run and if I did, it was on them, not me.

I remember a time when I was in the hospital 21 years ago. I was severely depressed and suicidal. I had attempted suicide and was hospitalized against my will, in fact the admitting staff forged my signature on the consent form. I went through my records after discharged. Anyway, back then they had ground privileges, which meant you could leave the unit unaccompanied by a staff person. Just as long as you stayed on hospital grounds. Well, I decided to walk around the block after working hours and got “caught” by off duty staff. My privileges were revoked the next day as I broke the “rules”. I never kept my privileges too long. I always did something to revoke them. One weekend I had to beg for an outside pass just to pay a bill (I was there for more than a month and if I didn’t pay the bill, my phone was going to be turned off). I told them I would be back within an hour and I did. It was the first time they trusted me to do this. It was tough because I was so suicidal and they weren’t going to let me try again, hence why my stay was 2 ½ months. That was my longest time in the hospital. It did help me but the demons were still there. I had major issues that I still don’t talk to anyone about, not even my current therapist. It’s just too scary.

Last night I was looking for former therapists. I came across one, Dr. B. She helped me probably more than all the rest. She was the longest therapist that I have seen till that point, three years. All the rest of the therapists that I have seen were year or less. I am going to send her my book and email address. I wrote about her in my book. It was hard not to include her because the opening introduction has her in it as that was my first serious suicide attempt. I had made other attempts before that one, but this one landed me in the hospital and then I was there for a long time. That is when you had good care and one on one contact with someone. Now they have these “teams” where there are all the staff from the unit meet with you for fifteen minutes or so and then decide what to do with you. Fifteen minutes to decide if you need further stay or discharge. It is nothing like the care I had 21 years ago. You met with your inpatient therapist, then a social worker, and then your contact person who was a staff member for that shift. This no longer happens and it’s sad. No longer do you feel safe in the hospital or cared for. It is the end of the era for hospitals. I will never go back, no matter how suicidal I get. They can just kiss my ass goodbye.

Brick Walls

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, depression, mental disorders, mental illness, mood disorders, psychache, suicidality

7-Aug-14 Brick Walls

I am currently on a psychiatric unit in a hospital. I’ve been here for a week now, with no hope of getting out anytime soon. I am here because I am profoundly suicidal. All I see are brick walls surrounding me and they keep on closing in on me. It’s like a prison that only I can see. I am surrounded by these bricks and no one cares how high they get. And they certainly don’t care how they got there.

I want to take my life because I am stuck, just like these brick walls. The cement has hardened each brick into place so you cannot move it. My thoughts of suicide have also hardened to the point where they don’t budge. I feel very hopeless that this hospitalization will not help detach one of these bricks so that I make break free of the confinement I feel. If enough bricks fall, I may see the light at the end of the tunnel. But I doubt that will happen. I never see the light for long. I am always in a dark place. I am always feeling hopeless. And hopelessness and suicidal thoughts are not a good combination. They seal the cement and lock me in to this confinement that I am in.

The doctor and staff are trying their best to keep hope alive for me, but I just don’t see it. All I see is the brick wall that is impenetrable. Nothing or nobody can get through it or to me. It will take more than a jack hammer or two to get through to me right now. And it seems that no one owns one. The staff is too busy to care about the bricks. They just want the cement to fall to force me to see the light as the bricks become loose. Just so they can discharge me. They don’t care how the bricks were formed. And this hurts because no one takes the time to see how much I am hurting like they used to.

I have been trying to stay in the moment but my moments are just filled with suicidal thoughts and feelings. They are also filled with plans on how to end my life. Each thought makes the brick wall stronger so no one can breakthrough. Each brick has been mounted with feelings of inadequacy, shame, indignity, depression, hopelessness, worthlessness, and unbearable pain. Pain is the biggest brick. It lies in the center surrounded by the other bricks that I just mentioned. It exceeds all others in thickness and size. It is killing me, literally and physically, to be in unbearable pain all the time. The pain stems from just left of the sternum of the chest wall and captivates the entire left side of the chest cavity. It is a pressure felt day in and day out. In essence, it is like a ton of bricks weighing on my heart.

