It might be a while.

Hello.

My posts I think have been less frequent.  They feel that way.

I am probably not going to be able to post for a while, I probably won’t want to either.

I am moving back home to live with my parents.

I am yet to start any form of packing so that will take some time.

I have things to sort out, things that I never thought I would have to sort out.  Things like re-registering with my home GP and getting a medical certificate for the incapacity benefit that I never thought I would be claiming.

The move scares me.  It is to the unknown.  Sort of.

I will be sleeping in the same room I slept in from the age of four to nineteen and then every summer since.  I will be living with my parents, who to the best of my knowledge are the ones I have had all my life.

I will however for the first time ever not actively have a goal that I am moving to.  I don’t remember much from before I was seven and by that point I was firmly established in the education system.  I had a day,week, month, term, year of primary school, then primary schooling to complete, then secondary schooling and then I went for a degree.  I have always been in some form of educational establishment.  I have never held a job that was not either paper round or working a night at the local newsagent or didn’t have the words student or placement involved with it.

I am going to be a member of the public.  I am leaving university with a nothing qualification, still ill and claiming benefit/mooching from the government.

It is the lack of structure and momentum that freaks me out.  It has been clear for months that I was going to drop out and I let my moods guide my days, I have slept too much or too little depending on hypomania or depression.  I have for the first time been really close to actually being hospitalised.  I probably haven’t  been fighting it as much as I should have been.

I have spent most of my diagnosis depressed and beating myself down.  Learned helplessness, if I am never going to succeed then why try.

Things need to change, my current depressive momentum needs to change.

There is the thing that at least I believe to part of the zeitgeist that says that in order to recover you need to believe you can return to how you were before you were ill.

I can’t see that though.

Literally everyday I think of suicide,  not planning or fantasies but a resolute belief that I would be better off not here.  I don’t know if that is ever going to go away but it’s presence should not stop me from living my life.

I am taking time away from this blog to start finding paths to recovery that don’t include whining to an anonymous audience, that involves proper dialogues with real people, that involves sensible sleep patterns, that involves taking the minimum amounts of medication, that involves being honest, that involves whatever else.

I am likely to post again in the future, probably more of the foxhole variety, but less so.

I know I have said this before but this time with such a big change happening I think I really need to focus on making that change happen.  Once their is some speed in the new flywheel I’ll be writing here again.

Note This Down: or Things I shouldn’t have read

Hello.

There is still something very freeing about the fullscreen editor of wordpress. I digress.

Today was my last ever appointment with my current psychiatrist.  I had assumed that I would have had another appointment next week but he, Dr P, leaves to go on holiday on the 24th and I have an appointment with my new psychiatric care provider who is a doctor but could be an SHO or consultant or something but I don’t yet know.  All I know is that I am going from a rather large psychiatric hospital to a centre that looks an awful lot like it was designed to that it could be turned into a newsagents and take-away fried chicken place with the minimal of refurbishment, but of course the inside might be very very swanky indeed.

That appointment though is next week and not today.

Today’s appointment was odd.  Mainly I was taken by surprise with the news I was being seen in Glasgow so soon, so was Dr. P, and Glasgow had asked for some more correspondence about me so they better know what to do when I pitch up with nothing but salty blood and a stupid grin.

Turns out that Dr. P had copies of the letters sent by the psychiatrist I saw during the very first time I was in a mental health service.  Against my better judgement I asked to take a look.  Oh the stupidity.

I remember very very little of the time spent at that service.  I could not tell you with any degree of certainty how often I saw the nurse therapist or the consultant psychiatrist.  In fact I have been incorrectly remembering the name of the consultant for five years.  I know that I was argumentative and that I was given citalopram and that I overdosed on it in November and the letter I got in January saying something like as you are showing no interest in returning I take it you have left was weird.

Regarding that last letter.  I had agreed with my nurse therapist to stop seeing her, we were really not going anywhere, and I had presumed given we were not seeing any more of one another that I had left the service.  It came as a surprise that they thought I hadn’t but I suppose it works out.

One of the initial letters that was sent said that I had thought of overdosing on paracetamol and had thoughts of burning myself.  I know I had told her these things and I think that might have been a back-handed way of saying I was suicidal.  The next sentence said that I showed no suicidal intent.  Two months later I tried to kill myself.  Maybe it wasn’t detectable when she wrote but I still feel a little rubbed the wrong way at the implication I was talking the talk with no intent of walking the walk.

The significantly most distressing thing was the link between my mental illness and my physical illness.  I have an endocrine disorder.  References appeared often enough to one of the effects of this disorder to make it seem like I had a pre-occupation with it.  They went as far as to say that I was not inviting people to my home because of this particular symptom which is simply not true.  What is true that the symptom was discussed briefly, I stated that it was not an issue.  The treatment I was on required me to inject myself regularly.  My concern was that if people discovered the needles then the wrong conclusion be leapt to, this concerned me significantly more than the slightly embarrassing nature of the endocrine disorder.

I did not have and do not have a pre-occupation with the disorder, I should probably be spending more time dealing with it in truth.

It was also stated that I was prone to argument.  I was prone to argument, I was also either hypomanic or agitated depressed, I was cutting myself and nobody understood.  I was a teenager.  Saying that it was because I was a teenager is disingenuous.  I took umbrage at being ill, at being “forced” into treatment, at being talked down to, at having to agree with everything that I was told.  I was depressed, severely so.  I was also scared and felt alone and was in the metaphorical dark place, with dark clouds overhead and a dark beast dogging my soul.

There is little to excuse my behaviour, I was being offered help and didn’t take it.  I was at times so standoffish and argumentative that I have little doubt I probably drifted from difficult to treat to don’t want to treat.

 

I have perhaps an unhealthy thirst for being define, whilst conversely wishing not to be.  I think these two things can sit together.  Maybe I over-stated.  I don’t want to be defined but I know that I am, consciously or otherwise but lots of people.  Doctors, particularly psychiatrists, define you as part of their job.  

I like knowing what people think of me.  I want to know what it is about me that really screws your noodle, that you hate, that you love, that you want to know more about.

Sometimes that desire is stronger than others.  Sometimes it is just the in-five-words-describe game and sometimes not.  It doesn’t get in the way of things and I have a fairly strong sense of self,  though sometimes it wobbles.

