Tag: hopelessness

stuck in misery

by Midnight Demon, posted in chronic physical pain, depression

It’s after midnight and I am still in a lot of pain. I can’t sleep. My foot is throbbing like there is no tomorrow but alas tomorrow is here. I don’t know if I will fall asleep. I just took some more pain meds. That is four pills within two hours. I don’t care. My pain is a ten and I can’t stand it any longer. I feel like my foot is not even mine, that it belongs to someone else. This is the second time that my foot has been through the roof and I have dissociated my body part. I know this isn’t a good thing. I am meeting with my pdoc tomorrow and will discuss this with her. Maybe she can give me some tips to deal with this crap. But I doubt it. She will just reassure me that I am not going crazy, refill my prescription for my antipsychotic that I need, and set up another appointment with her in two weeks. I don’t know why I am going on continuing to suffer like this. I should just end it all. I just need to place a plastic bag over my head. But I don’t want my family finding me like that. I swear that is the only thing that is stopping me. If I had some other method that was less painful for them I might try it. Or if I could get a hotel room that would be better. Ah Ha, the midnight demons have surfaced and I am talking about death again. Funny, I don’t feel like Mr. Hyde. I don’t have the dread feeling I usually do when Hyde takes over. Maybe I am just feeling so badly because I want this pain to stop and it has been hours and it still has not ceased. I came home around four this afternoon. My ankle gave out on me around three. I remember the time because I wanted to catch the dreaded 15:13 bus. But I missed it when I was off trying to figure out what to get for dinner at the meat market.

I haven’t felt this way in over two weeks. I know last week I felt like taking the bottle of pain killers but this week, the pain has been so bad I can’t think straight to kill myself. thing is I don’t want to die, I just want the pain to stop. But I don’t want to live either, so what am I going to do? I have been writing in my journal for the past hour and filled it up. Now I have to move on to another journal. I started that journal in May. I am hoping the new Journal lasts until the end of December. God I hate feeling like this. I feel so useless and hopeless. I really feel like everything is just so dark and gray. I don’t see any colors except black. It is terrible to feel this way. Part of me knows this will pass but another part of me is unsure. I am tempted to call my pdoc. I know that I will see her tomorrow but I am worried about my safety. I took two ativans to try and calm me down and they have not kicked in yet. My foot is so bad that I can’t move my toes and every time I can’t move my toes on my left foot, I panic. I think that CES, cauda equina syndrome is back. I have to keep telling myself that I am not in severe back pain, that I still have control over my leg even though I can’t move my toes, that I am not numb like I should be if I was getting CES again. I am not saying that this is in my head. I know it is not. It’s just that the pain is making me crazy and thinking all this stupid shit. That is why I take the ativan, to help calm me down and stop the endless thought process. But tonight it just doesn’t seem to help me. I am stuck in misery. I can’t get unstuck.

I bought some pens tonight. I got a temporary “high” from my buying powers. I love buying pens. I don’t need them but I just have to have them. I got different colors this time. I usually just buy black pens but they had these cool looking colored pens so I had to get them. I can’t wait till they come in.

I bought a book that my psychiatrist wrote. I haven’t started reading it yet. It is about child mental illness so I am not sure I want to read it. I feel bad for kids that have mental problems, and I don’t mean just ADHD. When I was in college my psych professor had us read about a kid named Gus. He went through many hospitalizations and foster homes because he was depressed and suicidal. he was also a very abused kid. It was tough reading it. I think child abusers should be shot torturously before finally putting a bullet through their head or they should be fed to hogs alive. I have been abused and would so want my abuser to go through the kind of pain that he put me through.