As the cement hardens around the brick, making it so difficult to breathe, the pressure on the chest increases. No medical tests exists to identify this weight. It’s not visibly present. That makes it difficult to explain without the feeling of sounding crazy. Who is going to believe a suicidal person that there is a weight on the chest when no one can see or feel it? It is not measured by tests or electrocardiograms. It is just a heaviness that fills your soul. And the soul cannot be seen or felt. Nor can it be measured. No one’s pain is the same. Each is unique to that individual. And my pain is what is strangling me in this moment of time.

The pain is always present in times of despair. It ruins any hope one might have and increases the weight of the bricks bearing down on you. Nothing alleviates this pain. There are no pills that can ease the pressure or painful despair. It’s ever present and deepens the despair because no one understands it. All the symptoms of depression and suicidal thinking makes it very difficult to treat. And the longer it lasts, the higher the brick wall is built. Will the doctors and social workers have what it takes to help bring down the brick and mortar? Very unlikely. They don’t have the time to really get to know me, much less help me. I have resigned myself to stay within these brick walls until they envelope me so I can no longer breathe. Each day they move closer, causing me to feel more isolated and the feeling of suffocation grows stronger. Love doesn’t have any effect on these walls that have surrounded my heart. My heart has become stone a long time ago. Only negative feelings are allowed to pass through. I have given up on positive feelings ever passing through my little barricade. It took years for the brick wall to be built. It might take years to be torn down. But the suicide demons won’t allow that. This time the brick walls will win. I no longer have the energy to chisel my way out of my own prison. But then, I am in a psych ward where chisels are not allowed. You just expected to go to groups to cope with the demons rather than allow them to fall.

And because no one knows the depth of my prison, I am here for a long time, in solitary confinement. The walls are dark and gray, just the way that I feel inside. I doubt I would ever get parole from this darkness that fills my soul. If I do, it is only for a short time before I am back in solitary. The light barely has a chance to touch me before everything becomes dark again. That is why I don’t trust happiness or feeling good. I much rather be content about things than feel happiness. Happiness, to me, is a fleeting emotion that is hard to hold onto. It is slippery like silk, never lasting more than a few minutes and devastating when it leaves you.

So I sit here in my room, surrounded by darkness so the sunlight won’t come in, staring at the brick wall and it staring back, trapped in my own prison.

Psychosis is a Funny Beast

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, mental disorders, mental illness, mood disorders, Paranoia, psychosis

1 March

Psychosis is a funny beast. It terrorizes you, yet when it’s gone, you miss it. It stimulates you like nothing else can. Yet it’s a completely individual experience. No two people will ever have the same type of voices/hallucinations. These voices/hallucinations can be visual or auditory or both. Such a common ailment in mental illness, yet so different in people.

You can have command hallucinations that tell you to do stuff or tell you to harm yourself. Or have other voices that tell you are great and powerful. Others that are more sinister and mean that cause paranoia. It doesn’t have to be people, per se, that give these commands. It can be words from the TV or voices on the radio, even if the appliances are turned off and unplugged. These devices can still speak and it can cause great anxiety and nervous agitation.

Sometimes when I am reading a book, the words will fly off the page giving me new meaning. It is magical and majestic. Most of the time, a man’s voice “reads” to me. It is the only way I can comprehend the paragraphs. Without this voice, the words have no meaning and I don’t know what the book is trying to say. The words are empty and meaningless.

There was a time when my paranoid thoughts got the best of me while I was at work. I was utterly convinced my email was being monitored by a doctor colleague I had a row with. Well, not really a row. He just called me incompetent. I told my boss that I didn’t want to work with him again. In retaliation, he was “watching” my email activity to get me fired. Every email was tagged to him somehow. I was convinced of this because the voices said so. When the emails started doing their dance like the words of the book, I became nervous that something was wrong. I called my psychiatrist. She told me I needed to be in the hospital. Psychosis such as this required urgent care. But I did not feel sick. I may have felt a little insane, perhaps. The delusions and hallucinations were bad that year. It caused me to quit college. I have yet to return to university, but mostly that is because of financial reasons than psychosis.

