Tag: David Jobes

writing bug today

by Midnight Demon, posted in depression

I know this is my third blog of the day but I can’t help it. I have the writing itch and I can’t seem to stop it. I just can’t stop thinking about what I have been writing today about suicide and it has not really triggered me but I feel like I can’t stop it.

A fellow blogger wrote a comment about the frustrated needs in my last blog. I guess I wasn’t too clear about that. Frankly I am not too clear about it myself, only in the respect that I can see it myself and maybe that is not really clear. I will have to research it more as there are some top ones that always get people to think about suicide when their needs are frustrated or not met. I know succorance, validation, and affiliation are some of the top ones. I don’t know if this will make sense if you haven’t read my other blog, (my suicide career), it talks about frustrated needs as a precursor to suicidal thinking. It is the buildup of these unmet needs that might lead to suicide. Everyone has them, and most are met but for those that are mentally ill it can be challenging to have each of them met and feel satisfied with them. And all of this is related to the father of suicidology, Edwin Shneidman. He was a great guy that thought long and hard in the path of suicide prevention. He so wanted a psychometric assessment to evaluate suicidal thinking. Unfortunately, what he came up with was not always sound and easy to perform. Luckily, his successor, David Jobes, has been able to have a validated and empirically sound assessment called the suicide status form. Unfortunately, copyright laws prevent me from posting a new form. There is however one that has been filled out online if you search for it. I have used this form in my therapy and it has helped me. You can get it in his book Managing suicide Risk. I have made copies and have it in a word doc for easy copying.

I don’t know why I am thinking about this today. I have been up since three thirty this morning writing and writing and writing. Now my writing partner has come up with something else for me to write and somehow have it crossed linked to our blogs as tomorrow is National suicide prevention day. This is a wild idea. Hope it works out well for the both of us.

random 654

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, depression, suicide, suicide attempt

The shipping box for my new laptop came today. Now I just have to drop it off at FedEx to ship it. This will give me a chance to go to my old Starbucks hang out in Wellington. I hope that I can take my sister’s car tonight to drop it off, otherwise it will have to be tomorrow morning.

So far my day is going ok despite my allergies flaring up. I have had two sneeze attacks since getting up at noon. I woke up at three-thirty in the morning and fell asleep around six. I slept for about six hours. But I was productive during the early morning hours. I got to work on my book (nothing triggering) and came up with at least six pages. I am excited because this line of writing will be at least fifteen or so pages, if I am able to keep it up.

I am feeling less depressed than I was yesterday. I have more energy and I hope this isn’t a crash before a fall. I still am worried that I am going to lose my data on my laptop. But seeing that I have what I need, my blogs and book, I am not so worried. I have my music on my phone that I can always back up and Amazon has all my music is on cloud. The rest of the music is on CDs (actual CDs not CDRs) so I can always make copies of those to put it back on my phone if need be. It is weird working on my old laptop. I forgot how different the keyboard is. I am just hoping that I don’t have any more blue screens of death or that my monitor screen get funky.

This week is National Suicide prevention week. I think there was a chat on twitter about it that AFSP and Mayo clinic were holding. I wanted to see what it was about but I missed it. I don’t usually say anything, unless they discuss treatment options. Then I will put in my two cents about Jobes’s CAMS and the Aeschi model. More clinicians need to be aware of these two similar modes of therapy if they ever want to get the suicide rates down. Course the biggest hurdle is actually getting the person the help he/she needs before they act. I know it wasn’t easy for me to reach out and get the help I needed in the beginning. It took me several calls to Samaritans before I ever saw my first therapist. And I only saw a therapist after I tried to kill myself because I felt like no one would believe me otherwise. I was an intelligent teen and didn’t seem to have any behavior problems so I just felt like they wouldn’t believe me. I felt that if I cut my wrist, it would give me more creditability. After all, my own mother didn’t believe me when I told her I was suicidal. And it took the school nurse to convince her that I needed help.

There were no anti-suicide campaigns at my high school, least none that I recall. I know now they have a counseling center as well as a health center at the school, thanks in part to the movies they have made around the school and other donations. I don’t know how I got through high school as I was extremely depressed and suicidal. But I guess part of it is the connection I made with the school nurse. After I had my problems, I saw her nearly every day just to say hi and chat for a few minutes. I think those chats were the most helpful.

While I was up in the wee hours of the morning writing, I was also reading a little bit in the Comprehensive Textbook of Suicidology. I wanted to see if they had anything about “suicide careers” by Ronald Maris. And to my surprise it did. I don’t know why I wrote this book off. It also has Shneidman’s ten commonalities of suicide. I also included that in my chapter that I am writing. I think I will make what I am writing a blog post. It will be long as already it is almost seven pages or I could just write about it separately. I haven’t decided yet what I am going to do. But I am glad that I don’t have to go searching for “pathway to suicide” by Maris to find the definition of “suicide career”. The way he defines it, is a lifelong depressing road that ultimately leads to completed suicide. In the book, he uses Sylvia Plath as an example.

