Category: suicide

Cinco de Mayo 2015

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, cauda equina syndrome, chronic physical pain, depression, mood disorders, suicidality, suicide

Cinco de Mayo 2015

I got my S’mores frappucino with a shot of espresso. I had to have a real caffeine kick. I didn’t think I was going to go out because all the stuff I took for my bowels suddenly worked, all morning, for me. But things settled down after lunch and I was able to go out.

Had therapy and my therapist doesn’t remember reading the blog I sent her last week. The part she did remember was the nest part, which to me is similar to a hope box. She didn’t call it that and said she wanted to have things remind me of how important I am to people and such. It’s hard to do that when I am still in an environment that doesn’t fully support me in my illness. Today, I told her that my mother made me feel bad because I don’t do things “useful” around the house. My mother wanted me to put her breakfast plate in the sink to be “useful” and it made me upset. I don’t get why my mother has to be mean to me. I feel that giving her half of my paycheck every month to cover the bills of the house should let me live here, too. I just don’t get it.

I got really angry today so I posted on Twitter my feelings. A fellow CES sufferer saw a doctor today for her disability claims. He discounted her having CES, Cauda Equina Syndrome, saying she HAD CES, but once you have surgery, you no longer have it. That infuriated me. Infuriate is my word today as I have used it several times. I don’t get how a doctor can say something like that. If she had a stroke, the result would be the same. I just don’t get it. I really don’t and the more this happens, the more I distrust the medical profession. To me, despite their high degree, are all bozos, unless proven otherwise. I have yet to find a doctor that helped me with my ankle. No one wants to believe that I still have nerve damage in it. That the weakness is just from tendonitis. Just pisses me off, big time. So I have to take pain medication to quiet the pain. Normally, tendonitis heals with rest and therapy. I have been resting for three years now and I still have flare ups of pain. And no one can tell me why I am in pain or why my ankle swells up and all the veins in my foot pops out when I am in severe pain. Course, a doctor has yet to see this happen because it only happens in the after hours, late at night with the pain so bad I want to kill myself. It doesn’t flare up during appointment hours or even during an appointment. I am hardly in pain during the day, usually. But after seven in the evening, almost every night, the pain will rise and if I don’t start taking pain meds it becomes out of control. I have been fortunate that lately I have stayed on top of it. I am kind of lucky that I no longer work because if Friday was any indication, I would not be able to walk and stand eight hours a day. I would be in too much pain. Friday I walked more than I should have and paid heavily for it. Only reason I walked too much was because the eyeglass place made my glasses wrong. If the idiot explained to me what he meant by distance, we wouldn’t have had this problem. I still haven’t gotten my glasses back yet. I will call tomorrow and find out when they will be ready. I need them to read Dostoevsky. The glasses I am currently wearing can only go so far and then I start straining my eyes to see with them. It sucks having bad eyesight. I have been wearing glasses since I was in first grade.

My therapist and I talked about the chat that had me upset Sunday night. It’s like, am I smarter than all these clinicians and therapists in this chat when it comes to suicide prevention? I understand they want research and evident based treatment, but the research is there. If I know about it, why don’t they? I don’t get it. I don’t even hold a bachelor’s yet I know what needs to be done for a suicidal patient. Understanding, compassion, empathy, and the client telling his story. Treatment can be DBT based or CBT. I understand not everyone is trained in these modalities. There is a “short” kind of CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, that seems to help veterans in as little as five sessions. This is from what I have gathered on the internet vines and through the research of Jobes. So why do they not trust these kind of therapies is beyond my understanding. If they are looking to predict a suicide, they will have to wait a really, really long time for that to happen. You can’t predict a suicide anymore than you can predict cancer in a patient. And if this prediction is what they mean by prevention, they don’t understand anything about suicide at all.

Goodbye, Jack

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, chronic physical pain, suicidality, suicide

Goodbye, Jack

Since very early this morning, I have been playing my game like crazy to get as many missions done as possible. Only to find, that it is impossible to finish all the missions. I am going to miss this game. I don’t know what I am going to do tomorrow evening to wind down. I have a busy morning but when I come home, there isn’t going to be a game waiting for me to tend to crops and animals. It is going to be so weird. I still am thinking about getting off of Facebook for a while. I can already see that there is just going to be more bullshit photos of sayings and prayers. I have been slowly unfriending my gamer friends so they are not in my feed and my real friends are there. There is one gamer that has baby goats and like to post their pics. I could care less.

