exciting article

Just read an interesting article about the Collaborating and Management of Suicidality (CAMS). I can’t believe this theory is 25 years old. It is gaining more acceptance as time goes on as more countries are using it as a treatment modality in suicidal people. It is a clinical intervention that is used as a collaboration between client and therapist in the treatment and care of a suicidal person. I find it one of the best out there and it is the best because it can be used across the disciplines in the mental health field.

I will be writing more about this. I write a lot about Jobes, the creator of CAMS and the SSF (suicide status form). He is the most brilliant person I have ever met. The fact that this is going to electronic way I think will be used across mediums and will be easier to deliver. Most clinicians have gone the electronic way but not all. This makes me want to go back to school and get my degree.

unbearable psychache

Been having a hard time the last few hours. I really want to do some self-harm. I just am disgusted with myself for some reason and want to cut. I feel like I should be doing something but what I should be doing I have no idea.

I have been also feeling a lot of psychache. Every time I feel it I feel like I have to do something self-destructive. I don’t know why I get this way. It’s not like anything happened. I have been listening to Gary Allan and playing my games. I had breakfast and wanted to get back to sleep. My back is bothering me because it’s thirteen degrees out. I thought I would go out but it’s too cold. I hate getting all bundled up just to mail a letter.

My breasts have been bothering me so maybe that is the problem. They are extremely itchy because of dry skin and the cold. I hate it. I hate my chest things with a despicable passion. I just can’t stand how my body is and there is no way I can like it until the things are chopped off. I am starting to save my money so I can get the operation. I figure by the time I get that much money saved, I might be on hormone replacement therapy. I am trying but it’s not easy. I really know I should meet with the special docs that deal with this stuff and maybe my menses would really stop. It’s been a month and a half that I have been dealing with this and I am not liking it!!! I have to wear female underwear because the pads don’t fit well in my boxers. It is so depressing and demoralizing. Just another way for my stupid body to remind me that I am not who I am. I just want to cry.

I haven’t told any other family members about me wanted to be who I am. I just can’t seem to bring myself to tell my mother or my other sister. I am just afraid that I will become suicidal as the sister I told had some reservations about this. It’s making me suicidal anyway. I just am so tired of fighting who I am not. The struggle is unbearable. If I could I would just stab myself right now. That is how bad I feel but the stupid breast would probably get in the way and I would just cause tissue damage than any organ damage. My life just sucks…

Ramblings 25

Not been feeling good today. Back has been bothering me and so has my stomach. Seems like no matter what I eat lately, I get indigestion. I just took some Mylanta, the Walgreens equivalent as the real Mylanta hasn’t been on the market for quite sometime.

I got my haircut at my cousin’s house tonight. I had to get my haircut because it was getting too long. It’s been at least two months since my last cut. I like to keep my hair short and buzzed close at the sides and back. I wanted to take a shower afterwards but I just couldn’t bring myself to. I just washed my hair and that was it.

I was supposed to go out tonight but the Bruins are playing and I didn’t feel like going to a bar. I just don’t like loud places anyways.

Person from my long term disability company called me yesterday to check in. I don’t know what to say to her. I still have pain but it has been minimal because I no longer leave the house anymore. I might go out three days tops, and that is only if I really feel like going out for a coffee. Today I went out and now my ankle is thanking me with pain. I just can’t win. And what if she asks me about my mental health. I will just say yea I think about killing myself nearly everyday and wish every night before going to sleep that I don’t wake up. I just can’t face another day of nothingness. I haven’t been taking care of myself, more now so than before I got the disability. I shower maybe twice a week if that. I don’t do housework, though my mother now needs help with it. I’m not sure how I can help her as I can’t really be on my feet for too long.
It sucks having Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS). I’m lucky it likes the cold as the temperature has dropped to the twenties. I cannot tolerate the heat anymore. I like to be warm but not too warm. Sometimes I can’t even have the sheet on my feet/leg it bothers me so bad. But at least the swelling has gone down some though I still have a lump in my leg where it shouldn’t be. I so want to excise it. But I have been told that I might cause more damage if I excise than leaving it alone. I’m just glad that the voices haven’t been around telling me to excise it. I would have to go back to the hospital. I am taking my antipsychotic med. I have to take it every other day or else I become delusional and psychotic. It has been helping with the paranoia that I had when I was on a crowded bus or train. Now I can be around people without freaking out that they are going to kill me. How fun it is having Schizoaffective disorder or as my therapist calls it just bipolar disorder with psychosis. Apparently I don’t have the “positive” features of the Schizoaffective part.