In finding this little tidbit of information, I feel energized to continue writing a book that talks about the newer age treatment of suicide rather than the old. I talk about my experiences and hope that one day someone will read my book and not feel so alone. Maybe they will have attempting, maybe they have been thinking about it. I will never know.

Midnight Demons Are Back…and it sucks

by Midnight Demon, posted in Chronic pain, depression

I did my what has now become my daily routine. I took a shower and then headed to Starbucks for my coffee. Because I earned so many stars (rewards), I earned a free drink so today took advantage of it. I also got another banana coffee cake as I was in the mood for something sweet. I then sat and journaled about my therapy session.

Last night I sent her a pretty nasty text message because I was in so much pain. I told her “fuck you, I am still keeping my date. Ankle has exploded so fuck you.” I didn’t get much sleep last night because I was hyper and because I was in pain. I have had a few hours sleep and the coffee helped. I am getting scared though. I am feeling like I am separating into two people. During the day I am Dr. Jekyll and during the night, I become Mr. Hyde. My moods are drastically different. If given the opportunity last night, I know I would have tried to take my life last night. I was that crazy that much. Now, because I am not struggling to sleep and not in crazy about of pain, it’s like a night and day experience. I have to ask myself, did I really think those things? I know the text message meant what I said and I know I wanted to talk to some one but who do you call at 3 in the morning?? I wrote a letter to Dr. Jobes, telling him of my demise and thanking him all the same time. I don’t know why I did that. I just thought he should know that I was struggling and used his works and it still failed me somehow. Maybe I wasn’t using it right. Maybe I am just a failure and can’t be helped. Maybe I am just too hopeless a case. I don’t know if I will send off the email. He doesn’t know me, not in a personal way anyway. I doubt that he remembers who I am other than the crazy guy that keeps asking him for his autograph in his works. I adore him. I admire his brilliancy in the field of suicidology. Yet why do I feel I should tell him I am committing suicide? Maybe I am hoping he will send me a reply that will give some affirmation that my life is not a total failure and loss. But if I don’t get a reply, how then will I feel? What if he takes my threat seriously and tries to hunt me down to get me help? I don’t know if I can take that chance.

Last night I wanted to chat so went to the twitter boards to see if there were any suicide chats going on. I know twitter isn’t a chat forum but there might be something under trends and such. No such luck but I found a ton of people writing their suicide notes or just making fun of being suicidal. Not my cup of tea. And NO WHERE did I see a prevention tweet. Usually I see one from the National Suicide prevention, Lifeline but there was zippo. Pretty sad to see all these tweets and no one really helping. I asked one person why she was writing a suicide note but didn’t get a response. It was four in the morning. I couldn’t believe the stupid tweets about suicide, such as my math book has so many problems it committed suicide. What is funny about that?? I just don’t get it. I did go to one forum for a text chat but it’s only from 2 pm to 2 am. I guess you can’t be suicidal outside those hours. I guess you could always go to the emergency room but by the time you are seen over the “real” serious cases, you are exhausted and just want to go home and sleep. I know I probably could have called my psychiatrist but I also know that she would be worried as I NEVER have called her that early in the morning unless it was a true emergency. I’m not saying I was not in bad space last night, I was, but I knew she would try and talk me into going to the ER to be admitted or at least evaluated. To me those things are one and the same and I wasn’t going to get near either of those places.

So hear it is day light and I am feeling better than I was 10 hrs ago. I didn’t do anything different. I just go a little sleep and went about my day like nothing happened. Guess the midnight demons are really back.

coffee and therapists

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

Went out for coffee today. I didn’t feel like it but I forced myself to. I gave myself an incentive, that if I went I would get something sweet. I usually just get my coffee and maybe a sandwich, if I am hungry. But today I really wanted something sweet so didn’t need that much incentive to get a coffee cake. I like that the baristas are getting my order down pat. I don’t order anything fancy, just my favorite flavor, which is now Kati Kati, grande size but in a venti cup. This is so I have plenty of room for the half and half. I also put in several packets of sugar. I need my coffee sweet, which is why I usually don’t get something sweet.

