Tag: depression

pain and baseball

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, chronic physical pain, depression

Game time is in a half hour from now. I don’t know if I am going to watch it. I have been in a blah-exhausted mood all day. I didn’t sleep too well last night as I woke up at three in the morning. Researchers are now saying that this is how people in the 1800s slept. They would sleep and then be up for a few hours in the wee hours of the morning and then go back to sleep. I don’t see how this was as most people got up at the crack of dawn to do farm work. I am usually going to bed at the crack of dawn. That seems to be my norm lately.

My writing buddy has completed her 100 pages for her new manuscript for the month. I have been her coach. Made me think that I should have some writing goals to do in order to get my book done. I just don’t know if I can be held accountable for it though. So I am going to try and write at least two pages in my book a day and see where that gets me at the end of September. Thing is this is hard. Writing about my past is harder than I thought it would be.

Tonight my brother in law’s brother came over for dinner. We get along pretty well and he asked me what I was doing. I told him that I was writing a book and he asked what was the subject matter. I wanted to tell him about suicide attempts but my family was there and I didn’t want to divulge this information. I have told people I am writing a book but no one has really asked what it was about. So I told him it was about my depressions and hospitalizations, which is essentially true. I just didn’t feel comfortable telling anyone that it is about my suicide attempts. I am publishing the book under my pen name.

I guess I could listen to the game, even though it might put me to sleep. I am so damn tired. I had to take a couple of pain pills because I took a shower and my ankle got angry at me. I couldn’t take the pain anymore. I have decided that any pain above a 6 on a scale of 1-10 is going to be medicated. I usually just take a pill if my pain is above a 8 but by then it becomes impossible to control, sometimes. I never know when the pain is going to increase or decrease. Tonight, I just decided I wasn’t going to wait around. I have been going up and down the stairs today so I know my pain is going to increase sometime tonight. I don’t know why I feel I have to justify taking my meds. It should be easy right? You are in pain so you take something for it. But I have voices in my head that doesn’t want me to take any pills so I have them bantering me all the time. Even when I take my regular psych meds they are always interested. Why am I taking it, am I taking the right dose, etc. I can’t stand it when I am hounded all the time every time I crack open a pill bottle.

I am listening to the game. I always know when Adrian Gonzalez is up. He fricken has the cuckaracha music. Drives me insane, most of the intro music for the Dodgers has been awful. All Latin music, which I do not like. And this jackass just hit a home run. On another baseball note, I got followed today by a Toronto Blue Jay. That has to be weird as I am a Red Sox fan. I don’t know why these people will follow me, but oh well. Long as they don’t cause trouble I let them be.

research and school

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, depression

The sound of a million dreams has been running in my head the last few times I have been up in my room. So I had to play the song sung by David Nail. I love this song very much. It has some pretty cool lyrics.

I didn’t know if I would write today. I have written a three page letter to my therapist on the events of the day and feel pretty worn out. I then wrote a few pages in my journal. I left off in my journal about grief affecting my suicidal state. Then the bus came and disrupted my train of thought.

Today’s mail brought me the latest journal Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior. It had a few articles of interest. One article was about treatment resistant depression. Another dealt with the future aspect of time in relation to suicide. The other one that I read with interest was Suicide of the patient, the experience of a Flemish psychiatrist. I find it interesting that most male psychiatrists had a higher proportion of suicides as opposed to female and that Belgium had the highest suicide rate than the US. There is also an article on escape theory that I have not read yet. I get excited when I get this journal. I feel connected to the suicide people through it. I wish I still had access to my work’s network to get research articles on my favorite researchers. I feel so left out because I have to rely on doing pubmed searches but sometimes I don’t get it all because it focuses more on medicine than psychology. So if it is not in a medical journal, I will have trouble finding it. I loved to use psychLit for my searches. I know I need to go back to school but it isn’t practical right now because I just can’t afford it.

It saddens me that I can’t go back to school and I know it is my fault. All the should have’s go through my head and if Only’s. I could have been a PhD by now if I didn’t have my illness and setbacks as much as I have had. It really kills me that I should me further along than where I am right now and I am not. My niece will probably get her doctorate before I can even finish my bachelor’s degree. It’s so messed up.

clinical marker to suicide attempts found

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, depression

Just read an article that has me pissed off and I don’t know why. To me, it’s just another nail in my coffin. The article is about how researchers in Ireland found a Biomarker for suicide attempts and drum roll…it stems from whether you are psychotic or not. Great. Just. Fucking. Great.’

