Category: writing

this life would kill me…

by Midnight Demon, posted in suicide, suicide attempt, writing

The Boston Bruins have won the semi finals to advance to the Eastern finals. In Overtime. It was a spectacular game. I didn’t watch one second of it. I just had to turn on Facebook and Twitter to learn of the hits and misses. It was awesome. I can’t watch hockey. To me, I rather watch golf. It is the most boring game to me.

My Sox were off tonight. A travel day to the Trop in Florida. They will be playing the Tampa Bay Rays tomorrow.

My friend who gives me ideas sometimes for writing thinks I should write about suicide in the spring and baseball season. I think I have already written about it. But I almost told her that this was my last year. I have given up and there is really nothing no one can do about it. I am just going through the motions of living just to fool everyone around me into thinking I am ok. I hate having these dual feelings, the ambivalence about living. I just know I can’t go on. If I could, I would try something now but it will just mess up my plans for later on this year. I just don’t feel the timing is right. Not that the timing is ever right. I just have it in my head about this certain date and I got to make sure that things are set before this date. I might try in a month or two to leave this world but I am not sure. The ambivalence is just killing me, literally. I want to die but I don’t want to live. Maybe if I survive this, that will be the name of my book.

I have been writing about the Aeschi model and the CAMS model for the AAS blog that I write for. I feel like I have the basics down pat but I am stuck on the specific details about it. But then it is not an exact science. People have died even though they have followed the Suicide Status Form to a T. I still feel like trying to prevent suicide is a tricky business. You can’t take away that person’s option. Once you do, it is treacherous territory. But working with a suicidal person is risky. You might get them out of the water this time, but not be so successful the next. It take a constant vigilance and effort to deal with a suicidal person. I don’t know how my therapist does it. I feel like if I kill myself I will let her down. She traps me into living and I hate her for it. But like the song by Thompson Square, If I didn’t have you, goes. “This life would kill me if I didn’t have you.”

a little bit about my psychosis

by Midnight Demon, posted in psychosis, suicide, writing

My foot is burning. I just came from doing a little food shopping. Now all I want to do is sleep. I have not decided if I am going to eat today. I just have no inclination to do so as my stomach has not been the greatest the past few days. I don’t feel hungry. I just want to sleep. Maybe if I take a nap I will get hungry. I bought some Chinese food that I have not had in a while. I could make that or go to my go to, cereal.

I still have to refill my prescription for my antipsychotic. I really don’t want to as it’s thirty bucks and I am running low on cash. I have thought of not taking it but that could prove to be disastrous. I would end up back in the hospital most definitely. The voices have been held back and I am afraid that if I stop taking the meds I will regress.

I am not having a good day. I had a difficult session with my therapist. We were talking about my roots of suicidality and I didn’t like going back there. It stirred up things I rather not deal with but now I have to deal with. It doesn’t feel cathartic. It just feels horrible. Remembering what I went through as a kid. It just sucks. People thought that because I was a good kid, I didn’t have problems. They couldn’t have been more wrong. I was dying inside. I just wanted to die and yet I couldn’t let anyone know or my ass would get whooped. I tried to play it off as a happy kid as much as I could but at night it was just me and the voices. We’d talk for hours until I fell asleep. I had different voices growing up, mostly female and a few male. I had to keep them a secret too. I couldn’t talk to them openly like I could while I was in my room. This went on from the age of five to now. I still talk to the voices, especially when I am stressed out. Sometimes they are my sounding board. Sometimes they are mean to me by criticizing everything I do. They would always do it in school while I was taking a test but I could never talk back to them. They were the adults and I was the kid so I had to be quiet. I could only talk to them when I was in my room. And still do. I rarely talk to them when I am with another person. When I read they are the voice that narrates the words for me. We have a symbiotic relationship. I can’t survive without them and they cannot survive without me. I take meds to control the voices and sometimes they are too quiet and I cannot function. There has to be a murmur of voices for me to function. It has always been this way. When there isn’t, I just shut down. I can’t think. I can’t write. I can’t read. I can’t do anything.

The medication that I am controls the bad voices so they don’t interfere with the good voices. I just realized that I skipped the last few days. Shit. I hope that I don’t have negative consequences because of this. It will really suck to have to go back to the hospital. I just emailed my pdoc so hopefully she will give me an answer soon. I am not having bad voices now but that doesn’t mean that I won’t. I am just having some weird movement symptoms, like my arms and legs feel like they are elastic bands and I have to keep moving them so they don’t snap. That is one of the side effects of this medication. I don’t like it but Ativan keeps it in check.

a painful day

by Midnight Demon, posted in Chronic pain, chronic physical pain, depression, suicide, suicide attempt, writing

Woke up today in pain. It should have been a sign not to go out today but it was such a beautiful day out I decided to go out anyways. I got my coffee at Starbucks, my West Java which tastes like a little chocolate coffee. I started journaling but got bored so decided to write a letter to my therapist about how I feel about our last few sessions.

I feel like she has been blowing me off when I tell her I am suicidal. The most she can say is go into the hospital instead of trying to work through it. And that just pisses me off because the hospital is NOT the fucking answer to being suicidal. She doesn’t use the pain scales or even use the SSF’s when I get suicidal anymore. I think I am barking up the wrong tree. I don’t even know if she is taking me seriously anymore. I have not thought how I would kill myself but I just know that I want to die. I am trying to write this all down but my head is still half asleep because I took a pain pill before leaving the house and it makes it hard to concentrate. And the music today in Starbucks was a little louder than it normally is so I was being distracted very easily and could not focus on what I wanted to write. So I texted her that I wanted a check in, not to tell her all this, but just to tell her I am having a hard time. I hope she calls me but then we have an early appointment tomorrow so she may not.