I did accomplish something today and that was finishing the book why do people die by suicide by Thomas Joiner. I had an autographed copy but lost it on the train the first week I read it. Much to my sadness. The book was good and I learned a few things that I hope I retain. He is a cognitive therapist so he focused on that during the strategies for dealing with suicidality. I really liked the book because it not only dealt with personal experience (his dad died by suicide while in grad school), he also listed empirical data to back up what he was talking about. I am a research geek so I tend to like stuff like that. He also used terms that put people that couldn’t understand the technical stuff into words that people could understand, like how neurotransmitters interact. It was a very interesting book. I also bought another book that he wrote called Myths of Suicide, which I hope to read after I finish reading Lincoln’s Melancholy.

My reading voices are back, thank god. I can’t seem to focus unless they are there. I got a comment from my psychotic while reading blog and this person said that she only hears her voice while reading. I find that so interesting. I never hear my own voice. Unless my voice is male sounding, which I don’t think it is, not yet anyways. But then I do have enlarged ventricles in my brain that cause the voices. Not as large as those found in schizophrenia but enough to have a radiologist comment on it. I had the MRI the first time I was hospitalized when I was sixteen. They ran a bunch of tests on me the whole time I was there, from cortisol suppression studies to psychological tests such as the inkblot. I remember how much paperwork I had to do for the MMPI, the Minnesota Multiple Personality Inventory. I hated that. I did that more than once over my lifetime for various studies I was involved in. It is a LONG inventory. I am glad it is not used in clinical practice, unless you go specifically for psychological testing. It would make for a long afternoon or morning.

I have been feeling self-harm urges the past few days. I don’t know why that is. I just have the urge but usually distracting myself or listening to music helps. I have not cut in years and I like it stay that way, though I still have my “kit”. Even though I don’t use it, I still find it comforting to have it around. I also have been getting urges to overdose but these quickly pass as I just can’t do it in my house. Symptoms of my illness.

The dreaded nerve pain has come again. I really tried not to stand too long while waiting for the bus today to get my coffee. I tried not to jiggle my foot in a way that I know would upset it later. But I did do stretching exercises while I was on the phone with my therapist so maybe that is why it is angry at me. I never know what will make it upset. It’s like an untemperate, abusive person. You just never know what will set it off. The cold. The heat. Wearing socks. Not wearing socks. Moving it this way versus that. It’s a never ending battle. I am so sick of it. I am tired of hurting. And nothing helps curb the pain. My pain meds can only do so much, which is knock me out most of the time so I can sleep. But that is only for a few hours. Once the meds wear off, I am screwed. I wake up and sometimes it take a little but to register that I am awake before the pain starts. Other times it is because I am in pain that I wake up. My sleep has not been good the past week. I keep waking up between 0230-430 in the morning. No matter what time I go to sleep, I always wake up during those hours. If I fall asleep before ten, I am always up four hours later. I can’t stand it. I usually play my games or check twitter. If I am bullshit, I might write another blog or journal if I don’t feel like opening my laptop. Sometimes, I try reading and usually that works to put me back to sleep, unless I am in roaring pain. Then I just stay up until the pain meds kick in to knock me out again while withering in agony.

This week’s AAS blog is about finding a therapist that won’t run away or panic at the mention of suicidal thoughts. I want to laugh and say, have you read my therapist blog? I have had ten therapists run away from me soon as I mention that I have had suicidal thoughts in the past or been hospitalized because of them. Course I am hospitalized frequently so that doesn’t help my case. I have been hospitalized at least eight times since 2008. My last hospitalization was last June. So it has been a year but if these damn voices don’t stop, I might have to go back in. The voices and being suicidal doesn’t mix too well. But getting back to therapists, they can be tricky. I kept on being referred to another therapist, who would then refer me to yet another therapist. Before I knew it, I had ten within a month’s time. I finally gave up and stuck it out with my current therapist, even though I don’t see her in person frequently. I think I will see her next week. I will try and get my sister’s car.

I know why therapists don’t want to take on suicidal clients. They don’t want to be liable. They fear malpractice. They even fear losing the client. But I believe that despite this, with the right treatment, therapists can see suicidal clients. It just takes a little bit of courage and trust, a lot of it. Not only on the therapist’s part, but also the client. The client also needs to have a trust in the therapist that they aren’t going to be dumped in the hospital every single fricken time they get suicidal. The therapies out there that help are by David Jobes, CAMS and by using his suicide status form. Also using the Aeschi model helps. Knowing why the client wants to kill themselves says a lot. By not allowing the client to share his story, he gives his therapist a reason to distrust him. I do hope that there comes a day when graduate schools are mandated to have some kind of suicide preventions/treatment protocols in their curriculums. It shouldn’t be up to the therapist’s own style of interviewing that should be dependent on their suicide knowledge. That and the use of no-suicide contracts should be discontinued as long as something like CAMS is in place or the QPR by Paul Quinnett. I forget what QPR stands for but it is a useful resource.