I have been debating going into the hospital for a few weeks now. I am thinking that I might have to and that now is a “good” time to go. I always get really depressed and suicidal around this time of year and it lasts until February usually. It never fails that the middle of September I fall into the pit of depression and I can’t get out of it. It has been this way since 2005. Thing is, I am too lazy this time to actually pack my things like I usually do. I keep putting it off, saying I don’t need to. But I have my menses right now and I hate having to wear female underwear and then having to change pads while in the hospital. You don’t get a bin to throw the pads away and have to use the main bucket in the bathroom so it is really gross to have to do your business then carry the trash with you. Maybe I will go when the menses stop, whenever they do. But I am hoping I will feel better afterwards and I won’t have to do. I have not been in the hospital for over a year. But I know I need to go in. I need my batteries recharged, so to speak. I can’t quite explain the relief I feel when I am in a locked unit in the hospital. Sure it will suck not having my laptop with me but I am hoping I will have my tablet at least. I also hope I will have my headphones with me. that is all that I want. And of course my journal and writing pad. The only thing that will suck is that I will have a shit load of blogs to type up when I get out. I might be able to type up in the hospital on the tablet but I am not sure about internet connection. Course it all depends what kind of unit I get placed into.

my suicidal career (short version)

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

My suicidal career:

I write about this not in the sense that Ronald Maris created it as that would be a completed suicide and I am not dead. But my relationship with suicide is a long one, from the time I was eight up until now. It is a struggle I deal with on a constant basis. It along with my depression makes life very unlivable for me. I often think about death in so many ways. I plan my death in so many ways yet I am unable to act on it.

When I was younger, I had no problem acting on my impulses to kill myself. But then protective factors such as my niece and nephew entered my life and I couldn’t bring myself to go ahead and kill myself. The loss was too great for them. I couldn’t imagine what my sister would say to these young kids who adored me. They were my saving grace whenever I had a bad day and really wanted to end my life.

Then chronic pain entered my life and made the balance of protective factors seem out of reach. I felt that I had to ignore them in order to let myself get into the suicidal mind frame to end my life. And I got there several times in the last few years. I had one friend call me every single day for a week until the storm had passed. I had therapy with my therapist several times a week. Nothing stopped the pain and the hurting that I was feeling. And when the pain got worse, so did the suicidal feelings. The feelings turned into plans that never were executed. This is the story of how it evolved and how a few suicide attempts lead to more hospitalizations than I can count.

I first thought about killing myself at the age of eight. I don’t remember the particulars but I thought it would be a grand idea not to be alive anymore. This got worse when I was nine. I really thought that ending my life was the answer to my problems. I hated myself because I felt like I was a burden to my family. I felt I had let them down somehow. I started planning my death at my birthday that year because I couldn’t stand the pain of living anymore. But for some reason, the age ten had a significance for my family and my mother was throwing a big party. I don’t know why she was throwing the party and making a big deal out of it but I figured I might as well stick around and see what I got. I was disappointed that I didn’t get a tape recorder that I wanted. I didn’t try to kill myself that year. But I did try later that year when I had an argument with my mother that now I don’t even remember what we were fighting about. I just told her I wish I was dead and went to my room to try and kill myself. I placed a pillow case over my head and prayed for death to come take me away. It didn’t work. The pillow case was too breathable. I was left crying in my room what seemed like hours. I don’t recall if my mother ever checked on me. I hated my life from then on. Suicide was always on the back burner for me.

This is a book detailing my career in suicide and the journey I went on to deal with it. There have been a couple of close calls but nothing recent, though I still feel the need to kill myself at times. But I do not act on my thoughts. I have attempted suicide many times and according to all the statistics, I should be dead. The one study that I often am in awe at is the one where they found that suicide attempt reactions often predicted future suicide deaths. I am in that category of not wanting to live yet I am still here. I am the outlier. And I hate being the outlier.

This story is my life that centers around my suicidality and the works that helped me get through it. Without finding the American Association of Suicidology, the works of Edwin Shneidman and David Jobes, I doubt I would still be around to talk about my life in this way. There are concepts of these people that I hope to explain in layman’s terms so people know about them because they have had a deep impact on trying to keep me alive.

