Category: psychache

ramblings 16

by Midnight Demon, posted in CES, Chronic pain, depression, mental disorders, mental illness, psychache, psychosis, suicide, suicide attempt

Been staring at the cursor of a new document for the past fifteen minutes and still nothing is coming to me about what to write. This writing project that my friend has involved me in is draining me. I am having to come up with new material every day and how can you possibly do that every day? I am not used to writing on demand. I have a migraine today so my thinking is kind of slow. All I want to do today is sleep but I just can’t because I have this restlessness inside. I want to go out but it is just too bright out. I am getting lazy. I am hardly leaving the house for anything these days. Not even the temptation of Starbucks makes me want to leave the house.  Last time I left the house was Friday for a doctor’s appointment. I spent that day at the medical center because I was to be seen for my blurry vision episodes. Tomorrow I will have to leave the house to go for an MRI.  I will have to take pain meds and an Ativan to get through. I know that it is going to be tough because the damn thing always hurts my back. I simply cannot lay flat for the 45 minutes or so it takes. I am always hurting afterwards. I have had numerous MRIs as I have a chronic back condition that needs monitoring. I have not had a back MRI in some time but I have had a brain MRI last year. It was similar to the same condition I am experiencing now. Except I just have blurry vision and not a visual field problem.

So this writing binge is because my friend need help writing her book and I sort of need to write my book which has to do with how I deal with my suicidality all the time and my chronic pain that can send me over the edge. My last pain attack was two weeks ago and it ended ugly. I ended up taking more medicine than I should have because I just didn’t care any more. I could have ended my life that night and the only thing that stopped me was that I couldn’t walk the three feet, yes three feet, to my bureau to get even more medicine. I still wish that I went through with it. Maybe I would have slept more and not woken up the next day. I don’t know. I am so sleepy now that I just want to go to sleep than to talk about this…

I think my friend has an ulterior motive for me writing. It’s to know that 1) I am alive and 2) to try and control the demons. The demons are what control me to try and take my life when I am in severe pain, either mental or physical. I can’t seem to tolerate one or the other but when I have both, I am in trouble. As what happened that night, things escalated very quickly and I found myself staring at a bottle of pills to end my life because I couldn’t stand the intense pain. I still am in disbelief about how this happened and the intense grief in surviving it really got my head spinning.  When you feel suicidal you have a plan about what to do. You call someone, your therapist, psychiatrist, PCP, a hotline. But I didn’t use any of those resources and that is what is killing me. I didn’t have the time to practically think about what is causing me to feel suicidal. I just wanted the pain to end and was willing to take a bottle of pills to end it. Stupid yes and for the suicidologist in me couldn’t distract, how is someone that I am treating or a friend that is in crisis supposed to do this? It makes no sense. I couldn’t step back and see that this pain would pass, that I just had to give the meds time to work. I see this now but I didn’t in the moment.

psychological pain: real or not?

by Midnight Demon, posted in Chronic pain, depression, psychache, suicide

I did some Google research on psychological pain. I got over 34 million hits on those terms alone and had to narrow it. I really miss having access to PsychLit, a search engine tool for psych papers and other related mental health professions. So I put the psych pain in quotations to narrow the search. I narrowed it down to 444,000. Yikes. How was I going to get through that many? I decided to go through the first three pages of results. I found what I was looking for and did another search for that. Sometimes you can get lucky and get a free PDF of the research article. I wasn’t lucky this time. I did pay $20 USD for to “look” at the research article. What I found was another psychological pain scale that has been in use for the past six years. I don’t know how I missed this article in my previous searches, but then I have been following ONLY the works and “followers” of Dr. Shniedman.

From what I have read about this article, this is a quantitative research measure for psychological pain. Unlike Jobes’s SSF (Suicide Status Form), which measures multiple psychological pain issues and is a qualitative form, it does not measure anything related to suicidal thinking. This is disappointing. Most of the measures have been for major depression, whereas the research for the SSF has been across all psychiatric disorders.

OMG I just read one of the results that Tylenol would help psychological pain. WTF, ARE YOU SERIOUS??? No wonder there is so much liver failure in this country. But then most people don’t think that this pain is real and only physical pain can be felt. I think this is bogus because I have suffered from psychic pain for a great many years and I can say that it is just as real as any physical pain that I have ever felt. It might not be the same as say the pain from a broken limb but a broken heart hurts just as bad.

In this article that asks is there such a thing as psychological pain? And why it matters. I found this article interesting as he was comparing the pain and grief of losing a child to cancer can be just as painful as a kidney stone.

 

 

References

Biro, David. Is There such a thing as psychological pain? And Why it matters. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 2010.(34).4.658-667

Mee S, Bunney BG, Bunney WE, Hetrick W, Potkin SG, Reist C. Assessment of psychological pain in major depressive episodes. J Psychiatr Res. 2011 Nov;45(11):1504-10. Epub 2011 Aug 9.

a painful night

by Midnight Demon, posted in Chronic pain, medical, mental disorders, mental illness, mood disorders, psychache, psychosis, suicide, suicide attempt

Right now my left foot is on fire and there is no calming it down. I think I did too much when I made my chicken wings today. God forbid I should make a meal. It really sucks when you want to make something other than a bologna sandwich for dinner. That is why I eat out so much. It’s so I don’t have to cook.

