Category: suicide attempt

Morpheus, Where are you??

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, Chronic pain, chronic physical pain, depression, mood disorders, suicide attempt

Morpheus where are you??

My stomach ache is gone but my foot has exploded so I had to take strong pain pills to kill it. I really would have loved to shoot myself in the foot. Least the pain would be explainable. But I would probably take the gun to my head instead at this point. I am feeling really poorly because I can’t fucking sleep. I have taken my regular pain meds, Ativan, and now the strong pain meds and I am still fucking awake.

I looked over my finances and the money I got paid yesterday is gone. I have only a hundred dollars to my name, which will be half that after I pay for my prescription later today and my T pass. I shouldn’t have bought groceries but I needed food, even though I am not eating very much these days. I think I have lost 10 pounds in two weeks because my appetite has been nothing. I have been eating just one meal a day and that has been it. I don’t feel hungry. And you would think that because of the weight loss, my pain would be less. NOPE. If anything, it has increased!! One physiatrist told me that even if I was my “normal” weight, I would still have back issues. Course, she didn’t say that in her notes. She said that I should lose weight. Talk about contradiction. If losing weight is supposed to decrease my pain, why does it increase it? Doesn’t make any fucking sense. My therapist would say I am the exception not the rule. I hate when she says that. She is reckless, like the new Martina McBride song. I can’t wait to get the lyrics because I think the song is perfect for our relationship. It’s not available on Amazon right now and I am pissed. I hate iTunes. It always crashes the computer.

I can’t take my pain anymore. I am going to go through with my plans this weekend. Fuck it. I am done. It probably won’t kill me but at least I will be seriously knocked out. I just need a fucking escape and I have it and I am going to use it. It is a done deal, for right now. I may still change my mind but I doubt it if this fire that is burning is still going on. I will text my therapist before I do it. Or maybe I won’t. Will be kind of stupid if I did.

It’s getting cool outside but it’s still hot in my room so I have the ceiling fan on. It’s a comfortable coolness in my room that I like. I will probably be cold in the morning but oh well. I am comfortable now. Why can’t I sleep then?? The meds have kicked in though now I am feeling nerve pain. I have found that I will have intense fucking physical pain and then when the opioids kick in, my foot/ankle will burn like it is on fire. Neurontin is the only thing that extinguishes these fires but I can’t take it now or I will be foggy brain later today and I need to be coherent because I have to see my “lovely” father.

When I saw him yesterday, he was speaking mostly Italian. My middle sister couldn’t understand a word he was saying. I don’t think she ever really grasped the language like I did when I was taking it in college and in high school. I may not know ALL that he says but I can get the gist of it, if he talks slow enough. If he talks fast, forget about it. I am lost. Maybe I should invest in the Rosetta Stone to learn Italian because he is going to be speaking it more as he ages. I think he thinks he is speaking English sometimes because when you tell him to speak English, he has a confused look on his face like “huh”?? And then he is silent because he is searching for the English translation to what he is saying. He will also talk slow like we are retarded or something. It’s very frustrating.

I am feel loads of pain in my left ankle down to my toes. The peroneal tendon must be inflamed because that’s what it feels like. I had a good pic of the tendon but I have no idea where it got saved to. The spasms that I had earlier before my foot exploded must have triggered the tendon. Fuck. I wish I could just cut the sucker out and be done with it. I am so sick of being in fucking pain.

Every morning a little after 0100, I get a text from the Twitter account of Dilbert. I love the comic strip. It makes me laugh. Very few things these days make me laugh but Dilbert does.

I feel like having ice cream now that my tummy feels better but the effects of the strong pain pills is starting to make me feel woozy. It funny because I will feel high for about 30 seconds and then I will just collapse. This happens to me almost every time I take it. It’s very rare that I am able to fight the effects of this medication. I hope Morpheus finds me and I can sleep. I just hope he doesn’t bring me dreams about Jobes again. Those are weird. Dreaming about a psychologist that I respect a great deal and then following him around like a puppy? No thanks, Morpheus.

Shared from WordPress

by Midnight Demon, posted in suicide attempt

Three Strategies for Conducting State-of-the-Art Suicide Assessment Interviews – http://wp.me/p1O9VF-oP

I like this post very much because it is so non judgemental and straight forward to assessing suicidal ideation. I also like the fact the author stressed the use of safety planning rather than another type of contract, though there are several he could have used, such as crisis response plans. Either plan is helpful when assessing for suicidal thinking.

I also like the open questions to allow a client to think about responding rather than just asking directly. It is my belief that assessing in this way opens up more talk about suicide than being direct.

Article Review: Working with Suicidal Clients

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

Article Review: Working with Suicidal Clients

I have to say that this article was not what I expected. It was an overview to the special issue the journal Cognitive and Behavioral Practice was having. The authors of the article described briefly what each article was about, which left me looking for more articles to add to my collection. But the take away message was that suicidal clients are to be treated as individuals and not as a “one size fits all” treatment modality.

Cognitive therapy has been moving up in the suicide chain as being helpful to suicide clients (Jobes, 2015 presentation AAS). DBT is also as it has helped a lot of clients with borderline personality disorder.

I found it interesting that there was a safety planning section. I googled it to try and learn more and there was a website for it. I downloaded the form as well as the training manual. It might come in useful in my therapy. I didn’t need the article to get to the form. It is similar to many other planning tools used by cognitive therapists. The thing I don’t like about it is that it is a sheet of paper that can get lost or misplaced. It also has the potential of not being used if the client is not near the paper when a crisis is at hand (e.g., at school versus at home). The author for the brief article has stated that therapists are slowly moving away from “no harm” contracts and moving toward safety planning. The reason being that “no harm” contracts have not been shown to be effective and may increase the likelihood of suicide. Also, simply making a promise not to kill yourself doesn’t really hold up well legally.

Ellis, T.E. and Goldston, David B. Working with Suicidal Clients: Not Business as Usual. Cognitive and Behavioral Practice (2012) 19: 205-208

Recovery…what does it mean?

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, chronic physical pain, depression, mood disorders, suicide, suicide attempt

Recovery…what does it mean?

I keep hearing people talk about recovery and I am at a loss. Can someone enlighten me on what the hell it is? And what exactly are you recovering from?

I hear from suicide attempt survivors all the time this word. Do people who think about suicide really recover after they attempt? Because I keep wanting to try again and again. I haven’t made an attempt in years but I think about suicide constantly. Or is recovery just something that happens after you learn different coping mechanisms?

The reason I do a lot of suicide research is because I want to find something to help me. If I never looked for it, I wouldn’t have found CAMS and the SSF so useful. I have also found other assessment tools but nothing else worked. Traditional therapy didn’t work for me. I had to find a therapist that treated me as an equal and collaborate with me on what works and what doesn’t. It’s still an ongoing process as my suicidality gets worse during certain times of the year than others.

I don’t think I will ever recover from my mental illness. I think it will wax and wane, just like my suicidality, but it will never get better. I might find symptom relief through medication but even with medication, my depressions get the better of me. They are too severe and too frequent to really get relief from them. Medication has been proven useless with treating them. I am just left to suffer through them until they pass.

Then I have the physical pain that I deal with. I don’t think I will ever recover from that. It just seems to get worse during the temps of New England. My former PCP thought that I can just do something to make me feel better and things would be better. Wishful thinking. As much as I don’t want to be on meds, I know it’s my new way of life. It’s the only way I can survive. Otherwise, I think I would entertain the thoughts of killing myself, and by entertain, I mean attempt.