I had an interesting session with my therapist. I told her I was a nobody and for some reason, that triggered her into crying. She said it had to do with my self-regard. I don’t know why she took it personally. It is how I feel, a nothing, a nobody. Then I felt bad that she cried. But then, I have no idea the effect I have on people. It all started when I was telling her I don’t matter and the winner of the writing contest keeps coming up. It just hurts me that I didn’t win or even get a thank you for entering but sorry you didn’t win. I was one of 100 people that entered the contest. Surely they could have sent out sorry letters/emails. I just hate it when she says I contribute and I am wondering what the hell I am contributing to, exactly? It isn’t toward an academic journal or research lab. It isn’t even on the social media presence on Twitter. Hell, I tweet all the time and only 0.01 percent of the time, I get a response. So how am I contributing??

I entered another AAS contest, though I think I am wasting my money. I never win, but if you don’t play, you can’t win so I paid the money for the raffle and I will know June 2nd if I won. It’s an all inclusive package to Chicago for the 2016 annual conference. If I don’t win, I am never entering anymore contests from the AAS. I can’t be wasting money that can be used elsewhere.

My therapist was a real pita today. In addition to making her cry, she was just all in my business. I swear I was going to hang up on her if she told me one more positive thing about myself. I just couldn’t stand it. It’s one thing to hear it from time to time, but the last three days has been overwhelming me. It really is hard for the good stuff to sink in and I felt like she was hammering me with it. I understand that today I was going to end my life but now, I am not. And I really don’t know how I feel about that. Sure, I feel like a failure. But the last few days, I have been thinking about the people that would miss me and if I wasn’t here anymore. My online friends won’t know that I am gone. Who will be there to tell them? If they aren’t friends with my sisters, I doubt the message would go out. And what about Twitter? My sisters don’t know how to use Twitter so there will be a loss there. Just weird thoughts that I have been thinking about lately. And Julie Cerel’s number of 115 affected by one suicide keeps ringing in my head. That is the average number of people that will be affected by someone’s suicide. She doesn’t know where Shneidman got the number six, but it is way more than that. Hell, my mother’s side is just over 60 people, maybe more. My father’s side is smaller, more like 25 tops. And that is just my family, not including my friends, either at work or school or wherever.

My therapist wants me to make a nest. Of what exactly, I am not sure. The things she was naming to put in it sounded more like a hope box than a nest. When I brought that up to her, she was confused, or at least sounded like it. I might have interrupted her train of thought, which was sort of the point. I had told her what my psychiatrist said to me on my last visit to her. She called me, of all the people in her life, her role model. How the hell am I suppose to kill myself knowing these people take me so seriously and lovingly? I don’t know if it is a guilt trip but it sure feels that way. And I guess if they have their way, I am the one that continues to hurt, not them. But their affection towards me keeps me hanging on, even if it is for one more day.

hopeless yet hopeful

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

Today is the first day of the American Association of Suicidology’s annual conference. I have been getting tweet updates all day from my fellow Twitter buddies. One of them won the writing contest that I had also entered in. I posted the blog earlier today.

I have been astounded that researchers are finally getting a clue that psychache and hopelessness goes hand in hand when dealing with suicidal thoughts. Shneidman would be proud. And they are finding this across the age groups, including youth suicide. I know from experience that was what lead me to self harm and also to think of death constantly. It wasn’t until 2007 while working on a term paper did I realize that only Shneidman had made the connection so brilliantly. Course he never did an empirical study of it. He was out there in the trenches doing the actual work to help decrease suicide. If I hadn’t come across his work and then the work of Jobes, I doubt that I would still be here.

Reading these tweets always makes me feel like I am missing out. Though I know that if I was there, I wouldn’t know how to tweet during a lecture. I would be more interested in what the person was saying than trying to remember it and then post it on Twitter. I suppose I could take notes of what they were saying and then tweet. They had Marsha Linehan today and she told her story of how she was mentally ill with borderline personality disorder, was hospitalized for a good number of years and that the treatment was awful. She made a promise to God that if she got out of her hell, she would try and get others out of theirs. I hate when I am feeling like scum of the universe, feeling hopeless as anything, and then this conference happens to lighten the load so to speak. I truly was in awe that Dr. Linehan came out and was inspirational. She said that to decrease suicide, you have to decrease the pain. And also to use skills to cope. Of course she would say that. She is the founder of DBT! But I think she has softened in her rigidity of DBT as a cure all over the years. She is the one that pushed Jobes into research for CAMS and why would she do that if she thought that DBT was the answer to everything. I minimally respected her before today. But as I am getting to know her more, the more I am respecting her.

Jobes was also at the conference. No surprise there. He was on a panel of speakers but between the tweets, I couldn’t really figure out where he was coming from. The message was that even though he has trained thousands of clinicians in his modality, it didn’t change their behavior toward suicide. And that is sad. He wants the younger clinicians to step and do the research as to why that is.