 

Mostly it is just a matter of interest but when it is in my notes I worry.  I, for some reasons, put doctors and their notes on pedestals.  If it is in the notes it merits being discussed and it is not just opinion.  This is my worry.

 

I should not have read the notes.  I think perhaps I am better for it though.  I try to be less self-interested.

Self harm and privacy: or Truely simplistic bollocks

Hello.

Last night I got an email from my good friend R.  He had during the course of his day heard the following

Cutting on arms is public and to do with wanting help, cutting on legs (especially high on inner thighs) is private and the person doesn’t want help.

And after presenting me with this assertion asked 

true? bollocks? too simplistic but…?

My initial reply was that it was all of those things.  Mainly it is an overly simplistic assertion.  I also said that unless the person had first-hand, personal third-hand or a great deal of experience in the psychology behind self-harm then really they shouldn’t be making such assertions.  I, who predominantly cut my arms, leapt to the defense of my people (fellow arm-cutters), and immediately assumed that the person making the assertions that A) they cut themselves and B) cut their legs and C) had developed a snobbery that said that people who cut their arms are attention seekers (in the positive way, seeking help to stop whatever is going on rather than attention for attentions sake (I have thoughts on that too)).

Just by way of an aside their is very little solidarity between self-harmers, from my experience they tend to ignore the severity of cause and look to the severity of effect.  There is a huge backlash of animosity to people who cut themselves to fit into social cliques, namely emos, but that does of course mean that the person who is cutting themselves to fit in could have a very shaky sense of self and a very unhealthy need to belong to a group which is not so different to the personality disorders which meet the self-harmers stamp of approval.  My reaction to the assertion reveals just as much about my snobberies as it does anyone else’s.

My initial response, as is almost always the case in such things, was to prime the person I was about to talk to to other ideas.  Admittedly with R I don’t need to do this.  

I told him first that cutting your arms is not public.  Cutting your arms, wearing short sleeves and going out in the public is public.  Additionally a single cut on your arm is less likely to have people leaping to the conclusion that you did it to yourself that a cut on your inside upper thigh.

I told him to consider that if he were asked to mime cutting himself he would probably mime cutting his neck of arms.  And it is of little coincidence that a lot of self-harmers cut their arms.

I told him to consider that by being more public we can actually push people away.  Given that self-harm is not the norm and tends to be clandestine, certainly we tend to think of people sinning alone in their bedrooms or bathrooms rather that happily opening up gashes in their arm on the bus or during a sunny day at the park, we may assume that given the person is being open about their self-harm that they are in less need of help or indeed don’t want any.

Some people take this to the extreme by having visible minor wounds and horrible gouges in more private pieces of flesh.  I during the final few months of my sixth year at high school would went asked how my day was spend five minutes telling my mum until she realised that really she just wanted a cup of tea and to watch the end of Countdown, the preceeding years when I had just said fine met with a more determined attempt to try and fish out the imaginary wrong.

R replied saying that to be fair to the person who made the assertion, they cut their legs and was pointing out that cutting your arms carries with it the ability to make it public quite easily.  So that even if the intent to ask for help is not their then the attempt to be able to ask for help is.

I did not say this at time but it occurs to me that I never had anyone ask to see my arms or legs when I told them that I cut themselves.  Some people have asked to see them months later and people have only seen my arms during times when the cuts are all healed.

I have never sought help, other than for getting stitched, by showing my arms.  I am sure that it exists.  And certainly I have seen enough episodes of Degrassi and after-school specials to know that the reveal that someone self-harms is almost always a stuttering attempt at an explanation followed by rolling up the sleeves.

Now I know this is a phrasing issue but cutting your arms has other factors to it than just the ability to ask for help.  My arms are now a horrible mesh of scars upon scars.  There is no way now for me to wear a shortsleeve shirt, tee-shirt, on in a very unlikely turn of events probably involving a proposition bar bet gone very long, the song -YMCA  - a muscle shirt.  Me wearing short-sleeves is met with, to varying degress depending up who I am around, weird looks, hushed voices, abuse, misplaced offers of help, ideas of mutual understanding and whatever else.  This I proposed was the result of years of my head convincing myself I need so immediate a self harm fix that dropping my trousers would take too long.  That proposal is disingenous.

 

There is very little secretive about how I started self-harming, it is all there on the archives.  R proposed that it was more that there is less deterent in the lack of privacy for those who cut their arms.  This is probably true. 

 

One thing I can say, with certainty, regarding self harm and privacy is that the easiest way to get attention, wanted or not, helpful or otherwise, is to cut in places that are more public.

 

It is difficult to propose that I was anymore secretive than anyone else.  I mean I was wearing hoodies and longsleeve shirts and bracelets in the height of the summer I first started.  It was a hot summer I am sure some people were putting things together, things that would not have been put together if I had only had to make sure I was wearng trousers or shorts.  With time I mellowed with regard to people finding out.  I went out with shortsleeves last summer, more accurately I went out with lightweight hoodie and cardigan sleeves rolled up, I have no issue with people I don’t know knowing the extent of my self-harm but just in case I bumped into someone I knew I could unroll the sleeves and not be self-conscious.

 

Another thing I can say, with certainty, regarding self harm the initial reasons why you start self harming the part of the body you do are wide and varied.  My most extensively scarred area is my left forearm but I have cuts on both forearms, but upper arms, left shoulder, chest, left thigh, right knee and both calfs.

 

It is difficult to neat dress any of what I have said up into a succinct conclusion.

 

People can, will and do find reasons to justify the reasons why they cut where they cut.  Sometimes privacy leads, sometimes the desire to have someone notice, sometimes immediacy, sometimes the level of damage that can be exerted, sometimes the level of damage that can’t be exerted, whether the person is left or right handed, whether the person is using a knife or razor or compass or map pin or keys.

 

The more I read, and I suppose learn, about self harm the murkier its depths become.

 

What are your thoughts?

Leaving is the hardest thing to do, right up until you do it.

Hello

Yesterday I had my last session with T.

