Tag: depression

disability

by Midnight Demon, posted in cauda equina syndrome, CES, Chronic pain, depression, medical, mental disorders, mental illness, mood disorders

For the past eighteen months, I have been in chronic pain with my left ankle. It started as a sprained ankle and blossomed into CRPS, Complex Regional Pain Syndrome. I have nerve damage in this ankle from Cauda Equina Syndrome (CES) and CRPS affects 80% of those affected with this condition. In my case I am repetitively inflaming my peroneous muscles and tendons as I do not walk correctly. The result is constant burning and swelling of my ankle and foot.

This condition limits my walking due to pain. In December of 2011, I decided to go on medical leave of absence to try and give myself a mental and physical break from working two jobs. I was working as a lab assistant in both research and clinical areas of a large hospital. Four and a half months later, I was out of both jobs. I had decided at the end of January to work just one job and that proved to be an error on my part. I think that if I was working with research my life would have been simpler as I wouldn’t be walking so much anymore. I am now on disability and I have to say that it sucks. I went from a working member of society to nothing in just four months. I just couldn’t do the work anymore. Walking around the huge lab was killing me. I had put in job restrictions and it was rejected. After working fourteen years in the same place, I was sure to get “special” treatment. But that was not the case. I had to move to do something more sedentary. That caused me to have a mental breakdown. I was in the hospital in April of this year and then again the end of June. June was a long stay. I was there for two weeks because mentally I just could not handle doing nothing anymore. I became psychotic with the stress of not having a financial income and not being able to pay my bills. Stress always brings out the hallucinations and most of the time I can handle it but this time the voices wanted me to cut my leg so I had to go back on my meds and stay longer to have it work.

It is very depressing to be disabled. It cuts you deep inside and makes you feel so bad. Although I am collecting I’m still trying to find myself. I have days where I do absolutely nothing, least that is what I call it. I might go out to Starbucks for a coffee and write or read. I might just stay home and sleep. I might write a blog or try and read. Most of the time I play on my computer, playing online games.

When I have the energy and creativeness to write, I write about my mental state and being suicidal, what it’s like being in chronic pain, and how I am living this way. I have a lot of time on my hands and don’t spend most of it in front of the TV. There are not that many shows that I watch on a regular basis. I record my favorite shows (CSI NY, CSI, SVU, Hart of Dixie) and watch them at my leisure, which is sometimes a few days after they air. I am just too restless to sit for forty-five minutes in front of the tube.

It hurts not being able to do something during the day. I wish I loved cooking but I can’t stand too long to do something like that. I like making cookies but I don’t like the clean up. As November is slowly approaching, I am thinking of making my first pumpkin pie. That will be my goal for the holidays. I just hope that I can stand long enough to mix the batter.

ramblings 6: ambivalence about suicide

by Midnight Demon, posted in depression, mental disorders, mental illness, mood disorders, suicide, suicide attempt

Past few days I have been in my own world. I just have been obsessed with my blog. Been catching every spam message as they have been piling up and just been checking my stats, watching my readership go up with each passing day. Today I was blessed with six Google searches that found my blog.

Not only have I been on Facebook for the majority of my time and on my other profiles (I currently have four active profiles for my ONE game that I play, but that is my other obsession), I also have been on Pubmed doing a search for any research articles that have my real name attached to it. I found that I have another researcher with the same last name in Italy. He is probably a relative that I don’t know or maybe he is not related at all. I don’t know. I have tried to ask family members about him but no one knows this guy so I am guessing that he is not a relative, just like not all Smiths are related.

My mood has been bleak. Today is cold and rainy and I just do not feel like braving the weather to go to the post office to mail some things. I just do not have the energy today to get dressed. I also been itching to write something useful but the few things I have scratched on paper have not amounted to anything more than a thought. This morning I reviewed what I wrote and I could hardly remember the feeling that went with the thought much less than what I wanted to write about. I had heard last night on the radio two songs that mean a lot to me. The first was Martina McBride’s “How Far” and the second was Sugarland’s “stuck like glue”. Two songs that don’t really relate to anything much less each other but in my emotional state last night I felt that they were intertwined with some purpose and meaning. Today I am lost for what that meaning was. From what I am trying to recall, it had to do with the ambivalence of suicide, how far can you go to want to end your life and stuck like glue when you want to cling to life with all your might. The infamous, I want to die and live at the same time. It’s an epiphany that most people who think of suicide think about. They don’t want to live but they don’t want to die either. A chorus of Sugarland’s song:

There you go making my heart beat again,
Heart beat again,
Heart beat again
There you go making me feel like a kid
Won’t you do it and do it one time?
There you go pulling me right back in,
Right back in,
Right back in
And I know-oo I’m never letting this go-ooo

 

Chorus from Martina’s McBride’s song:

How far do I have to go to make you understand
I wanna make this work so much it hurts but I just can’t
Keep on giving, go on living with the way things are
So, I’m gonna walk away
And it’s up to you to say how far

 

With Suicidal thinking, the walls go up and you isolate. You don’t think about the outside world, just think about how much pain you are in and how much you want to end it. I have been thinking about this for a long time and I sometimes think that I will be better off but my nieces are a reminder that I can’t end my pain to start theirs. I am truly stuck like glue and it sometimes sucks really bad knowing I can’t end my life because someone else will suffer. I do not want someone to suffer because of me.

Freedom from CES

by Midnight Demon, posted in cauda equina syndrome, CES, Chronic pain, depression

Building a Therapeutic Alliance

by Midnight Demon, posted in mental disorders, mental illness, mood disorders, suicide, suicide attempt

Building a Therapeutic Alliance with the Suicidal Patient. Eds: Konrad Michel and David Jobes

This book is a work of genius among the top suicidologists in the U.S. and Europe. The editors actually want to help suicidal people get better and try to make their life worth living. Like most of Drs. David Jobes and Konrad Michal work, they have done an excellent review of the literature and made the book easy to read without a lot of psychological jargon.  This book should be used as a handbook for anyone dealing with suicidal individuals.  As someone who has been through many suicidal episodes with many different therapists, this book is groundbreaking.  It lists his classic work of CAMS (collaborating and managing suicidality) which is a tried and true way of dealing with lethal suicidality in an outpatient setting. The other evidence based therapists will enhance therapy around this work.

The Chapters are broken down easy enough and progress from good to bad in my opinion, of the treatments that work.  The conclusion was brilliant by Dr. Jobes. He has stated with clarity the hardships that are faced with suicidality such as the IRB approvals for research, clinicians wanting to work with this population, and the need to try and keep these people in therapy.

The brilliance surrounding this book is the alliance part of it. Without a therapeutic alliance, you cannot have a good report with a therapist and the therapist cannot have a good report with the client. The essential element is having a good working relationship that builds on trust and collaboration. The therapist must want to know the client’s story in a non-judgmental, non-criticizing way. By listening to this story, the therapist engages the client and the client feels validated and understood. This is a central element to helping any client in psychotherapy, in any discipline.

This book covers most of the therapeutic disciplines and how it relates to treating someone with suicidal ideation. It also offers empirical evidence that supports treatment of suicidal individuals, from psychodynamic to cognitive therapies.

I believe this book should be read by every graduate student and post graduate in the mental health field. This book can also augment education for those that are already in the field and practicing psychology or psychiatry.