The first is Edwin Shneidman’s conception of the word psychache. It is a word used to describe psychological pain which is defined as the combination of hopelessness, despair, loneliness, guilt, worthlessness, unbearable anguish, intolerable pain, and helplessness one feels when in deep despair. It is the pain one feels that is deep within you when contemplating your life. His other concept, the twenty frustrated needs is another brilliant sign of what constitutes suicide. They are:
ABATEMENT The need to submit passively; to belittle oneself
ACHIEVEMENT To accomplish something difficult; to overcome
AFFILIATION To adhere to a friend or group; to affiliate
AGGRESSION To overcome opposition forcefully; fight, attack
AUTONOMY To be independent and free; to shake off restraint
COUNTERACTION To make up for loss by retrieving; get even
DEFENDANCE To vindicate the self against criticism or blame
DEFERENCE To admire and support, praise emulate a superior
DOMINANCE To control, influence, and direct others; dominate
EXHIBITION To excite, fascinate, amuse, entertain others
HARMAVOIDANCE To avoid pain, injury, illness, and death
INVIOLACY To protect the self and one’s psychological space
NURTURANCE To feed, help console, protect, nurture another
ORDER To achieve organization and order among things and ideas
PLAY To act for fun; to seek pleasure for its own sake
REJECTION To exclude, banish, jilt, or expel another person
SENTIENCE To seek sensuous, creature-comfort experience
SHAME-AVOIDANCE To avoid humiliation and embarrassment
SUCCORANCE To have one’s needs gratified; to be loved
UNDERSTANDING To know answers; to know the hows and whys

When you have frustrated needs your thoughts of suicide go up. One feels the need to be loved and nurtured and when that doesn’t happen a certain loneliness occurs and it is painful. According to Shneidman, one must rank these needs so the final sum of all is 100. I have never been able to rank them but I find that these needs are important in everyday life. He got them from another psychologist, Henry Murray in his famous book explorations in personality. The theory is that frustrated needs are a causal factor in suicide. Decrease the frustration and reduce the suicide. Then you have the ten commonalities of suicide (suicidal mind):
I. The common purpose of suicide is to seek a
solution.
II. The common goal of suicide is cessation of
consciousness.
III. The common stimulus in suicide is intolerable
psychological pain.
IV. The common stressor in suicide is frustrated
psychological needs.
V. The common emotion in suicide is
hopelessness-helplessness.
VI. The common cognitive state in suicide is
ambivalence.
VII. The common perceptual state in suicide is
constriction.
VIII. The common action in suicide is egression.
IX. The common interpersonal act in suicide is
communication of intention.
X. The common consistency in suicide is with
lifelong coping patterns.
Within suicide you have a vocabulary of suicidal terms. The list is exhaustive but I have a few favorites:

Hopelessness, psychache, lethality, perceived burdensomeness, thwarted belongingness, press, perturbation, fearlessness and competence.

Perceived burdensomeness, fearlessness, competence, and thwarted belongingness are not Shneidman’s term but of another suicidologist Tom Joiner. I read his book why people die by suicide and found it fascinating. It really is a good read and helped me to understand my suicidality a little better.

Hopelessness, the feeling of being lost in hope, that nothing is ever going to change, that things will always be the same no matter what.
Psychache is defined as despair, intolerable anguish, hopelessness, guilt, worthlessness, and unbearable psychological pain one feels. It is like pain in the heart that no one else can feel. Your heart feels heavy and you feel like a burden because of it. Nothing soothes this pain. No medication can touch it. And suicide seems like the only answer for this type of pain and anguish.
Lethality, the degree to which someone is at risk for suicide. Whether it be a loaded gun or a few bottle of pills or some cuts on the wrist. This is what determines how suicidal a person is and how they are going to act. If the risk is high and eminent, involuntary hospitalization is called for. If the risk is low, then more contact is need and assessment at every visit.
Perceived burdensomeness, the idea that you are a burden to those around you but in reality you are not,
Thwarted belongingness, the idea that you don’t belong anywhere and feel the need to belong somewhere. It is a very awkward and lonely place that hurts very badly. Everyone wants to feel like they belong somewhere or to something and when that need is not met, they feel detached and alone.
Press, similar to stress. It is as if the building of the press is similar to the pressure of a volcano ready to explode. It can lead to further perturbation and make things worse.
Perturbation, the need to feel or do something to ease the pressure and anguish and despair they are feeling and to feel better. It can lead to want to do something but the idea is that you need to do something to relieve the pressure of the feelings on your chest.
Fearlessness, the absence of fear. In this regard, it means that people may be fearless when trying to take their life, like a type of Russian roulette.
Competence, the meaning is the level of competence to carry out the means for their suicidal plan. Examples include rope for hanging, gun handling and shooting, knowledge of drugs, etc. High competency is a high risk factor.