It was fine and not particularly intensive, not intensive at all.  Over the past few weeks we had been starting session with five to ten minutes of non-therapy conversation – how we both were, how the cubs were playing this season or whatever – so it did not feel overly odd to spend forty-five minutes doing something between therapy and casual chat.  It was probably more in-line with the more serious conversation you have with friends from time to time about life, the universe and everything.

He started by asking how I felt about therapy ending.  The truth is I have not consciously been preparing for it.  I figure that it would be best to spend by twenty-ish hours of therapy dealing with the things most present at each session so it has never felt like I had to squeeze in things or wasted time on things.  We spent one session talking about my relationship with my current girlfriend, though given the way the discussion went it was more about my relationship with a girlfriend rather than a specific, because that was the thing I needed help with at the time.  

I have become accustomed to that firewalled hour where I get to decompress, I quite like it.  I can understand why people, through their own choice, always pay for and attend therapy every week – there is something decidedly freeing about that the time is set aside for you.  I suppose it feels more legitimate and useful having an hour with a therapist each week than an hour at the driving range but whatever suits best I suppose.

There was a couple of weeks towards the start of our sessions when T was ill and there was almost a panic, certainly I felt like I needed to see him and talk to him.

The need for an hour, each week, where I, talk about me, then schedule a time to do it again, is over.  Which is good because my alloted twenty sessions are over.

I am glad that my lack of need conincides nicely with the sessions ending but, as I told T, I think it will only be now after I have stopped that I feel weird about stopping.  I suppose it is like teachers retiring at the end of term – there is nothing weird or out of the ordinary until the summer holidays are over – perhaps I will feel differently next week when I should have had another session.  But for now it feels tied off neatly.

He asked what I got out of the sessions which is an all together more interesting and difficult question to answer.  The proof of the pudding is in the eating of it (the proof is not in the pudding) and I have yet to take a bite.  There are things I know that have changed for the better.  There are things that have changed for the better that I prolly don’t even realise yet – the starts of threads whose ends I may never trace back to their beginnings.

One of perhaps the most important, if slightly weird ideas, is that I can choose how to react to what I think.  Now there are times when, if very depressed, choosing what I think is difficult.  But with the stability provided by the drugs I can choose to acknowledge or deny the thoughts I have, to spend more time on thinking things through positively.  I suppose it is best summed-up as being more mindful.

The most important thing I learned though was perhaps something I had always known but hadn’t appreciated.

I don’t believe that my friends – I am mainly refering to those without mental illness –  make constant decisions regarding their mood, or indeed to be well.  But I do think that everyone is carefully making decisions to keep themselves right.  I for a very long time believed that being recovered meant that all those decisions that I need to make every day in order to remain well (or at least not die) would be automatic.  

Now though I realise this isn’t about getting well and sticking auto-pilot on.

This is a paraphrase of something Craig Ferguson, recovered/ing alcoholic and general funny-man, said about rehab.  There seems to be two kinds of facilities those that people drop into for four weeks get sober and leave and almost invariably return to for another four week detox and so on and there are the good ones who after however long it takes to be sober reminds their patients that what lies ahead is a lifetime of vigilence.

 

I have a mood disorder.  I can and do take pills to stop the disorder making my moods too high or too low.  I take two different medications to try and stabilise my moods. I take an anti-psychotic to stop me getting manic in mood and an anti-depressant to stop me getting depressed in mood.

This was and maybe is compounded by a thinking problem.

I think it is asinine to believe that I can think myself out of depression, and there is no-way I can think myself out of mania.  When manic by all accounts from other people there is a point where by I cease to be me, that is to say that my personality is not just slightly amplified or muted depending on mood but outright different, maybe even character is too and so doing anything about that is not going to happen from within once it has happened.  But when depressed or hypomanic I can exercise some control.

There is a very stupid idea that a way to deal with manic depression is to act depressed when you feel yourself heading up and act manic when you feel yourself heading down.

I cannot control my moods, nobody can.

I am however better equipped, through therapy, through 20 hours with someone I like and trust investing sometime in dealing with my bad thinking, to deal with those moods when they happen.

 

I am and hopefully forever will be grateful for T who at the very least pointed out the the right path, if not walked alongside me until I was sure I knew the route.

 

He told me that enjoyed working with me and that he thought I was a bright, intelligent and talented young man.  He once, after I admitted I like the idea of being a psychologist, told me that my personality, personal experience of therapy, intelligence and empathy meant that I would probably make a good psychologist.  I have little reason to think he is lying, he has at times been critical of things I have said of myself, as it would be unethical for him to do so (this is my truth, let me have it).  He mentioned that perhaps we may see one another again.  Part of me really hopes we do not.

I told him that I couldn’t say I enjoyed it but that I could say that I have found it helpful and not horrible or traumatic, that I did not dislike it.  I told him that I was glad he was who he was, that he was my psychologist.  It is entirely possible that I could have got on better with someone else but T was a great psychologist, knowledgable without ever being condescending, patient, helpful and someone who realised the importance of being human ( after all we all know doctors can get a superiority complex). 

 

I will I suppose miss him and the therapy.

Both times with the people I have spent time speaking with, T and before him B, I have felt that perhaps if we were to have met under different circumstances we could have been friends.  Maybe this is a misimagining of the clinical relationship or maybe it is real.  Either way I do accept that these relationships occured through counsel and that to dwell on another instance of meeting would be silly.

 

All in.  Therapy has helped.  Only time will tell how much.

Well it is not natural, is it?

Hello

This is my answer to the question asked here. The question in essence being is manic depression natural or illness, well it is more in depth than that. Go read it I’ll wait.

I think that manic depression is natural.  Sort of.  Only in the way in which people come to have it is it natural.

I think that viral, bacterial, fungal and parasitic infections are not natural.  Noone is born with Chagas disease for instance (at least not that I am aware of).  Some infections are part of everyday life like coughs and colds but the viruses that cause these are not part of our natural make-up.

Manic depression is part of your natural make-up,  well it is if you have it.  Manic depression is not contagious and you can’t catch it from anything.  But it is natural, a series of genes that cause extremes of mood.  The flip-side to this though is that manic depression is an illness.  Although the changes to neurochemical balances are out of whack due to a natural process they are not natural in the sense of being normal.