On my way home, a three wheeled stroller got on the bus next to me. On my way off, my bad ankle couldn’t clear the wheels and I sort of tripped. Just fucking great. I now am in really bad pain and I have a golfball swelling on my ankle bone. I just iced it, took another pain pill, and put on the compound mixture of different meds to try and get it to calm down. So far, the pain is down a notch but that is all. I am screwed. I know tomorrow I am not going out as I need to rest it. All because I wanted to get a coffee at my favorite coffee house.

Today I finally learned how to print a PDF from my new laptop. I really didn’t want to have to switch laptops to get it printed. But control P works! The article I printed was about CAMS, Collaborating Assessment and Managing Suicide. It was a nice article that summarized the breakdown of how it evolved and where it stands now. I love this idea and I wish my therapist would open her pea brained mind just a little bit to let this in but noooo. I don’t want her to become a suicidologist, just to open her mind a little about the current trends out there that might be helpful to me. Is that too much to fucking ask??

My safety is kind of in question at the moment. I really want to slice open my ankle to let the swelling out but I don’t think I will get anything more than just blood. I would have to cut pretty deep to get to the root of the swelling and cutting deep would mean stitches. If that happens, I am liable to end up in the hospital. I don’t want that. I just want the swelling and pain to go down. Ice has not helped. I get to ice it again in an hour or two. I know part of the reason it hurts is because it is swollen. There is not much space for swelling to happen down there and it hurts when there is fluid build up. I was hoping that compound might shrink the tissues but it does the opposite with one of the ingredients. It brings blood to the surface to absorb the stuff. I can’t tell if it helps. I only have used it twice so far.

No ball game tonight so I will be bored. Maybe I can get some reading done. I have not been so great at that. Facebook games have been distracting me. But seeing as I will be laid up for a while until the swelling in my ankle goes down, I think reading will be good, as I got like a 1,000 page book to read. It is called Team of Rivals and is about how four people became the republican nomination for presidency in 1860, and also about Lincoln and the war. I have not ventured too far in the book but I am making headway as I am at page 150. It is easy reading though I cannot read too long because then my eyes do a weird thing that makes things double. I feel like I could use another cup of coffee. I am so tired but I don’t feel like going downstairs to get it. It will put too much of a strain on my ankle.

Aeschi model and ramblings

by Midnight Demon, posted in depression, mood disorders, psychache, suicide, suicide attempt, writing

Just woke up after a morning of pain. I decided to take my pain meds and go back to sleep. Like I figured, I woke up around 1400, which left me a half hour to shower and get dressed before the bus came. Well I did take a shower but going down the stairs to my sister’s apartment for coffee put a kink in me going out. I still plan on going out with my cane to Walgreens for some soda. I know I shouldn’t as I am trying to diet but I need something to drink other than water. I also need to get another bottle of water as I drank the one I had while watching the Sox game.

I am feeling energized by the coffee. I hope it doesn’t lead to a crash because I don’t want another nap today. I need to work on my writing today. I have been amiss doing so the past few weeks but now I think I know what to write about and I’ll just stick it in. I want to write about the Aeschi model for suicide and also how Dr. Jobes came into my life through his work. I really believe that if more clinicians took this approach to their clients or at least they had this approach in inpatient settings, there might be less suicides.

Aeschi model (pronounced Eshi) is a patient-oriented model, meaning that the patient has a say over treatment more than the clinician does. What has been found is that the provider-oriented model doesn’t work as patients can get frustrated over the “provider knows best” thinking. The Aeschi works toward a collaborative effort with the patient and provider working together to finding out what is at the heart of suicidality of the client.

Today I was at Starbucks taking notes on my Aeschi book. I was writing down what I had highlighted but there is too much information that I didn’t highlight that I needed to share so I gave up on it, for now. This book is so powerful that you really need time and energy not only to read it but to digest its contents.

The gist of it is to have the client be the person in charge of treatment and therapy, a novel idea when so many clinicians think they know it all better than the client and therefore take charge due do their discipline (CT, CBT, DBT, Etc.) I know that if my therapist had been in this category, I probably would not be here, or I would be seeing another therapist. I believe that if there is a collaborative effort of the therapist and client, there will be a higher success rate than if the therapist has the one track mind of he/she knows best. But the nice thing is that the Aeschi model doesn’t have to focus on one discipline. It can work for social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health workers, etc. It just takes a little courage to step out of the normal boundaries and put the client first. To let the client tell their story without being judgmental or critical.

After the client tells their story, there is an openness that can be trusted. Once the client has a sympathetic and empathic ear that is open to whatever the client is saying, the real journey begins.

This model is the new age of what therapy should be about. I know that if I didn’t develop a relationship with my therapist, I probably wouldn’t be here.

On another note: I did go out today and wasn’t in too much pain. I was able to walk a block with my AFO on. Now I don’t know if the brace is what calmed the pain down or if my ankle is finally calming down. I had a wicked bad night last night. Ice and pain meds were just not working for me. Usually ice helps but this time it didn’t. I am going to try again tonight. I have my foot elevated on a foam block. Best $60 I ever spent for a foam device. It really helps my back and legs.