I am a survivor of suicide attempts

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

I wrote a quick blog yesterday about the stigma of suicide. I asked wouldn’t it be nice to say to people you survived suicide like you survived cancer? I listened to the WEEI radio to hear my Sox game and it amazes me how quick people are to say they survived cancer but hide in the dark when talking about taking their own life. Both people are fighting for their lives. Granted one is bodily and the other is mostly mental but it still begs to question why there is a different in the illness. Suicide is the result usually of untreated depression or other mental illness. Most people think that it is depression that causes people to think about suicide but it is not. You can be psychotic and think about killing yourself. I know. I have been through it with my psychosis. I have had voices tell me to kill myself, in fact in one of the delusion it was considered a command order. Psychotic disorders often get tossed by the way side when considering suicide but a recent article in JAMA showed that it can pave the way to catching suicide attempts if asked about. The study showed that teens with psychotic symptoms are more apt to attempt suicide than non-psychotic teens.

But you don’t need to be in a mental state to be in the suicidal mind. That is what is so devastating about suicide is that people before they commit suicide look and act “normal”. I know that people who are suffering from cancer can look anything but normal. They can be bald or look skeletons. They are really fighting to be alive while those that are thinking about suicide just want to die. People with cancer are the lucky ones. Their suffering will end. People know this. But those of us with mental illness we continue to suffer and when we decide to give up and end the fight, we are looked down upon and treated often inhumanely. We then feel ashamed of ourselves for trying to end the pain and failing at it. We end up in the hospital to “save ourselves from more destruction”. All we want is peace, same as the cancer patient that is terminally ill. We want the suffering to end.

To some people, they believe that suicide is preventable. To some people it is but you are not going to catch the majority of people most at risk. You cannot stop every suicide. People have the right to kill themselves if they so choose to do so. It is the ones that survive that have the right to speak about it. Because those that survive depending on their reaction to their own attempt might be clues to whether they survive or not. I have survived the past several years despite making elaborate plans on killing myself. I really want to die but my reasons for living keep me going. I don’t like it but I can’t picture my sister telling my eight year old niece that I have passed on. She is my baby and I don’t want to hurt her or my other nieces or my nephew. My nephew is what kept me going during a very difficult time in my life. I wish that I had succeeded but because I didn’t, I got to see him grow into a man and graduate from high school. I didn’t think that he would or that I would live to see the day he did.

It saddens me that I am still alive when all I want to be is dead. I don’t know why I preserve. Right now I am in a lot of pain and I don’t like it. I don’t know if I am going to get any sleep tonight because of it. Where is the training of medical doctors to handle chronic pain? There isn’t any. I don’t get asked what my mental status is during medical visits anymore. It is just assumed that I am ok because I have a smile on my face. Didn’t matter that the day before I was in so much pain that I was in bed all day, taking pain pills every four-six hours. Maybe I was happy because I could finally get out of the house and go to my doctor’s appointment and I wasn’t in pain. The siege was over with. But now it has returned and the meds have not kicked in yet to knock my big ass out. I am tired of living with chronic physical pain all the time. It sucks the life out of you, what ever life is. And if it doesn’t, your mental illness will surely do it for you. There is no reprieve. No relief in sight. And that is why suicide is what it is. For people that survive it, they should be able to say that they have. But no one does. There are a few people that have been coming out slowly through the AAS blog but I fear that the ones that don’t come out, are the ones that will try again and maybe succeed.

I am a failure of suicide attempts. And because it has been so long since my last one I am not going to try again any time soon. Least for now. So I am in pain and I have one option left to me…to suffer.

Chronic Pain and Living

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

I have tried to take my life several times over the years. Currently, I am struggling with the difficulties of trying to stay alive. I keep coming up with plans to end my life. I give myself a date and when that day comes, I plan on ending it. This has been going on for a few years now. My therapist has been able to stop the constriction by telling me how my family will feel and how she will feel if I go ahead and take my life. I can’t help making these plans.