Now there is a contigent of people who say that mental illness is a fraud because it isn’t an illness at all just an ability, a gift, that you are able to experience emotions more deeply.  I could vibe with this if my manic-depression was congruent to external factors.  If I am depressed and I won the lottery I may feel a bit better but I would not be swung into a mania.

The degree to which people are high or low in manic depression is pathological, they are naturally occuring for that person but that doesn’t mean it is not maladaptive.  Noone claims that people with Type 1 diabetes have a special gift for dealing with sugar in their diet, they recognise the naturally occuring but pathological state for what it is.  Mental illness, especially manic depression is no different.

I am going to deploy an extended metaphor that may not stand up to scrutiny.  Apologies.

Imagine a road, the road is well maintained but the ground either side of it is rocky and bumpy, beyond the rocky and bumpy ground is a deep dark lake on one side and a steep drop on the other.  So the scene described is your mood.  The lake is depression, the cliff mania, the rocky ground extremes of mood and the road plain ol’ normal mood.  Everybody at birth is given a bike, which they ride along the road.  Some people are very adept at cycling and don’t need stabilisers at all.  Some people are very shaky and need some encouragement to avoid leaving the road.  Some people are so very shaky that with stablisers they would be veering from rocky ground to rocky ground – some of these people veer so suddenly that they can end up in the lake or at the cliff edge, some drown and some fall.

It takes no genius to figure the metaphor out.  The place we should all be is on the road, (the irony of people frequently quoting about crazy people being the only ones for them is not lost on me – if it is lost on you, google is your friend) the road is natural moods.  Those people with the propensity to end up in the rocky ground might get a better appreciation of how icy cold the lake is or how wide and beautiful the view from the cliff edge is but neither of these things is condusive to travelling along the road and both these things carry with them the chance of hitting a rock and ending up drowning or falling of the cliff.  Now while the shaky cycling is natural, drowning in lakes, falling off cliffs and spending time slogging through rocky ground is not.

 

This is all getting very recursive and fractal and generally a bit weird.

Mental illness can be naturally occuring through genes and what-have-you it is still pathological.

T, my psychologist, told me he had a patient who had an exclusively medical depression, there were no great grievances or maligned parental intents or crappy relationships, just all of a sudden her brain stopped working right.  Now it wasn’t all of sudden, it was always going to happen, it just had no obvious cause.  The patient took an anti-depressant and was back to normal, when they stopped taking it the depression returned and when they went back on it the depression left.

To my mind to think of manic depression as anything but an illness is dangerous.  

I am getting bogged in the semantics of natural and unnatural.  Mental illness is natural to the individual but not to the population as a whole.

Manic depression is an illness and a significant part of its danger is its allure.  There is a stupid, stupid notion that depression makes you deep or have a great appreciation for life or whatever.  This shouldn’t be a newsflash people with depression are black holes for emotions, they are vacuous, dull, tedious, boring, maddening and frustrating.  You do not need to experience darkness to appreciate the light.  Manic people are irritating, irrational, irresponsible.    But manic depression seems to carry with it the idea that they are positives to the depression and the mania, it seems to do this so strongly that I wonder if perhaps it should be a symptom.  Because depression once you are out of it does carry a sense of the lifted veil of renewed experience and vigour and rebirth; and hypomania comes with increased productive and spontaniety and words and thoughts are always right and always at hand.  Even mania can be cast positively as boundless exuberance or as a natural psychonautical experience.

The truth though is that if you are reliant on your depression or mania to define who you are then the illness has won.  You are manic depressive not a person with manic depression.  Manic depressive is not something to aspire to be.

To come back to my perennial favourite Andy Behrman quote.  20% of people with manic depression are successful in spite of it.  Not because of it.

I will grant you that my depressions have probably granted me some positive things and the manias too, though less so and mainly of amusing anecdote varieties, but it is an illness that is screwing me over and I refuse to believe that anything so damaging can not be considered unnatural.

I don’t want wanton wont

Hello.

 

This is a relationship rant.  Please feel free to skip or otherwise ignore.

Though if you, L, do read this best do it alone.

Also, read the whole post

Clocks Will Carry On

Hello.

I’m ill again.

I write I am ill again like it ever stopped.  I told a friend once that it is never quiet in my head. For a few weeks it had been quieter, easily ignored in the din of talking to friends or watching telly, but not so much now.

One of the easiest ways that I can tell the noise is louder is that I stop listening to music.  I attended a course a couple of years ago, everyone in attendance was some flavour of mental; one of the people who heard external voices said listening to music helped to drown them out.  Thing is when the noise is thoughts and it is coming from inside your head it doesn’t really help.  It is like trying to listen to a boombox  in the car park when you are in the car with the radio blaring at full volume.

And the noise is there are the time.  Thing is, thing is, thing is.  I say thing is a lot.  We all have phrasings we are fond of, or gestures we commonly employ.  I suppose it is a shorthand of sorts.  ”Thing is” is just my lazy way of saying that I am going to explain something or posit my opinion.  There is no shame in these linguistic crutches but my head says otherwise.  This paragraph written specifically because of the “thing is” deployed in the preceeding paragraph and the voices, my internal voice repeating and talking over itself that I am stupid and dull and boring for saying “thing is” which in the instance of typing it my voices shouted that I use all the time.  I know that I do not and that there is an availability heuristic at work.  I am not saying it more than normal, but given those damned intrusive thoughts have decided to weild the phrasing as a weapon they readily recall every instance that I have said it.  Thing is this is not the worst of it.

Don’t let it be said that I can’t, when being insightful, have a sense of humour.

Last night I could not sleep.  Nor the night before that, or that, or til a point when I cannot remember.  The not sleeping has not being going on long, a week or two perhaps, but the slipping of regular sleep pattern has been going on for longer.  Perhaps not that I cannot remember but cannot identify the conclusive tipping point of not sleep.  I spent two hours trying to rock myself to sleep whilst my head played the same eight-note piece of incidental music, I can’t remember where that music came from though I think it was one of two movies I saw recently.  But it just looped and looped and I could not shift it.

In a way these stupid, not intrinsically harmful, thoughts are worse than thoughts of death.  That two hour of a looping piece of music was maddening, it blocked all other thoughts.  At least with the thoughts of death there can be some kind of discourse, an internal dialogue between irrational critic and rational or in lieu of that the critic at least has a forward moving progression, the thoughts change albeit in a march towards cruel fates at least there is movement.