Is it too much to ask that I kill myself now before the illness will just kill me anyways???

If you want to read about it, here it is

Voices and Other Musings

by Midnight Demon, posted in mood disorders, psychosis

I don’t know why I am writing this as I am very tired and want to go to sleep. Except the voices are having conversations in my head about things. Some stuff I can decipher, others I cannot. It is very annoying. I wish they would just go away and let me be but they are not so accommodating.

I have lowered my dose of my antipsychotic because I was having side effects. I don’t think I can go back up without my doc’s ok. I just need a little time to adjust to this dose and I am hoping the voices will go away. Something tells me this is just wishful thinking. I really don’t want to go back into the hospital. I won’t have my music to listen to and having music with me calms me down. I will get agitated if I don’t have music, and well, you don’t really want to have a meltdown on a psych unit. It is not pleasant. I guess as long as I am not feeling paranoid I am doing ok. But then, there isn’t much interaction with people I don’t know. I am grounded in my house because my funds for Starbucks have ended. I can’t have my coffee until next week when my paycheck gets in. It’s just as well because I think the caffeine might have had something to do with the tremors I was experiencing. I have been ok the past few days but I still get the feelings like my arms are like stretched out elastics. I know that is a little of the dyskinesthia I experience. I am also worried that this feeling is going to drive me nuts more than the voices will.

In case you are just reading my blog for the first time, I have been hearing voices since the age of 5. They started off as imaginary friends but have always stayed with me growing up. The voices have changed over the years. My latest new voices have an English accent. I think that was because I was preoccupied with England for a time. They have gone away but sometimes still creep back. I also have experienced paranoia while on the bus. I thought it was anxiety but if anxiety caused paranoia than why would I think one of the passengers were going to harm me in some way. I have not been taking the bus that often anymore because of this.

Sometimes I have delusions. When I was younger I had delusion that I was living on the holodeck on the Enterprise. I created this other life that I still somewhat believe today. Or I wish it still existed. Lately my delusions are related to the type of voice I hear. If the voice says he is Allah I will have religious types of delusions. Usually these new voices are often commanding voices (they tell me to do things) and always lead to a hospitalization. I don’t know why voices are an automatic reason for getting hospitalized. I just know that I could be ok otherwise but soon as I say I have voices that are not controlled, they put me in the hospital. It drives me nuts, no pun intended. Other delusions that I have had in the past centered around my coworkers conspiring to fire me or have me fired by planting devices in my email. I felt like every move I made was being watched and every email I sent was being monitored. Usually, it would center around one person. And eventually, I became fearful of this person though I had no real reason to be. When I seriously asked my coworker if she was going to kill me, she gave me a crazed look like “you kidding me”? I then knew that it was just my illness talking and that it wasn’t real.

The hard part about dealing with psychosis is that your view of reality becomes blurred. You often don’t know what is real and what is not. There was a good period of time when I thought God was always watching me and that I had to watch what I was doing so not to offend him. These feeling persisted even when no one was in the room with me, I still felt his presence and it was not a good feeling. I felt like I was constantly being watched and the voices helped to confirm my suspicions. It wasn’t until I started on the drug olanzapine that all this went away. For the first time in my life, I felt free. But then out of fear of me getting diabetes, my psychiatrist took me off this drug. I was fearful that this paranoia was going to come back but it has been over ten years since being off that drug and so far I am still free from that type of paranoia. I often wonder how other people react when someone tells them that God is all around them. For me, I ended up with paranoia for most of my childhood and early adulthood. And it all stopped by taking medication. I was on other anti-psychotics at this time, but none of them took care of that presence I felt all the time. It feel good knowing you don’t have to always watch over your shoulder. That is why I am fearful that I might have to stop this medication. I haven’t had any symptoms since Monday and I hope it stays that way. Maybe it was just a little hypoglycemic attack (low blood sugar). But that still doesn’t explain why I had symptoms later that night AFTER I ate a good meal. It doesn’t make sense.

I see my psychiatrist tomorrow. I hope she has answers for me that doesn’t include me being taken off my medication. So far she has not responded to the emails I sent her so I am hoping that by reducing the dose, I am doing the right thing. But in doing so, I hope that doesn’t mean it’s also open season on a voice attack and that paranoia will start coming back. I am just fearful of this happening. But I think if she really wanted me off this medication, she would have responded and told me so.