Tag: hopelessness

Throbbing pain and suicidal thinking

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

Throbbing pains and suicidal thinking

I knew I was going to be in severe pain tonight. What I wasn’t expecting was the stupid pain to change course on me. I usually have three metatarsals (bones in the foot) that hurt me every night. Now there are six of them. If I didn’t just have foot X-rays, I would probably get them again. Of course, there is nothing wrong with my bones. They just throb and throb every single night. Then I have my ankle deciding to join in the fun and it keeps me awake when I want to sleep.

I knew I should have tried to take a nap earlier this evening. Around 1730 or so, I was really tired from the migraine I had and everything was bothering me, lights and sounds mostly. Then my face went numb so I took my migraine meds. I should have taken a nap but it was too early to sleep and I knew I would be up if I did. Now I am shooting myself in the foot, so to speak.

I have my phone on vibrate because I can’t stand noises, even though the migraine has gone away now. I need to change the ringtone for my text messages. But there really isn’t any good ringtones on my phone that I like. I would love to get the Star Trek Next Gen communicator ringtone but I haven’t been able to find an app that has it. I think by now they have come out with the real comm badge that is a Bluetooth communicator. I would get one but it’s $80. Way out of my budget. If I strike it rich on my birthday, I will consider getting it. That is if I don’t go through with my plan.

I know I have been talking a lot about my plan and yet I am still here. Honestly don’t know why I am still here, but I am. Guilt is one reason. My fucking idiotic therapist is another. And of course my psychiatrist, who I value her trust in me more than anything. I can’t whole heartedly go ahead with my plan knowing that a) it might not work the way I want it to (meaning I will survive) and b) if I do die, the pain I will cause those left behind. It’s a burden on me knowing that I will cause suffering to those I love more than anything.

I was reading a blog today from a friend I know in Ireland. She has DID and was in emotional turmoil. She needed to hear from her therapist to calm her down. I remember the days when I needed the same thing from my therapist or psychiatrist. But since the psychosis that has happened this year and the medication I take for it, I no longer feel that connection. I feel disconnected from my feelings, all together and it worries me because other than feeling really suicidal or depressed, I really don’t feel much else. Maybe anger occasionally and grief, but no sense of connection to the people I care about. There used to this connection but I no longer feel it. I have been cut off from it. I guess it started when I realized my father wasn’t going to make it earlier this year. I remember being in the hospital room with the PA while she was telling us the oncologist was not going to pursue anymore treatment options for my father and that it was only a matter of time that he was going to die. My father was wrapped up in the blankets in his hospital bed, trying to sleep. I have no idea if he was hearing the conversation or not. That is when we started looking for nursing homes for him. It was a hard decision and it was difficult to bear. I don’t think the month of April is ever going to be the same for us again.

While my father was dying from his disease, my depression was out of control. Then I became psychotic after his death, even while taking the meds for it. The voices told me to stop taking it so I did. I got worse. Then I went on another medication because I had to take something for it. The voices were commanding me to take bottles of my pills and telling me everyone was going to kill me, including my lovely psychiatrist. Now that I am back in control again, I feel different. I feel shielded, like I have emotion but I don’t. They are useless to me. My doc wants me to take a lower dose of this medication but I have tried to and it just doesn’t help me to be on a low dose. I need to take two doses a day to feel stable. It might be causing me to feel like a robot at times but it’s keeping the delusions, paranoia, and voices under control. It’s been five months now that I have been feeling disconnected but I really don’t want to be plugged in. It’s better this way. The only time I feel out of sorts is when my pain is out of control and the anxiety takes over. That is when I feel most dysregulated and suicidal. It is at these times that I come up with plans to kill myself because I want to end it all. Sadly, the way I feel right now, I could just toss a coin and see if I should die or live. Heads I live, tails I die. I don’t care anymore. If my favorite holiday wasn’t coming in the next few days, I might toss that coin. Until then, I will wait till next week and then toss that coin.

ASAD: Acute Suicidal Affective Disturbance

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

ASAD: Acute Suicidal Affective Disturbance

http://www.mdedge.com/clinicalpsychiatrynews/article/100017/depression/aas-acute-suicidal-affective-disturbance-proposed

I read the above article with interest. One of my Twitter buddies shared it with me and wanted my opinion on it. I think that it is right on queue and I hope that Dr. Joiner eventually sees this as a diagnosis. But I worry that if the stigma of suicide is not dealt with, it might just be an admitting diagnosis and thus cause more harm than good.

According to the criteria lined out, I meet this diagnosis, though at this time, I am unable to rule out whether a medical condition or conditions exclude the diagnosis. There have been many a times that while I am in excruciating pain, this condition is activated and I am acutely suicidal. The only thing that has saved me from actually making an attempt on my life is that I physically cannot walk and have refused to kill myself in my own home. Then in the morning (most of these attacks have occurred in the midnight hours), I no longer feel so suicidal.