I suppose that movement provides a hope of sorts that the path can be altered, the momentum used to swing back around to happy.  But repetition just breeds despair.  

The truly worrying thing about the noise, these intrusive thoughts, is if I start seeing options disappearing.

I can deal with being depressed.  It is a known.  The first time was scary, literally every day was worse than the last one.  It is now less frequently that I can say that I am having a day worse than one I have ever had before.  It is worthwhile pointing out that the worst days are not always punctuated by self-harm, or suicide, or other destruction, mainly the worst days leave me paralyzed staring at walls.  The day after worst days are the ones you should worry about, you dear friend still with the blackness of utter depression and now the energy to do something about it.  I can deal with depressed because I can still believe that option to be happy exists.

Being happy is an odd-one for me.  I don’t think it is over-rated, I think happiness is the goal.  I think the idea that sad is happy for deep people is deeply upsetting.  I just struggle to imagine a time that I am happy.  Not due to exacting standards, just because I have an illness that makes me pervasively depressed.  

The worrying bit, when the depression is at its worst, is that options start getting blinked out.  I can only get through depression because I believe that someday the possibility of being well exists, the option of living a life unencumbered by manic depression exists.  It may never happen but the belief that it could is enough.  However spend enough time staring at walls with eight notes of incidental music looping through your skull and it becomes a whole lot more difficult to hold on to the belief.

The gradually increasing noise in my head tends to be match to the things the noise suggests growing in malice.  From a quiet little voice calling my stupid when I ask Geoff about Susan and it turns out they split up last month and I’d forgotten, to the screaming that I am not worth the oxygen I inhale and the space that I take up and I should at the very least stop inhaling oxygen.

A gradually louder and tighter and constriction of my worth.

These thoughts don’t not sit graciously with my current relationship, which is increasingly falling apart and being put back together.

Fun times.

I won’t go dying.

Worry Not

Hello.

My girlfriend had a little whine about people worrying about her.  The way I see it is that the worry is legitimate.  The story is long and convoluted.  Thrown wine-glasses, hurled insults, beaten flatmate, scaremongering and a frequently drunk, oftentime criminal ex-boyfriend – of the flatmate – causing it are all involved.

This is a fairly crappy situation for her, and in turn for me as I can go to my flat.  She could come to my flat but, I suppose, then he would have won.

Thing is this post isn’t really about the relationship, or even really about her, it is about worrying.  The whine about worrying is a very depressed-person thing.

We are when depressed very good at equating someone worrying about you with someone caring about you and in turn we wonder why people care.

A had an epiphany of sorts whilst the girlfriend had her little whine.  It isn’t that people care about you and then worry about you it is that people care about you and worry about things happening to you.

I care, deeply, for the girlfriend.  I don’t worry about her, I think that she largely has enough wherewithall to keep taking one breath after the next and such.  I do worry about the flatmate’s ex boyfriend, henceforth to be referred to as FEB, will hurt her.  I am worried that something will hurt her.  She herself is not a source of worry.

And I think that is an important thing to remember when depressed.  People aren’t worried about you, they are worried about an illness.

Your Name Is Not On The List

Hello

Guess who is mental? Well yes I am, but you’d never guess.

I was talking with a friend about a mutual friend who looks likely to be diagnosed with depression.  Just to point out, the mutual friend had mentioned their impending diagnosis to both of us.  I am saying impending diagnosis like it is a foregone conclusion but that is not the case, it is however a likely conclusion.

It is due to talking to me that the friend made the appointment with the doctor and went along and told the doctor most of the things I thought hinted at depression.  Of course, being a good, little, impending depressive, they missed out some of what I had said because they weren’t important.  Of course the symptoms omitted were and indeed are important and I think they know that.

There is that damaging side to depression that seems not to appear on any diagnostic criteria (presumably due to the circular nature) that rarely people disclose all of their symptoms, if indeed they believe they have any.  Depressives need to be bad enough to seek help but weirdly once that appointment has been made suddenly you are smartening yourself up, washing yourself for the first time that month and trying really hard to avoid eyes tear stained with thoughts of suicide.  We sit down and say things haven’t been too good recently, when what we really mean is we only struggled to get out of bed four days this week, not six like last week.

My friend does this.  At least I think so.  Maybe not as extreme but they certainly are not entirely forthcoming with everything salient to proper diagnosis and treatment.  They also took weeks to eventually make an appointment.

I didn’t handle finding out that they had made an appointment well.  I asked about meeting them for coffee and they said they couldn’t make our usual time, I asked why and did not take kindly to be told, “You already know the answer.”  Not my finest hour.  In turn this probably lead to their initial reluctance to discuss how scary they find the diagnosis.

Thing is they don’t find the disease scary, they find the stigma scary.  

They, like I would guess most of with depression, are worried about that double-edged sword of labelling.  When I was labelled with bipolar, for diagnosis is labelling, there was that relief of what I have being treatable but also the dread of people using the label as a hook to hang their prejudices.

The friend worries about being found out and I struggle to think of any situation that I have been found out.

My mum frequently tells me that she knows more about me than I think she does, my standard reply is everything she knows about me is what I tell her.  This is somewhat true.  It extends beyond just my mother though.  

More than a few people knew, whilst I was depressed (with a diagnosis of depression at 18), that I had depression.  That though was mainly trying to find help in the wrong places.  If I had skipped straight to the friend or two who were genuinely helpful then only the two friends, my parents (only due to the pro viso that for SSRI treatment they needed to know) and people involved with my care.

I think more people know about the manic depression but I think that is the cumulative effect of two years of diagnosis and the situation I am about to present.  

One of the things I think happens most often with depression is that you tend to find out about other people’s after the fact.  Also I am fairly happy to say that I have manic depression, as that reveal is widely regard as me saying I have manic depression that is under control not that I am a raving loon.

I have only ever found out about other people’s depression after they have been experienced it with 3 notable exceptions.  One friend who I sought help from but who he himself was depressed, my first long-term girlfriend who told me she was depressed soon after I warned her about entering into a relationship with a depressive and an ex-girlfriend who continually pushes the boundaries of sanity, though not necessarily illness.

