Tag: suicide attempt

ramblings 7

by Midnight Demon, posted in baseball, Chronic pain, mental disorders, mental illness, mood disorders, sports, suicide, suicide attempt

I am totally wiped out doing nothing. I have been feeling low the past week or so and it just gets worse. I have a hard time motivating myself to get dressed or to take a shower. I just don’t feel like it. Today I wanted to make a pumpkin pie but I bought the wrong kind of pie crust. Least according to my mother I did. I am too lazy to go back to S&S to return it.

My foot has been aching since Friday. I don’t know why my foot always bothers me more on weekends than during the week. It also makes me just want to stay in bed and do nothing. I was able to write a story about my attempt this weekend. I am trying to write another paper about psychache and the assessment for it but I don’t think I have the energy for it and I hate it. I just can’t get my thoughts together about what I want to say in this paper, which is part of the problem and the other half of it is procrastination. Why I am procrastinating is puzzling. It’s not like I have a deadline for this. It is just a paper that I am writing for fun. I want to analyze about psychache and the assessments used for it, almost like a compare/contrast. Problem lies that my meds are making it difficult to concentrate on my paper and reading the articles supporting my argument. I hate taking meds affecting my thinking but I have no choice. It’s either take them or end up back in the nut house.

Disappointed the Pats lost due to one stinking point. They had the lead and they blew it to lose by one stinking point!! ARGH!!!!

In my baseball world, Detroit beat the Skankees 3 zip at home in the Bronx, taking a 2-0 ALDS lead. Sweet revenge having them lose at home. I hope Detroit continues to win and beat those overpaid bastards.

Moodwise I have been in a miserable mood. Mostly stemming from a bad relationship. But I’m over it. I just wish my heart can move on as quickly as my mind can.

finding comfort in a bell jar

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

I am reading A. Alvarez’s A savage God. I have just read the part where Plath finds comfort in Lowell’s pain of losing his mind. Isn’t that the essence of mental illness, taking comfort in another’s pain? I do not mean that we wish each other harm, just that it is comforting to know that we are not the only ones that are suffering so.

Lowell had talked about his breakdowns and subsequent hospitalizations which lead to my current one just a few weeks ago.  No one really knows that I was again hospitalized because I have not really told anyone other than those close to me. No one would suspect that I have been. I had been psychotic the past few weeks and now that I am on meds I am “well again”.  I am reading Plath and how every decade she attempted suicide doesn’t bode well inside of me. I have yet to attempt anything in over a decade now and I feel that the longer I wait, the longer and more fruitful it will be for soon no one with suspect that I have thought such things. No one will suspect that my depression has gone astray, that it has gone away and I am well now. But physical pain is more of a reality than my psychache is these days.

ramblings 6: ambivalence about suicide

by Midnight Demon, posted in depression, mental disorders, mental illness, mood disorders, suicide, suicide attempt

Past few days I have been in my own world. I just have been obsessed with my blog. Been catching every spam message as they have been piling up and just been checking my stats, watching my readership go up with each passing day. Today I was blessed with six Google searches that found my blog.

Not only have I been on Facebook for the majority of my time and on my other profiles (I currently have four active profiles for my ONE game that I play, but that is my other obsession), I also have been on Pubmed doing a search for any research articles that have my real name attached to it. I found that I have another researcher with the same last name in Italy. He is probably a relative that I don’t know or maybe he is not related at all. I don’t know. I have tried to ask family members about him but no one knows this guy so I am guessing that he is not a relative, just like not all Smiths are related.

My mood has been bleak. Today is cold and rainy and I just do not feel like braving the weather to go to the post office to mail some things. I just do not have the energy today to get dressed. I also been itching to write something useful but the few things I have scratched on paper have not amounted to anything more than a thought. This morning I reviewed what I wrote and I could hardly remember the feeling that went with the thought much less than what I wanted to write about. I had heard last night on the radio two songs that mean a lot to me. The first was Martina McBride’s “How Far” and the second was Sugarland’s “stuck like glue”. Two songs that don’t really relate to anything much less each other but in my emotional state last night I felt that they were intertwined with some purpose and meaning. Today I am lost for what that meaning was. From what I am trying to recall, it had to do with the ambivalence of suicide, how far can you go to want to end your life and stuck like glue when you want to cling to life with all your might. The infamous, I want to die and live at the same time. It’s an epiphany that most people who think of suicide think about. They don’t want to live but they don’t want to die either. A chorus of Sugarland’s song:

There you go making my heart beat again,
Heart beat again,
Heart beat again
There you go making me feel like a kid
Won’t you do it and do it one time?
There you go pulling me right back in,
Right back in,
Right back in
And I know-oo I’m never letting this go-ooo

 

Chorus from Martina’s McBride’s song:

How far do I have to go to make you understand
I wanna make this work so much it hurts but I just can’t
Keep on giving, go on living with the way things are
So, I’m gonna walk away
And it’s up to you to say how far

 

With Suicidal thinking, the walls go up and you isolate. You don’t think about the outside world, just think about how much pain you are in and how much you want to end it. I have been thinking about this for a long time and I sometimes think that I will be better off but my nieces are a reminder that I can’t end my pain to start theirs. I am truly stuck like glue and it sometimes sucks really bad knowing I can’t end my life because someone else will suffer. I do not want someone to suffer because of me.

Building a Therapeutic Alliance

by Midnight Demon, posted in mental disorders, mental illness, mood disorders, suicide, suicide attempt

Building a Therapeutic Alliance with the Suicidal Patient. Eds: Konrad Michel and David Jobes

This book is a work of genius among the top suicidologists in the U.S. and Europe. The editors actually want to help suicidal people get better and try to make their life worth living. Like most of Drs. David Jobes and Konrad Michal work, they have done an excellent review of the literature and made the book easy to read without a lot of psychological jargon.  This book should be used as a handbook for anyone dealing with suicidal individuals.  As someone who has been through many suicidal episodes with many different therapists, this book is groundbreaking.  It lists his classic work of CAMS (collaborating and managing suicidality) which is a tried and true way of dealing with lethal suicidality in an outpatient setting. The other evidence based therapists will enhance therapy around this work.

The Chapters are broken down easy enough and progress from good to bad in my opinion, of the treatments that work.  The conclusion was brilliant by Dr. Jobes. He has stated with clarity the hardships that are faced with suicidality such as the IRB approvals for research, clinicians wanting to work with this population, and the need to try and keep these people in therapy.

The brilliance surrounding this book is the alliance part of it. Without a therapeutic alliance, you cannot have a good report with a therapist and the therapist cannot have a good report with the client. The essential element is having a good working relationship that builds on trust and collaboration. The therapist must want to know the client’s story in a non-judgmental, non-criticizing way. By listening to this story, the therapist engages the client and the client feels validated and understood. This is a central element to helping any client in psychotherapy, in any discipline.

This book covers most of the therapeutic disciplines and how it relates to treating someone with suicidal ideation. It also offers empirical evidence that supports treatment of suicidal individuals, from psychodynamic to cognitive therapies.

I believe this book should be read by every graduate student and post graduate in the mental health field. This book can also augment education for those that are already in the field and practicing psychology or psychiatry.