It used to be that what I would call a “switch” would be activated and I would be suicidal until I fell asleep. Now I know that it’s this disturbance that occurs and it makes sense to me. But in every suicidal occurrence that has happened over the past two years, it has been because of physical pain or some kind of dissociative state brought on by physical pain. Very rarely has it occurred solely with psychache or psychological pain. Granted not every episode is psychache free and physical pain free. I will have what Shneidman calls the three Ps, Psychache, Perturbation, and Press as well as physical pain that causes me to be severely suicidal. These nights, I swear to myself I will end my life the next day when I can walk again. Fortunately, I don’t feel as suicidal the next day because I had a few hours or more of respite from these kinds of pain and perturbation. That isn’t to say that I won’t be activated the next night or come up with a suicidal plan to end my life the following day. These plans are usually a few weeks away to give me time to think things over and essentially put off today what can be done tomorrow. These plans have also given me time to work through my feelings and usually by the time that date comes, I no longer feel suicidal enough to go ahead with the plan.

Suicidality is a tricky business and not everyone’s suicidality is the same. What triggers my suicidality might not trigger someone else’s. There are mitigating factors that might be similar in nature like the criteria states but I would love to see the data in the context of ruling this a diagnosis. Just because I find this disturbance fits my suicidality, doesn’t mean that it will someone else’s and that is the difficulty with the nomenclature I think Joiner talks about in his article.

annoying therapy session

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

Annoying therapy session

I woke up a few times during the night. It wasn’t due to pain, just restlessness I guess. I finally gave up around 0830. My check had come in by then so I paid some bills and ordered my groceries. I then set my alarm for therapy and went back to sleep.

I wish I slept through therapy. It’s was like my appointment with my psychiatrist, all talk about damn pain medication and how I should take it and so forth. It was pissing me off. Then she just started rambling about my blog that sent her. I swear, I just wanted to go back to sleep. It would have been much more peaceful. She wanted to discuss me feeling tiny and insignificant but she had her own ideas about it so I just let her rattle on. She was in a talkative mood today.

I told her I wouldn’t come out to see her tomorrow. My back is still giving me grief and I know I am not going to be able to make it up the hill. I will see her next week. She said that was fine. I tried telling her to just cancel tomorrow’s appointment but she wouldn’t listen. I told her I still had a date for this week. Course, now with my back acting up, I don’t see how I am going to execute it. I just can’t walk to where I am going and the weather is colder than I had planned. I feel defeated and I haven’t even tried. I am such a loser.

Daily Word Prompt-Tiny

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, depression, mood disorders, suicide

Daily Word Prompt-Tiny

Today’s Daily Word Prompt is Tiny. I have been thinking of what to write for this. This is a side of me that I am embarrassed to share so please bare with me.

For the longest time, I felt like I was a tiny person. I know my outward appearance is nothing but tiny, especially since I have gained significant weight over the last twenty years. But inside, I felt small, like I didn’t matter because I was so tiny. I don’t know when this happened and I certainly don’t know when that has changed.

I remember when I was in therapy in the early years with my current therapist, I wanted to explain to her how small I felt inside, that I didn’t matter because I wasn’t big enough to handle things. We never did talk about it because I was afraid she would laugh at me or give me some other condescending talk. I never felt valued, that I was disposable. I still sort of feel this way at times, especially when my family wants to just dispose of my things that I cherish because they think it is “junk”. My middle sister often calls me a hoarder, though I am not. I just have clothes and papers everywhere because I have no place to put them or I am too lazy to actually put them somewhere other than the floor of my room.

If anything, I am a hoarder of books and research articles/journals. But being called that makes me shrink. It makes me feel alone and not being able to talk to my family about what is troubling me. Hell, my youngest sister thinks all I need is a clean rug to make me feel better. WTF. I do have a collection of boxes from Amazon. I don’t know how it accumulated. I have been lazy to put them in the recycle bin. Even though they are near my door, I never grab them as I am leaving to throw them away. It’s like I have just one thing on my mind and that is to leave to where I am going, which is usually to catch the bus. Therefore, I can’t be bothered to dump things in the recycle bin. When I do, it’s usually when the bin has been cleared by the recycling people that come and empty it.

It gives me a certain comfort to be surrounded by my things. It might make me feel insignificant, but I feel a kind of comfort in that place. It still makes me feel small, though. It’s like I have these huge piles of things surrounding me and I am in the middle of it. Sometimes it is suffocating because I have so much space to get around but it’s not enough to get by. I feel miniscule when that suffocation hits. It doesn’t happen all the time but it does happen.

The person that most made me feel tiny was my father. He would say things that would make me shrink away. There was no way to stop his abusive ways. For years he would make me feel insignificant and small. Like I was a tiny bug that should be stepped on. That is when he would feel his best and I would feel the worst. When I was older, I realized that whenever I would climb the ladder to get out of the pit I was in, he would take the ladder away and I would fall back into the pit. There was no way out. I guess that is why my suicidality is so strong. I still feel like whenever I am in that pit, I feel hopeless about getting out because someone is going to take away that ladder. It never fails. And you can only fall so many times before you realize why bother getting up one more time. You are after all a tiny thing that doesn’t deserve it.