The girl who took me to A and E in 03 after I overdosed revealed to me she had once been depressed.

A friend who I sought help from revealed he had once been depressed.

A friend once revealed that they had tried to kill themselves

A friend once revealed that they had thought of suicide

A friend once revealed that they had been hospitalised

The list goes on, but the common factor is that all these things were past.  I know, in my real-life, two people who may or may not be depressed: one was and may still be and the other, the friend, may be.

It feels that depression works almost like AA sponsors.  In that you don’t help other people out of depression, people who have been helped out of depression help you of depression.  In turn, if the time comes, you reveal that you were once depressed and you help that person.  You pay it forward.

There is a safety to revealing it after the event.  It is more likely you’d be asked whilst depressed if you were taking anything than years after and are therefore relatively immune to that stupid nonsensical, nosy upstart who thinks that people with depression should pull themselves together.

I know dealing with depression is better when other people have an understanding of the illness.

I have run out of steam with none left to conclude. Sorry

Have at it.

Dear Diary

What is wrong with me? Cause I am fine between the lines.

I hate this post.  I have been trying to write it for 24 hours.

See something happened this week that I wanted to write about and I couldn’t and this post is ostensibly about why.  And yes I am now doing the writing myself out of writer’s block thing. Yeh, whatever.

I like this blog really I do.  I have never been a great diarist and this blog represents the first time I have been anywhere close to good.  I maintained a personal blog for awhile on blogger and then wordpress around 2005 but it was dull.  Before that I wrote a diary for about week when I was 13 but after it being read by friends and my mother I never did that again.  Well not until a year to the day before starting this blog, I wrote in the 2006/07 journal for about eight months, with an entry every three or four days.  Between that journal ending and the blog starting I posted on a self-harm forum but mainly stuck to a mental-health sub-forum.

This blog became something that journals and forum never could be: a dialogue about my mentalism.  The problem with just journalling for me is that all the thoughts that race through my head get caught in black ink on white paper but somehow that just means that they gain more weight and importance.  The problem with the forum was that it was almost call and response, you say im suicidal we say you have so much to live for, you never got to know anyone really.

I am now at hour 84, this is taking an age to write.

There is a line in a song I like which goes something like:  Where all my screwed up thoughts can hide because God forbid I hurt someone.

The more I think about this the more I realise that I annex parts of my life.  But I already knew that.

In high school I didn’t have a circle of friends until my last year there, and whether we like to admit it or not that circle was the also-rans.  We were composed of people not quite x-enough to be in x-clique.  We had fun and all but we were mainly friends with one another because there was noone else to be friends with.  During high school though I did have another circle of friends.  I knew these people through a friend of friend, who I suppose at some point was my friend as well but not anymore.  This second circle were essentially the same type of circle as the one I ended up in at high school but they were in the school year above and at another school.

When stuff started to go properly arse over tits I didn’t tell my high school friends, I doled it out to the other circle who by this point were scattered and at university.  I was lonely and desperate so I shared with people I liked and trusted but ultimately didn’t know all too well.  I was called selfish when I told one of them I was self-harming and another one told me that there was something that was making my life incomplete and I was filling it by being depressed.  Looking back it is almost a joke how many people who I didn’t know particularly well knew that I was cutting, depressed or both.  Off the top of my head I can count about ten.  Telling people was stupid.  So I stopped telling people, largely.

Thing is though I need/ed to offload these thoughts caused by the illness somewhere and a journal didn’t work and neither did the forum.  Hence the blog.

The blog thing was perfect, I was able to write down these thoughts and there was something therapeutic to getting them written down but also to knowing that people, gloriously anonymous people, read it.  Then people started commenting, I attracted some regular readers.  I would now go so far as to say I have made some friends through this blog but largely they only know me as I relate to the illness.  This blog was only ever meant to be about the illness.  Everything else I was happy to share with real friends but the illness I wanted annexed from my life.  Then I fucked up.

Having my online recovery blog persona bleed into my real-world persona was fine, a few close friends were told about my diagnosis and it was all gravy.  There are still only a few people who know I have manic depression, fewer who know I self-harmed and fewer who know about being suicidal.  The problem was bleeding the other way.

I have spoken to, face to face, seven people who have read this blog.  Two were people I met through this blog.  One was someone who I met a self-harm support group and told about the blog fairly quickly, another was her friend.  One was someone I knew through a friend and found me through a link to his site.  One is a friend and the last is my current girlfriend.

It should never have happened.  It has completed compromised the whole thing.

I dread to think how long you would have to go back to find a conversation between the friend and I where there is not a reference to a post.  The title of the blog comes from a defunct email address I used to have, the friend told me to assume that anyone who knew I was blogging and had received an email from me (at that address) could potentially be reading my blog.  And potentially they could be but it doesn’t matter if I don’t know that they are, at least not to the content, what does matter is the people I know who are reading this.

Not to discredit the people who only know me through this blog, I am sure there might be a slight pang of sadness in you if I croaked maybe not as it has been almost a month since the last post and noone has asked where I am, but the interactions with people who you know in real life are stronger somehow.  So it is a pain that some of those really real people are reading this blog.

The relationship with the friend has fairly well disintegrated to the stage that I can’t remember the last conversation we had that did not in some way mention this blog.  It has soured to the point that they shouted at me then commanded me to call my psych and tell them about my suicidal thoughts within ten minutes or they would before hanging up the phone.  In fairness I called back promptly and they were apologetic.

Both the friend and the girlfriend have the phone numbers and email addresses for my psychiatrist and psychologist and the number for the ward I would be admitted to if need be.  And more and more I find myself thinking “why the fuck did I let that happen?”.  See the simple truth is that they both had enough details that if they were sufficiently worried they could have spoken to someone who could provide them with the details they now both have.  But given that there is now no barrier to entry the need to call doesn’t need to be as high.  They also have access to the one place I actually siphon off all the unpleasant shit into.  This does not a good combination make.

This blog was only ever supposed to be about me being mental and it isn’t.  It was supposed to be one compartment that people I knew weren’t to see.  But it isn’t.

So now this is what what would have been a five hundred word post about something that happened earlier this week is reduced:  Something bad happened and I am not happy about the situation.

