There is nothing intrinsically wrong (or aberrant) in thinking about suicide; it is abnormal only when on thinks that suicide is the only solution. –Edwin Shneidman, Suicide as Psychache
Tag: suicidality
I don’t want to exist
I was going to install the drivers for my printer on my old laptop when I realized it can’t be done. I need to have the laptop unplugged and I can’t do that. The battery is dead. So until I get the new battery, I can’t print anything. I really wanted to print that story I wrote a few weeks ago so I can work on it. Always something hindering my procrastination for getting this story done.
I tried to finish “Order of the Phoenix” tonight. I failed. I got through one chapter and that is all my brain could absorb. I really don’t know why I am having such difficulty. I usually go through Harry Potter books like they were child play. But for whatever reason, I am having real difficulty. I think it’s because the depression has gotten so bad.
I was going over my stats tonight. My “How to Save a Life” paper is going through the roof. I don’t know why. My CAMS paper is also getting a lot of views, not as much as save a life but getting there. I found out today that Jobes will be having a second edition of his book in the Spring. I can’t wait. I emailed my friend tonight to see if there was a CAMS therapist in my area. She said she would email him and get back to me. I asked if there was a database. It’s not listed on the CAMS-Care website. It would be cool if it did.
I got really upset by one of my twitter buddies. I don’t think he realizes how triggering his tweets can be to sensitive people like me. He was talking about rape of boys and the inhumanity of it. I agree with him that it is a social injustice, but going into detail about it, people don’t need to know. Yes, it happens and it is a terrible thing. I am not shoving it under the rug, but do I really need to hear about how the boy was penetrated? NO. That to me is wrong.
I hope my backache is gone tomorrow. Every time it rains, I hurt. It hurts so bad, I can’t lie down. I have taken meds to ease my discomfort but it hasn’t kicked in yet. What is also causing me pain is the temperature keeps going up rather than down. It was 47 degrees when I got home earlier this evening. It is now 63 degrees. That could be why I am hurting, too. I hate that I am a human barometer.
My older laptop now has EndNote ready to go. I think I am going to make a database of all my citations that I am co-authored on. I think if I go to PubMed I can export them to the database. That would be cool and handy. Unfortunately, I don’t have the PDF for the last article I am authored on. It was the last paper before I left research. I did a lot of work with the samples for this paper. Just thinking back about it, causes my hands to hurt. I was working with -80 degree samples. They were cold, even with gloves on!
My quote of the day should have been published by now. I will have more Shneidman quotes as time goes by. He was such a cool guy. Towards the end of his life, he wanted his work to go out without copyright hindrances. I thought that was pretty cool. There are certain things that are still copyrighted, but that is mostly because it isn’t his work, like Murray’s frustrated needs. That is one thing that I never understood in all my readings of his work. There are 20 needs and the sum of the need must equal 100, so each need must have a score of 5 or less. It just and still does, boggle my mind. I tried scoring the thing on myself and couldn’t come up with 100. And he is gone now so I can’t ask him about it. He really was a psychometric type of psychologist. He loved assessments and such. It is too bad that his pain scale could never some to fruition. It is too complicated and has a great risk of misinterpretation. But there are other scales that have been shown merit. Two that come to my mind that I use are the psychache scale based on the work of Ronald Holden in Canada and the works of Jobes, the SSF, suicide status form. These two have really helped with my suicidality. I don’t use the psychache form too often anymore. In fact, I don’t even know where the scale is right now. I used to copy it in the back of my journals. But I stopped that a long time ago. The SSF my therapist and I use when I am in crisis. It is useful for her. I just find it annoying sometimes because I feel like she is ignoring why I am suicidal rather than what’s behind it. I don’t know if that makes sense. She rather assess my reasons for living rather than my reasons for dying. Both are important but I usually have more reasons for dying than living. It just frustrates me. She also just assumes that I will call her or use my crisis response plan when I really just want to talk. But when I want to talk it’s late at night and I know she isn’t going to get the text until the following day. That is also frustrating. I am not saying she needs to be available 24/7, that would be asking too much. I am saying there has got to be a better plan in place that I can soothe myself so I don’t go crazy, or at least be accountable to actually doing the crisis response plan. She never checks in with me about the plan. I don’t want to cause more trouble with her. I am already on thin ice. We are just starting to make headway in what we want to do going forward. If I bring this up, she just is going to say she isn’t a suicidologist, which to me is a cop out. That is like saying I am a therapist when I am not. I just don’t get her deal. It really frustrates me that I thought things were cool and then she goes to a consulting group and that is messing things up for us. She is truly taking the stuff to heart and I feel like I am getting booted, like she doesn’t want to work with me anymore because I have become a leper or something.