A friend has told me to write when I am in pain so that is what I am doing…not to say it is helping me with the pain any but it is making me tired that I want to sleep…

I am to see my psychiatrist in twelve hours from now. I am afraid to see her because I have not told her about my pseudo suicide attempt last week. I keep thinking it was months ago but in actually, it was only ten days ago.  I am afraid that if I tell her I might get put into the hospital for it. The crisis has passed. I have not felt suicidal since that night, well, not really felt like acting on it since that night. It is a curious thing. I will share things with my therapist more than I will my psychiatrist. I know it is because I talk with my therapist more than my psych. Don’t get me wrong, the relationship I have with my psych is longer than my therapist. I have seen the same psychiatrist since I was seventeen. I am coming up on our twenty year anniversary. I can’t believe how far I have come and that I am still alive. I know it is because of her care that I am still here. I think most psychiatrists would have dumped me a long time ago but for whatever reason she stuck by me and I by her.

I have not processed my feelings about this last suicide attempt. I cannot believe I threw out the window all my safety plans. It is easier said than done to call someone when you want to down a bottle of pills. I think that there is no telling what might have happened that night had I been able to walk the three feet, 3, stinking feet to my bureau to get more pills. Not being able to walk three feet is what saved my life. Three feet. That is how close I was to taking a whole bottle of pills. My therapist is grateful for this. I am sure my friends are. I have been in a weird state since this has happened. I have been neither depressed nor euphoric nor anything since that night. I have become numb. And I am not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing. This is the first time I really want to document what I am going through because I know there might be someone in similar circumstances. Pain is awful but that night I was so full of despair and hopelessness, my mood changed on a dime and the demons came out rearing their ugly heads. I remember just this feeling of panic since that night. This overwhelming desire to get away from myself, the overwhelming pain knocking whatever senses I had out of commission and wanting to just die. Both of my feet were useless. Both of my feet were in agony. I couldn’t straighten out my legs. I couldn’t let the sheet touch my feet. It was awful, so truly awful not being able to do a damn thing but lie in agony and knowing that my meds were just a few feet away and my misery could have ended once and for all. But no, I could barely stand long enough to gulp down two of my night pills. So I skipped my dose of some of my other meds. What did that matter when all I could think about was death. After I took my meds I waited an eternity to pass out. Ten minutes passed. Then fifteen, then twenty. I felt like nothing was going to work that night. My feet seized in spasms again and all I saw was blackness filling me way deep inside such that I have never felt before. I had to do something. I had to get this demon out. I had to end my life. But I could not get up and walk the three stinking feet to do so. Moving my legs was agony. If I really tried I could have but then I would be in big trouble. I might not be here today writing this.

a phone call

by Midnight Demon, posted in psychache, psychosis, suicide, suicide attempt

One crazy day at work I received a phone call from a number I didn’t recognize. I let it go to voicemail as I figured it was some bill collector. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Not only did this person leave me a message for me to call him back but he said that it was urgent to do so. This man was Dr. Edwin Shneidman, the father of suicidology. He was a man I deeply respected because of his work in trying to understand psychache and suicide. He was the first pioneer to create a suicide prevention center in the United States. He has spent his life trying to develop a scale for psychache and psychological pain assessment. Psychache is the unbearable psychological pain (despair, grief, guilt, hopelessness, frustration, perturbation, and pain all rolled into one). It is this pain that he and I believe causes people to think about taking their life. I sent him my paper “Is suicide caused by psychological pain?” and he wanted to talk to me about the pain scales I had mentioned. He was fascinated that there was a scale to measure physical pain but (as I argued) not for psychache. He was always thinking about how to have a psychometric assessment to gauge a person’s psychache.

Dr. Shneidman began his career by interpreting suicide notes. He began collecting them after he was sent to the morgue for confirmation of suicide autopsy. He and his colleague Farberow lead the early work of this important tool in forensic suicidology. In addition to this, he also co-founded the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center, the first in the United States to have one.

His message to me was for me to return his call and quickly (he wasn’t in the best of health). I didn’t know what to say to him or what he wanted of me. I was extremely nervous. Looking back I don’t remember too much of what we talked about. I know that we were on the phone what seemed like a half hour or so. I was too stunned to really remember anything but I know that he talked about his ill health and that he wanted to know what the physical pain scale was so I printed some off for him and sent them post haste to his house in LA. He died about a month afterwards.
After our conversation, my therapist was convinced I was going to be the next Shneidman. I would continue to follow in his work and in a way I have in my own way. I have book or downloaded/printed every article he ever wrote on the subject. I have scores of files on him. I also have the same on David Jobes but that is another matter.