Last night I was in a pretty bad state of mind. I still don’t want to live. But if Marsha Linehan can come back from mental illness, then maybe I can, too. I know the suicidal thoughts are always going to be there. It is my default coping mechanism. Over the years, I have learned what it took to distract me from going through with these thoughts. I have only come close to killing myself twice in the last two years, no matter how dark and dreary my depressions got me. But figuring this out wasn’t easy. It mostly comes through in hindsight and after the episode has passed. And then I am left feeling like, “did that really happen”? My therapist assures me that I go through these bouts frequently. Which is why she is adamant about me keeping my appointments, no matter how hopeless I get.

how can I keep myself away from me

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, cauda equina syndrome, chronic physical pain, depression, suicide, suicide attempt

How can I keep myself away from me

I tried the not talking approach to my therapist today. I think it works better in person than it does on the phone. I just did not want to talk today at all. She tried to get me to engage with questions and I just shot her down. I kept telling her this is all pointless. Then she went off about how much I mean to her, and on and on with things like that. I just couldn’t hear her. I tuned her out, like I have most of my friends and family lately.

She wanted me to list the reasons why I want to kill myself. I thought about sending her the blog I wrote the other day but I can’t remember which blog it was. Once I write something, I forget it. It’s like mental eraser once I put it in a blog or on paper. So I will make a new list and please don’t think this is a whine list. I am already close to the edge and it won’t take much to push me off.

I don’t want to live anymore because I am not a full human, I am not a man. I will never be accepted by the society I live in, even if I were to get hormones. The people close to me, my family, will never call me a him or he. I will never be an Uncle, though I can’t imagine after almost 21 years, I can be called that. I have gotten so used to “aunty” that it just suits me, even though it isn’t the right gender preference.

I want to end my life because CES sucks. I am tired of being in pain every single day of my life, in some way, shape, or form. I can’t even have a bowel movement without pain, even if the shit is soft, I hurt. It’s all nerve pain so I doubt anything can be done about it. Luckily it goes away but I suffer for at least 15 minutes to a half hour after every movement. I never thought my life would come to this. And peeing myself every day is no help. I thought that shaving my pubic hairs would help but it doesn’t. I still smell if I don’t shower every other day. The worse part is that I don’t even know I am wet. I don’t have normal sensation down there since my second CES diagnosis. I know people can laugh it off but it really sucks for me because unless I use a pad (which is difficult with boxers), I leak. I just don’t realize I am full until afterwards. My urge to go is not that strong.

Dealing with depression and all that comes with it. The mental pain of living every day when you hurt physically and mentally yet you can’t take a narcotic pain med to ease that ache. I have tried. I once took a handful to ease the mental pain and it did nothing, NOTHING, for me. How can you continue to see a psychiatrist or a therapist knowing they cannot ease your pain. I have tried, desperately and in vain, to find something, anything, to ease this psychache. But all I get is talk therapy to address it. I am tired of talking about it. Nothing helps. Writing used to but now I just think I am a whine bag, going on and on about my little complaints on why I want to take my life.

I never will go back to school again. I will never embrace the academia again and that hurts me more than I say. I will never earn enough or save enough to go back to school, unless I hit the lottery but you have to play to win. I don’t even have the extra buck to play. I never will get my degree that I long for. And I feel like I have let my family down because of this. If I never got sick with mental illness, things would have been different. But this damn illness always gets the best of me. I have to go into the hospital at least once a year, sometimes twice because I just can’t handle “life” and need a “vacation”. If I didn’t have yet another breakdown in 2008, I probably would have got my degree by now and I wouldn’t be fucked with my loans. I don’t blame anyone for this. I blame myself for being sick. Living on SSD is not always as it is cracked up to be.

Then we have the employment issue. Will I ever be able to hold a job again? The past two months I have been plagued with hypomanias and psychosis which if I was working, would have been worse and I would be in the hospital again. And this is without a job! How am I supposed to handle work responsibilities when I can’t even handle no responsibilities? With the Long Term Disability still hanging over me, I still cannot get a job even if I wanted to. I really would like to go back to my old job part time. I just want to feel useful again. I don’t feel like I deserve to live because I feel so worthless. And being an author didn’t exactly give me the fame I thought it would. I still fight for every sale, every month. But self-promoting is hard work, harder than I thought it would be. I thought that when my book went on Amazon, it would fly off the shelves, so to speak. Hardly that. I never thought it would reach a best 100 status, that would be impossible and an unreachable goal. But to be in the millionth rank, well, that was not what I was expecting. And then you had to create an author page. I hate the way I look so I neglected for almost a year to put a pic up. I still don’t know what to say in bio so left that blank. All these things you need to do and yet no one tells you. You just learn as you go.

I hate my body image. I hate the way I look. I always have. I really don’t think that is ever going to change. I avoid mirrors like the plague. And no matter what pic or selfie I take, I always look like a moron. I am just not photogenic, but that isn’t what drives me to kill myself. I just hate me, everything about me sucks.

I think I have listed enough reasons why I want to take my life. These are the top ones.