I don’t know if I am suicidal anymore. I just know I don’t want to live. I don’t want to exist. It’s too painful, both physically and emotionally. I have severe heartache and chronic physical pain. Mixed together, it’s just a suicidal script. I wish I knew how to break it. Reading Shneidman has been helpful. He gets the suicidal mind. I have two options: exist or die. I rather die but instead I am existing, only because my family, psychiatrist and therapist would miss me greatly. I am existing because of guilt. It doesn’t make me feel good living this way. If I knew my death wouldn’t cause pain, I know I would be dead in a heartbeat. Depression is part of it but it’s not the whole of it. And no one understands it. That is why I am so frustrated. I have to keep changing my date to satisfy others. This is no way to live. I don’t know how to live but I am pretty sure jumping suicide dates is not the way to go.
my baby has left
My baby has left
I dropped off my baby (laptop) today as it would be pouring tomorrow. It did rain later in the evening but after I dropped off the package to FedEx, so I made good timing. I had lunch at my favorite place and then had coffee at Starbucks. I tried their new coffee, Sumantra Longberry. It was good and gave me some juice that I needed to write. After I wrote several pages in my journal, I decided to look at the roots story but didn’t have the mindset to do anything with it. I bookmarked it and left.
I got a little wet by the time I reached the station to go home. I caught the train and then got a text saying the buses were moderately delayed. Wonderful. I wanted to call my sister to pick me up but I didn’t want to bother her. So I waited. There were lines of people waiting so I decided to wait for the next bus as crowded buses give me anxiety. The next bus that came wasn’t as crowded, though the bus driver didn’t know where the stop at the station was. Made me nervous. Because there weren’t that many people on the bus, I made it to my stop quickly to go home. It was raining steadily by then. I never walked down the street so fast to avoid getting wet. I wasn’t carrying an umbrella. I hate carrying them. I probably will tomorrow, depends on how bad it rains. I have to go to Stop and Shop to pick up my father’s prescription. Damn jerk didn’t pick it up last week. Just hope my hip isn’t hurting like it is now.
I had therapy today and it went well. I like it when we talk about stuff that isn’t full of air. She is listening to me better than she has the past month and I like it. I guess telling her how I really feel has made a difference. She didn’t push seeing someone new today. I think we are going to try and work things out, which is good. We were talking about Corrective Emotion Experience, or something to that effect. I told her I will be willing to try that form of therapy. We also talked about structure and it will be the first day of catch up from the week and then on Wednesday more like a therapeutic day. She wanted to go once a week but I can’t imagine that to be helpful. All the suicide preventative people that I have talked to or listened to over the years, all seem to agree that twice a week is better than once. But she doesn’t want me to stop all together. I will only do that if she forces me to see someone else. With me catching up with Shneidman’s anodyne psychotherapy, I am learning tricks to help myself and then passing that on to my therapist via text messages. It’s hard to put his words in 160 characters but I am trying. The bottom line is trying to alleviate the press, perturbation, and pain that leads to suicide. We haven’t talked about my suicidality in the past three weeks because we are still sorting through what to do with therapy. It’s on “hold” for now. I talked a little about it today. It didn’t stress her out like I thought it would. She did listen rather than freak out. Progress. Today I thought about the Commitment to living paperwork but I have to be there to construct it. There is just only so much you can so over the phone. I suppose I can blog it and then we can talk about it and agree to it as oppose to signing it. I am just thinking outside the box. I think the biggest hurdle is going to be keeping track of the psychache when I am in physical pain. When my physical pain is low, it’s easier to do a psychache scale. But when I am really hurting, forget about it. It is very hard to distinguish psychological pain from physical when you have the heightened arousal of actual physical pain. I have been good about keeping it down and using Gabapentin more has decreased my pain tremendously, even though I have regained the five pounds I lost. There is nothing I can do about that. It’s just part of the side effects.
My therapist and I did discuss trying to find a CAMS therapist in this area. I have to get the nerve to tweet Jobes to see if he keeps track of such things. I know for CBASP there is a compilation of therapists on the website but, unfortunately, none are in my area. The closest person is in Rhode Island and that will be troublesome. I can look again. There might be more people trained in this area of psychotherapy. For CAMS, I personally know one of the consultants and am thinking of asking her rather than go through Jobes. Then I thought about it…would I see this therapist just because I am suicidal? That would be a pretty specific therapist to see just for a few weeks time. (CAMS can be useful in as little as 8 sessions.) I think I will do that and see where it gets me. The worse she can say is no, she can’t help me.
Quote of the Day 28 Oct 2015
Suicide is both a logical and psychological phenomenon. As a logical thought disorder it is fueled by an individual’s emotional turmoil and grounded in his psychological history. Edwin Shneidman, Suicide as Psychache
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