Tag: mental illness

ramblings 16

by Midnight Demon, posted in CES, Chronic pain, depression, mental disorders, mental illness, psychache, psychosis, suicide, suicide attempt

Been staring at the cursor of a new document for the past fifteen minutes and still nothing is coming to me about what to write. This writing project that my friend has involved me in is draining me. I am having to come up with new material every day and how can you possibly do that every day? I am not used to writing on demand. I have a migraine today so my thinking is kind of slow. All I want to do today is sleep but I just can’t because I have this restlessness inside. I want to go out but it is just too bright out. I am getting lazy. I am hardly leaving the house for anything these days. Not even the temptation of Starbucks makes me want to leave the house.  Last time I left the house was Friday for a doctor’s appointment. I spent that day at the medical center because I was to be seen for my blurry vision episodes. Tomorrow I will have to leave the house to go for an MRI.  I will have to take pain meds and an Ativan to get through. I know that it is going to be tough because the damn thing always hurts my back. I simply cannot lay flat for the 45 minutes or so it takes. I am always hurting afterwards. I have had numerous MRIs as I have a chronic back condition that needs monitoring. I have not had a back MRI in some time but I have had a brain MRI last year. It was similar to the same condition I am experiencing now. Except I just have blurry vision and not a visual field problem.

So this writing binge is because my friend need help writing her book and I sort of need to write my book which has to do with how I deal with my suicidality all the time and my chronic pain that can send me over the edge. My last pain attack was two weeks ago and it ended ugly. I ended up taking more medicine than I should have because I just didn’t care any more. I could have ended my life that night and the only thing that stopped me was that I couldn’t walk the three feet, yes three feet, to my bureau to get even more medicine. I still wish that I went through with it. Maybe I would have slept more and not woken up the next day. I don’t know. I am so sleepy now that I just want to go to sleep than to talk about this…

I think my friend has an ulterior motive for me writing. It’s to know that 1) I am alive and 2) to try and control the demons. The demons are what control me to try and take my life when I am in severe pain, either mental or physical. I can’t seem to tolerate one or the other but when I have both, I am in trouble. As what happened that night, things escalated very quickly and I found myself staring at a bottle of pills to end my life because I couldn’t stand the intense pain. I still am in disbelief about how this happened and the intense grief in surviving it really got my head spinning.  When you feel suicidal you have a plan about what to do. You call someone, your therapist, psychiatrist, PCP, a hotline. But I didn’t use any of those resources and that is what is killing me. I didn’t have the time to practically think about what is causing me to feel suicidal. I just wanted the pain to end and was willing to take a bottle of pills to end it. Stupid yes and for the suicidologist in me couldn’t distract, how is someone that I am treating or a friend that is in crisis supposed to do this? It makes no sense. I couldn’t step back and see that this pain would pass, that I just had to give the meds time to work. I see this now but I didn’t in the moment.

psychological pain: real or not?

by Midnight Demon, posted in Chronic pain, depression, psychache, suicide

I did some Google research on psychological pain. I got over 34 million hits on those terms alone and had to narrow it. I really miss having access to PsychLit, a search engine tool for psych papers and other related mental health professions. So I put the psych pain in quotations to narrow the search. I narrowed it down to 444,000. Yikes. How was I going to get through that many? I decided to go through the first three pages of results. I found what I was looking for and did another search for that. Sometimes you can get lucky and get a free PDF of the research article. I wasn’t lucky this time. I did pay $20 USD for to “look” at the research article. What I found was another psychological pain scale that has been in use for the past six years. I don’t know how I missed this article in my previous searches, but then I have been following ONLY the works and “followers” of Dr. Shniedman.

From what I have read about this article, this is a quantitative research measure for psychological pain. Unlike Jobes’s SSF (Suicide Status Form), which measures multiple psychological pain issues and is a qualitative form, it does not measure anything related to suicidal thinking. This is disappointing. Most of the measures have been for major depression, whereas the research for the SSF has been across all psychiatric disorders.