Soon after my release from the hospital, the delusions started again. This time with another co-worker. Voices had me convinced she was out to kill me. We had been good friends. I talked amicably to her so not to offend her. We played this game for three weeks. With each passing day, the paranoia got worse. I finally asked this woman, to test my reality, if she intended to harm me. She thought it was a preposterous question. The voices lied, again. They always do but they are so convincing, you believe them. No one else hears them. They are never visible though I often imagine what they must look like. A general overview of a female or male voice. It is when they start arguing amongst each other that things become confusing. Sometimes they make sense, other times they are incoherent. It’s like they get weird languages so I can’t follow what they are saying. The language is not any that I can discern. I have been exposed to different languages over the years and this is like nothing I have heard before. The language they speak, however undiscernible, is alien to me. And when I question what they are saying, only then do they talk English again.

These voices have been a part of my life for more than thirty years. I have adapted to them well. Only time they ever really leave me is when I am highly medicated. When they leave, I am utterly alone. It is a lonely place to be in. I cannot think without the voices. They have become so ingrained to my thoughts. They can “read” my thoughts so I don’t have to speak, at times. Yet we do have conversations that either I will initiate or they will. Especially at night when I try going to sleep, is when they come out and talk. There is this one voice that pops in just when I am trying to sleep just to have a chat. This voice inquires how my day went, and other general questions relating to how I have been. This is usually because it has been a while since we last chatted. It’s annoying because I want to sleep, not talk. Yet if I ignore the voice, the louder she becomes. Then I can’t sleep because I get agitated and extremely annoyed. There is no arguing with these voices. They don’t have a sense of time like we do. If they talk and ask questions, they must be answered, no matter what time of day it is. Many nights of lost sleep mean nothing to them. They are demanding creatures of the night.

I read a quote today that stuck with me. “I never understood the ‘psychosis isn’t illness, just an expected response to stress’ line. Bleeding is an expected response to a cut”. Alex Langford. What strike me with this quote is that it is true. People who have stress do not become psychotic. They usually suffer from anxiety of some sort, but they don’t become delusional and hear/see things that others cannot see.

Like most of my psychotic episodes, stress is usually the precipitant factor. Two weeks ago, I was getting stressed over financial matters. I am on a fixed income so trying to pay for everything can be a juggling act. A delusion of command tweets started. We have had heavy snow the whole month of February. I kept getting tweets to clear the roof tops. With each subsequent tweet, I took it as a command to clean my roof off. I started worrying that my roof was going to collapse (highly unlikely as I don’t have flat roof tops). But I couldn’t shake the notion that something terrible was going to happen if I ignored the tweet. So I started taking one of my PRNs (as needed) medication. It helped to ease the agitation and helped me to see that I was safe in my home. But taking this medication caused the voices to go away, temporarily. I have never felt so empty and alone before. I could function, do my every day things, but it was eerily quiet in my room, and in my head.

Not everyone who has stress becomes psychotic. If stress was the reason, there would be more schizophrenics or those suffering from psychotic depressions or manias in the world. Most people who are stressed, as I stated before, have anxiety. I become psychotic for reasons I don’t know why. I start having conversations with myself, out loud, with the voices when I am stressed. It just looks like I am talking with myself, but I am really not. I do know that once I am on medication, the stresses don’t bother me as much and I can handle them better. I sometimes like to think of myself as a functional schizophrenic.

It’s hard to explain the voices as they can be random. They come out more when I am tired, stressed out, or overwhelmed. They also come out when I am in an agitated state. I also feel like I am losing my mind. I wonder, am I depressed? Am I manic? Or am I just mad, bordering on insanity?

My drug of choice when I am in an agitated state is trilafon (perphenazine). It helps to keep the “bad” voices away. The “bad” voices are the voices that tell me negative things, give me paranoia, start with the delusions, and give me commands. If they are not controlled by medication, I usually end up in the hospital.

These days, the “bad” voices don’t come around much since I take a regular anti-psychotic everyday. What is striking is that this pill has no effect on my “regular” voices, the voices that I hear every day. This is good because without these voices I cannot function. Although these regular voices can be annoying, critical, and negative, they can also be helpful to sort out problems or have discussions with.