I am thinking about suiciding this blog and starting somewhere new.  Somewhere where well-meaning friends will not be over-informed and to that extent dangerous.

Dropping Out

Hello

I have dropped out of university.  Well that is sort of true.

Last week, and indeed the week beforehand, I was going to go home to talk to my parents about being ill and results from exams and such.   So I I broached the subject gently and with a lie when I eventually made it home this weekend.  It iasn’t really a lie, I merely posited I wasn’t sure what option to pick before I knew they wouldn’t over-react at the idea of me dropping out.  The options are really just to try and muddle on with the course take a suspension or to drop out.  Dropping out is not something I want to do but it is the best option.  My parents agree.  But dropping out brings problems.

Dropping out of university means that I am going to be a member of the general public.  Being a member of the general public largely means I need to occupy one of three groups.  Those three are 1] the employed, 2] unemployed getting benefits or 3] unemployed not getting benefits.  Really it is only one of two which is employed or benefits. 

Dropping out of university means that I need to think about where I am living.  Either to stay in Aberdeen or to move home to Glasgow.

Dropping out of university has implications to my care.

My lease is paid up to the end of June and there is the option of getting my room until the end of August.

Everything is a bit complicated and having a girlfriend complicates matters a little further.

See if I move home then I 150 miles away from my current, pretty good care team and my girlfriend.  This sucks because it means either doing something potentially illegal or least legally ambiguous by commuting the 150 miles for appointments or change care teams; in both cases the girlfriend is far away. Which sucks.

Getting a job would mean making appointments would become more difficultt regardless of whether I am in Aberdeen or Glasgow.

Getting benefits means a lot of hassle first to initial get it and then if circumstances change.

The girlfriend thing complicates things only because she may or may not be staying in Aberdeen due to issues surrounding her job.

Not entirelysure how this is all going to pan out.

Self harm as a Coping mechanism

Hello.

The first revision of this post appears after the jump, it remains to provide context for the comment left by Fadingstar86.  Swathes of it will appear in this hopefully more articulate version.

This post was prompted by something I read recently.  It should when finished be something I wish I had read before I started self-harming or soon after.  It could also very well be just an opinion I have, an erroneous one too, but maybe I am right, or maybe I will be just about onto something

A couple of nights ago I read a post that talked about how someone started self-harming, at some point in that post it referred to self harm as a method of coping and that bothered me.

Self-harm stories are similar to urban legends in that they are almost all the same with a variance in detail.  I don’t wish to minimise the importance of someone self-harming, at the most basic it is central to them, it can affect relationships and many other things but it is not special.  The stories almost always start after a period of time of feeling miserable or stressed or having something seemingly insurmountable to deal with (though sometimes it is a particular intense bout of emotion) followed by an accidental or unknowing act of hurting yourself that brings some relief (frequent bringing feeling where there had been nothing or bringing a more desirable feeling) then a deliberate and knowing act that produces the same effect and then it happens again and again.  The story is not uncommon, my story is embellished a little by my introduction to it by a friend though I am certain I am not the only person who knew a friend who did it before they started, statistics support this.

For a very long time, seven or so years, I self-harmed and though I talk about it although it is in the past, the scars are very present, I still have a months old wound that is still healing up, and perhaps more concerningly I cannot say with any real certainty I will not do it again, I certainly think about doing it.  Largely though I believe that those things are behind me.

I never really discussed what self-harm was to me with anyone until I started writing this blog.  People knew but largely, and most often correctly, it was my depressive thoughts that were discussed.  I never really had a language for talking about it but when the language developed I am sure that referred to it as a coping mechanism.  I want to call bullshit on self-harm as a coping mechanism because it is not helpful.

Saying it isn’t helpful is a hard pill for even me to swallow.  Last night I was struggling to sleep and I knew that if I made a small cut the relaxing relief washing over me would help me to sleep.  It is helpful in the short term, the very short term but largely it isn’t.  This short term help makes me reluctant to call it a coping mechanism,  self-harm did not let me cope with things, it allowed me to limp on a bit whilst the thing was still there.  I believe this to be true of all self-harmers,  I cannot believe that one incident or brief episode of self-harm provides anyone with the ability to cope with something, it may do something else but we will come to that.

Calling it a coping mechanism does not make it right or good.  I read in a book someone say that cutting their wrists was not to make them die but to let them live, that it was an anti-suicide.  I can understand that,  I have used self-harm to stave off suicidal thoughts that I would have acted on, landing myself in A and E for sutures is better than landing myself in a coffin but it does not make trips to A and E okay, or cutting myself at all okay, or any other form of self harm okay.  Calling self-harm a coping mechanism  feels like a way of excusing the inexcusable.

I stubbed my toe recently and it hurt a lot, it didn’t bring relief or any of the other feelings associated with when I self harm.  It is not the hurt itself that brings the relief it is the reaction to it that brings it and that reaction is all in the head.  There is a physical component, no doubt, but the reaction and the relief comes from your head not the hurt.  Your body is actively telling you that it is wrong, it used to hurt like hell when I removed the adhesive dressings that I dressed wounds with, but your mind is telling you otherwise.

I cannot, and I am willing to be proved wrong, think of an instance when self-harm would be the only appropriate course of action.  It may be the path of least resistance but it is not the only path, there are other ways to deal with things, to cope with things.

Your life is yours, it might not be perfect but it is yours, and you are responsible not for what happens to you but how you react to it.  Peoples’ lives are often miserable and have shitty things happen and the sad truth is that it is par for the course.  I can completely understand why people turn to self-harm, I did for years, but it never stopped me being miserable or the shitty things from happening.  The best self-harm offered was a mask.

Those increasingly short periods where the miserable, stressful, horrible things in my life were masked were excellent.  But to need and require that masking is asking for trouble, at the peak of my self harming I was cutting 7 or 8 times a day just to maintain a level where things felt bearable.  But those multiple cuttings never once stopped the miserable, stressful, horrible things being real and present.  The best I can see self-harm offering is a way to ignore and distract yourself from whatever shit it is you want to be distracted from long enough for it to go away.  And this isn’t coping in the truest sense, that is scraping by.

Perhaps I am confusing coping with and dealing with, I largely believe these are the same things. 