I have been depressed for as long as I can remember. I recently been trying to get at the “root” of my suicidality but the feelings evade me. I just know that between the ages of 5 and 8 something happened that made me want to take my life. And by age 10 I tried by putting a pillow case over my head. No one knew about this. I told my mother right before putting the pillow case I was going to kill myself but she did nothing. My confidence in her dwindled that day. I felt I could no longer trust her.

Five years later I am a freshman in high school and my parents had started World War III. They broke up and so did my wrist. I started cutting to relieve the pressure and pain. I used cutting to relieve the psychological pain that I was feel and it became my friend over the next seven or so years. Sixteen I was hospitalized and everyone found out about the voices. That was tough. I had wanted to join the military to get away from my family but having a psychotic diagnosis, I knew that I never would pass their tests. My career was over before it started and I fell into a worse depression. I kept on getting rehospitalized, like every three months, because I just couldn’t handle my life. I was getting worse and the suicidality was getting better. I kept on thinking that I was the end.

As I suffer from delusions and psychosis, two years ago, I had a funny thing happen. I had the delusion and voice of Allah tell me that I should sacrifice myself so that the war in Afgan would stop. As you probably could tell, I was off my meds again. My psychiatrist doesn’t think that I should be on them all the time because of the side effects. I had to re-start taking them because I was the sacrificial lamb and I believed all this earnestly. Allah was talking to me and I was the cause of the war of Afganistan. The only way to stop the war was to stop my life. So again I planned another scheme to end my life. Only this time, like before, my therapist stopped me. I tried very hard to get her to see that it had to be done and to think of all the soldiers I would save by ending my life. It seemed like a good win win. Sacrifice one life so all could be saved. Isn’t that what the military does? Allah was not too happy when I started again on my meds. He was very angry. And he also wanted me to end my life anyway because it was better than taking medication. I agreed with him on this but I couldn’t end my life. By this time I was back in the hospital. I was still delusional, thinking I was still the “one” to save it all. But as the medication started working, the delusions dropped and I began to see more clearly. The voices went away except for my regular voices that I hear all the time.

Since that time, a lot has changed for me. I have become disabled and am in chronic physical pain. I now too have a plan on killing myself and it is to happen some time this year. I have had enough. No pill can adequately control my pain and it is a tough position to live in. I have a condition known as Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS). It is a neurological disorder in which the nerves are out of whack and no one really knows the cause. I was “lucky” in that I had nerve damage already to my ankle and then when I sprained it, twice, I think it allowed the nerve damage to spread. Of course I also don’t walk correctly. I can stand here and give a lecture about pain and suicidal but I am afraid it will fall on deaf ears or not really reach the people it needs to reach. I wish you could say that you can live your life with chronic pain but I would be lying. There was a time when I was able to. I had adequate pain control and could work a full time job. That ended when instead of being placed on a regular psych unit, I was placed in a detox unit and my pain medication was stopped. Since that time in 2002, I have not had adequate pain control and I am afraid to ask. I have my pain meds but it only treats the physical type of pain that I experience. It doesn’t help with the burning sensation or the other electrical type pain that I experience. And nothing helps these types of pain. No cream or pain gel works. It might be enough to take the edge off so I can sleep but I am always in a 3-4 state of pain every single day and when my activity goes up, showering, getting dressed, walking to the bus stop or standing while waiting for the bus, then the pain also goes up. Sometimes all it takes is my moving my big toe and I am in pain. And with each episode, I think about death. I plan it, I imagine it, I dream of it. I no longer am able to work because I can’t walk more than 300 ft. I can’t lift things greater than 10 lbs. I can’t stand more than 20 minutes. And I am only 37. I got this horrendous condition when I was 25. It was a long battle and I wish that I could say that not working is helping me. In some ways it does. It helps me to write and distress. My voices are at a lower key than they were when I had a job. I don’t have the delusions as much. I just am constantly suicidal. And maybe one day I will. But as one of the bloggers Toni has written, “I am not living and I can’t die”.