I haven’t been hospitalized for almost six months. That’s good but I have been feeling like I should be in. I just can’t take living my life anymore but then I know I won’t really get the help I need. Most hospitals don’t have time for individual work and so lump you in with a group of treaters to talk for 15 minutes of the day. Then it’s back to the ward doing nothing but arts and crafts all fucking day, least until dinner time. The groups they have are useless. On a good day you might get psychotherapy group. I like that group, I can get something out of it. I should make an effort to go to an outpatient group therapy but of course I have no motivation or inclination to do so. I think it might break up the monotony of the day but that would mean leaving the house at least once a week. I was thinking of going to a LGBT group to be more comfortable. And maybe help with the transitioning of things but I don’t think you can do that in a group. I don’t know, maybe next week I will call. Or have my therapist call to find out more information about it. It will be local so I wouldn’t have to travel too far. I just am afraid I might not be able to walk to the center because it is too far from the T stop. There isn’t a bus that goes by and the closest train stop is more than a few blocks away. Difficult for someone with mobility issues. Course I could take a cab but that is just wasting money to me but maybe it is something to think about. But that is if I get “accepted” into the group to begin with.

why i think about suicide

Suicide is the ultimate escape. The place you can go to when all seems and feels hopeless. I often think about killing myself at least twice a day or more if I am feeling really hurt and hopeless. Pain is another reason I think about suicide. Pain can be either physical or mental for me. Mostly these days it’s mental. I do not like myself. I loathe myself to the degree I would rather be dead than live this way. I hate the way I look. I hate the way my body is. I am ugly and disgusting and no one can tell me otherwise. My therapist says that I have a form of body dysmorphic disorder because I loathe myself so much. It’s just another reason to kill myself. Another reason to end my life.
Yet despite all this loathing and self-hating and pain, I’m still alive. I’ve come up with a date to end my life. I have decided that 38 years of living is long enough, or close to it anyways. I try not to think about it I try to think of now and live but its just too damn hard when you have to force yourself to breathe everyday. Sure the lungs work automatically but to actually breathe freely without this elephant sitting on your chest, that is what I am talking about. I used to say weight on the chest but what is that exactly. Not very accurate visually. Unless you have been to a gym and know what a weight is and looks like, most people don’t know. An elephant is easier to visualize and imagine better.
Right now I am at a café in a bookstore in Harvard Square. I bet no one knows that I am suicidal. They just see a guy writing in a notebook, drinking a lime soda. That what kills me. The invisibility of it all. These thoughts are mine and mine alone, unless I speak of it like I am doing now. No one knows. No friend or family member knows except my therapist and psychiatrist. Sometimes guilt will make me not want to commit suicide. I feel bad because I have worked with these caregivers for more than a decade. MY psychiatrist I have worked with for almost two decades. Yet I don’t but do care how they will react to my suicide. Will their attitudes change? Will they refuse to see other clients who are suicidal? Most will.
My therapist keeps saying I am the exception not the rule. But I am tired of living in constant misery. Misery that only the blog world knows about. I can’t share my misery with others because I have become so ingrained to keep it to myself. I keep it to myself so as not to worry my friends and family members. They wouldn’t understand anyways. My family is not one of openness. I am not blaming them for how I turned out. I don’t blame anyone but myself for my suicidal thoughts. It’s my fault. Maybe if I got help sooner I wouldn’t be this way but that is doubtful, it took me twelve years of therapy to realize what the root of my suicidality was. I was suicidal since I was eight years old. It wasn’t because I was abused (although I have been by multiple family members) but not at that ago. Suicide just came to me at that ago and has been with me ever since. I didn’t like myself back then anymore than I do now. But it was because of reasons I had not thought of. Reasons I could not articulate like I can now as an adult. I realized I was a girl and I didn’t like it. I developed into one an hated it. But I couldn’t say anything to anyone, not even my best friend from childhood because back then you just didn’t say what you felt or what you thought. I would have fallen on deaf ears and it’s not like psychiatry/psychology is like it is now. I have always felt like an outcast and coming out as a “boy” would have further set me into outcast land.
Just like when I thought I was a homosexual, I thought of killing myself. I felt like I was severely psychotic liking another woman. Again I didn’t say anything to anybody, not even my therapist at the time because I was fearful of being committed to the hospital. I already had a few by this point. But I met a fellow inpatient that showed me it was ok to be gay and I’m grateful for that.
My therapist now does what she can for helping me accept being a transgender but part of me always wonders whether one day she will have me committed for these thoughts. And I don’t mean the suicidal ones.
Why am I not in the hospital if I am chronically suicidal? Because I’m not “actively” suicidal. If I was in imminent danger to myself, like I was going to do it right this second, at this very moment, I would be hospitalized, probably against my will.
But at this stage I just feel like my telling my providers I’m suicidal is like me crying wolf. I’ve said this so many times I don’t really think anyone believes I will act on it. Hell I don’t even feel like I will act on it. I want so much to die and though I have made active plans to kill myself, I am still here. I have not attempted in several years now. At this point I wish it could be just a wish that I could be granted at anytime. I sometimes wish I lived in the times of the Ancient Greeks where if you constantly asked for permission, eventually you were granted permission and “allowed” to kill yourself with hemlock. Now the governments of most societies say it’s all part of mental illness and every life should be saved. Now do you see why I am not vocal on my suicide thoughts. I have to keep them secret for fear of commitment. But a hospital stay is not what I need. Being six feet under and pushing up daisies is what I desire. That is truly what I want.
Somehow between my last “attempt” seven years ago, I lost my lethality. I lost the will to truly die. Even though I wish to be dead on a constant basis, don’t get me wrong, I have no will so to speak to truly act on my thoughts anymore. I lost the intensity of my constriction, my narrow minded thinking. Because of this I am still alive though I desperately wish I was dead.