OMG I just read one of the results that Tylenol would help psychological pain. WTF, ARE YOU SERIOUS??? No wonder there is so much liver failure in this country. But then most people don’t think that this pain is real and only physical pain can be felt. I think this is bogus because I have suffered from psychic pain for a great many years and I can say that it is just as real as any physical pain that I have ever felt. It might not be the same as say the pain from a broken limb but a broken heart hurts just as bad.

In this article that asks is there such a thing as psychological pain? And why it matters. I found this article interesting as he was comparing the pain and grief of losing a child to cancer can be just as painful as a kidney stone.

 

 

References

Biro, David. Is There such a thing as psychological pain? And Why it matters. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 2010.(34).4.658-667

Mee S, Bunney BG, Bunney WE, Hetrick W, Potkin SG, Reist C. Assessment of psychological pain in major depressive episodes. J Psychiatr Res. 2011 Nov;45(11):1504-10. Epub 2011 Aug 9.

ramblings15

by Midnight Demon, posted in suicide attempt

11-28-2012

Tried to sleep most of the day and failed. I didn’t feel like venturing out because my ankles are hurting me. I ordered Chinese for dinner because I wanted to much to the chagrin of my mother. She doesn’t like it when I order food. Tomorrow I hope to make my chicken wings but that remains to be seen. I will most likely have to make them or the chicken will go bad.

I wrote a nice letter to my therapist about our relationship. Now I just have to wait for her to get it before we can talk about it. This arrangement sucks. By the time she does get the letter I will have forgotten what I wrote and it will be meaningless.  The arrangement is that we do not have regular sessions like normal people. I have phone sessions because she has her office far away and I do not have a car.

I still have to go to the post office to return my sister’s birthday present. I will never get women and their clothes. I like my clothes roomy and big and thought she did too so I got her a man’s jersey. Apparently it was too big for her and she didn’t like it so now I have to return it. UGH. I would have taken the bigness over the smallness…but then that is my preference. And with football jerseys you want them to be big anyway so I don’t understand why she wants a smaller size. Women!!

I have decided to return my glasses from Walmart and get them at another store. I think that will be easier but the tricky part is actually getting a car and going out there. This place is about 30 mins from my house. I wish I could have a Zipcar but I can’t have one. I should file some paperwork to get back on track with it but I am too lazy to do so. I hate paperwork. It makes a mess of things and you end up losing it in the end anyways so why bother with it. Which reminds me, I have to shell out another hundred bucks for the City of Cambridge for a damn stupid idiotic parking ticket. GGRRRR

today’s activities

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

MY pdoc today said that she is a fan of mine. I found it amazing that she would say something so sweet. We also talked about our anniversary and I said that we should go out for dinner but that would be over stepping a boundary.

I did tell her about my pseudo attempt and she understands why I get that way. I told her all my plans went out the window and it’s so hard to reach out when you are in so much pain. She didn’t say much but she understood that when pain hits, I become a suicidal maniac until the pain eases up.  If I did call her that night, I am sure she probably would have wanted me to call my PCP and tell him I needed more pain meds to get it under control. Probably but its not like they can call in for a narc over the phone or without being seen.

I am not in a good mood after today. I am hurting physically and am angry about it. No matter what I do I always seem to be in more pain for doing things I want to do, like walking to my doctor’s appt. Doesn’t seem like I am doing much but it takes so much out of me. Plus not sleeping has been annoying me and making me cranky. I am so cranky right now that I could dope slap anyone right now if they pissed me off in any way.

 

I saw my PCP’s colleague today because he wasn’t available. I wish I had waited until he was. I have to get another head MRI to rule out something on it and had a blood test for Myasthenia Gravis to rule out that. I am so tired about this and still can’t see that I am typing without my glasses because my eyes hurt. I am going to take a migraine med tonight to see if that helps. The doc thinks it is an atypical or ocular migraine that I am experiencing. I don’t care what it is I just want to be able to read and write again without agony. It’s almost 6 pm EST so I am going to take a nap and then the heavy drugs to go to sleep. I need to rest my head before it explodes so maybe I do indeed have a migraine going on.