Pain and despair can also bring about a psychotic episode for me. Physical pain is the not the kind that I am talking about. It’s more like a weight on the chest, making breathing difficult. It’s not like an anxiety attack upon the nerves that I sometimes get. It is more cerebral in nature but hurts like that of a broken limb. Despair will cause madness to intensify and with it comes the suicidal thoughts. Anguish also is felt like never felt before. It is unbearable. The combination of these feelings create a breeding ground for the voices to become unhinged. Delusions of persecution also become acute. I feel everyone is against me and are trying to kill me. I try to fight the rightness of the mind but it unthinkable. My thoughts are just too incoherent. Voices get their way and the insufferable feelings fuel the paranoia. The pressure to resist is futile and to cognitively deny their words proves to be impossible. The torment continues with the increase in despair and suffering of unbearable psychological pain.

In this state, lyrics of songs become perturbed and twisted. The meaning of songs always revolve around death and destruction, even if that is not what the song is about. Hallucinations of hearing the song over and over even when music is not playing is common. I hear the song even when the MP3 player or radio is silent. I once had a song by Pearl Jam run rampant in my head for weeks. Then the lyrics changed and were telling me that I had to die, even though there were no such lyrics in the song. There was no escape from this turmoil. The only place I found solace was in the hospital and being drugged up to calm my overstimulated brain.

These types of voices, paranoia, and delusions respond best to medication. The longer I go without meds, the worse my condition becomes. I deteriorate, losing whatever faculties I may still possess. I have noticed that as I get older, there is an increase in episodes. These episodes are profoundly devastating and scary. It used to be I could be on my medication until the episode passed. Then I would stop it and not have another episode for years. That doesn’t seem to be the case any longer. I must now take this pink pill every day to be sane and prevent symptoms from happening. Since this regimen began a couple of years ago, my psychotic symptoms have decreased. But if I skip a few days, I am in trouble again. Then it is harder to be back in control of the symptoms. The balance of dealing with the psychosis is never easy. It’s a fine line between sane and insane, despair and despondency, psychache, severe depression, and suicidal thoughts. These are the evil conundrums that medication cannot cure or control. Talk therapy is somewhat effective but only as a maintenance. Despair is its own miserable evil that sucks the light out of every window. It’s power cannot be underestimated.

Fricken cold today

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, depression, mental disorders

Just came home from the freezing cold. I usually don’t wear gloves because I don’t like them but today I needed them. I carried a bottle of Powerade home from Walgreens and my hand almost got frostbite! We were supposed to get 39 degrees today but it’s only 27 and feels like 20. I am so damn cold right now. My father has his pills set for the week, though I think he skipped a day and is lying about it. Oh well. I don’t give a shit. It’s his life not mine.

Still feeling kind of delusional. I might have to take an extra trilafon today. I was wicked paranoid on the bus ride home for some reason. I tried to sleep but I was so fearful someone was going to kill me it was hard to relax. There was hardly anyone sitting near me so I don’t know why I felt like this. I take my regular dose of the pink pill tonight and tomorrow night so that should prevent this psychotic episode from getting worse, I hope. I don’t get like this often, but when I do, it’s holy hell.

I haven’t had lunch yet. What I really want, I don’t have. I can’t wait to order groceries and get my steaks. I haven’t had a steak in a long time. I haven’t decided if I am going to share with my mother or not. She doesn’t like steak and always complains about it. But then, I am not paying the top dollar kind of steak so what do you expect?? I really would love a filet mignon but I just can’t afford it. Maybe for my birthday, if I live that long. I really don’t want to make it to my next birthday. It’s too much of an effort living the way I am. I have no life outside of family. I rarely see friends or former coworkers. I really just don’t to “be” any more.

Now that I am home, I just want to sleep. I would make pancakes but my mother is cleaning the spice rack and has all of them all over the place. I guess, I am going to have to wait. I will just take a nap and sleep off this morning.

I woke up early again but was able to get back to sleep. I didn’t have coffee today and it’s kind of late to have a cup now. I would have made it but after going back to sleep, it was time to take a shower and catch the bus. I just made it to the bus stop when the bus came, early. It must have been behind. Or I read the schedule wrong. Either way, I was happy that it came and I didn’t have to wait long in the cold.

I haven’t emailed or text my psych team letting them know that I am delusional. I just hope it passes on its own. There is not much they can do for me anyways. My therapist is still on vacation and my psychiatrist is still out of the office. I will just manage it the best I know how.