The really insidous and hideous thing about self-harm is that it hard-wires itself into your brain as a reaction to bad things happening.  You may very well end up requiring it for things that are not as bad as the thing that came before.  All that time spent waiting for the bad thing to go away is just training yourself to rely on self-harm.  Relying on self-harm sucks.

Cutting my arm when I was horribly depressed didn’t make me less depressed, it just brought another emotion to the front for a time and then it went back to being depressed with the added kicker of a bleeding wound.  Self-harm in this way leads to a downward spiral – depressed, cut, relief, guilt, depressed, cut, relief, guilt and so on.  It is similar to alcoholism and drug abuse in this way, the desired effect is ever decreasing with the initial problem remaining untouched.

I don’t think I will ever be a happy person, I don’t think I have it in me, but I am damned sure that things can be better than this and I am also damned sure that self-harm has never contributed positively to my life.  I recognise and freely admit that it let me get through tough times but it has left me covered in hundreds of scars that make me feel sad.  All those times I was close to suicide or feeling overwhelmed it would have been much much better to do something other than self-harm.  As I said before I cannot think that a single occasion could exist when self-harm is the only answer.

Self-harm was the answer for me because I didn’t feel strong enough to tackle something that felt, feels insurmountable and more than anything I didn’t want to share how screwed up and horrid and painful those thoughts were.

But taking the more difficult path ultimately is more helpful.

I stopped self-harming gradually, really gradually.  So deeply ingrained was it as a behavior it had to be tackled before anything else could.  The self-harm made me too unstable to treat.  It took months to get the self-harm to a manageable level,  the sort of level where I could deal with the underlying shit that was causing me to self-harm.

Only now, and very loosely, am I coping.  I am coping in that I am recognising how big this illness is and how much time I will need to treat it.  I still want to be free from this and quickest way is suicide but I am willing to stick it out and increase the deadline a little and that feels like coping.  Coping for me involves a lot of medication, weekly therapy and doing not much else.  Self-harm would just mask the horrible stuff for awhile and right now I’d prefer to have it not masked than be visiting A and E again.

I can only see self-harm as a bad thing.

Dealing with self-harm is easier said than done, I know, but it is really just a two, albeit broad, stepped process.

1. Find a way to deal with the urge to self harm,  there are websites full of these distraction techniques, go look them up.
2. Once you have had a significant, and that is your call, period free of self-harm get to work on whatever it was that made you want to self-harm. 

Most simplisticly, ask for help, get it sorted.  Your life is yours, it may have shitty things happen to it so don’t add to that yourself.

Have at it.

jump

Emotional Intelligence or It Is Crap, What Now?

Hello.

Firstly urgh.  Most of my posts take all of an hour at most to write, this has taken me most of the day and the reason bugs me.  I am being thwarted by something that I don’t believe exists and that is writer’s block.  I am resorting to that stupid piece of advice that you have to write your way out of it, hence this opening paragraph.  I think perhaps I have too many thoughts trying to push through the writing orifice.  The writing orifice being the bit of my brain the funnels ideas, thoughts, feelings and syntax into a readable/listenable form.

This is mainly stuff that happened with T yesterday and the interluding day that the thoughts have stewed and fermented into something stronger.

The night before I saw T I was speaking to a friend about things.  I told him that the lithium is doing the same job that it is last time, it is making me stable but miserably so.  I have a theory I am working on that bipolar puts a stop on working through normal real-life crap appropriately.  Getting a bank charge because you forgot to transfer money to your account the direct debit comes out of sucks, exponentially so when the bank charge was eight times that the direct debit; now in real-life you suck it up, call the bank explain the situation and make the best of it, in bipolar-life you think life sucks and now this where is the noose.  So all these stupid petty things like bank charges or parking tickets or an argument with your girlfriend stack up to be dealt with appropriately.  But other stuff builds up to.  Back to T.

This is skipping to the end a bit so this post is likely to be one of those circularly repeating things to articulately get points across types, when I was diagnosed, after an initial want to laugh, my first thought was “this is crap, what now?”  This is a very, very pragmatic and in turn very, very male approach.  Problem identified, so identify solution, deploy solution and your done.  The best case I was offered was lithium treatment; the best case would be find a stable therapeutic dose in around three months, then spend twenty-seven months on that dose before gradually tapering to nothing and getting on with life now that bout of the bipolar was behind me.  It has not been that simple but my approach to dealing with it has and that has been a mistake.

I never really considered that bipolar might, y’know, put a bit of a dent in the plans that I had.  I never really talked it through.  Rightly or wrongly at the time of the diagnosis I was working on getting a degree and instead of stepping back and thinking about what would be best, like taking time out or whatever I blindly marched on.  I was so incredibly stupid to think that a diagnosis and some pills would take away the the debilitating part of it.

Part of the not talking things through is because my parents don’t really get it.  This is unfair,  my parents don’t quite know how to approach me nor I them.  My parents are helpful, they are patient beyond belief but because we haven’t actually talked it through properly it sucks.  My dad reinforces the notion that my intelligence should be making this easier, see the backhanded “how can someone as intelligent as you self-harm?” comment, but he doesn’t like finding out it is worse.  I don’t like finding out it is worse but when I tell him that I have bipolar, that I self-harm, that I have needed stitches or that I have tried to kill myself it all feels like my failings rather than symptoms of a worsening illness; this makes conversations like it really fucking hurts right now difficult because it feels like I am letting him down by not getting better despite him sorta trying to help me get better.  My mum is easier to explain, I say that things are crap and she gets upset because her son is unwell, I just hate hurting her.

So all three of us have been clinging to this stupid flimsy idea of just getting through the degree and it’ll be rosy.  This is horse-shit.

One of the insidious things about bipolar, for there are many, is that it fucks you in two ways.  The first way is the messy mood thing,  when you are being tossed and turned by the waves of depression and mania it is really really difficult to get a fix on the horizon.  Once the storm calms you are still left miles from shore figuring out how to get back.  And it is that second part that me and my parents have ignored.  Some of my friends have had the clarity to point out that at some point I need to work on the fact I have a lifelong debilitating illness but my parents and I were busy dealing with the day to day messy moods.

What I need, what I needed was time.  I do not think that dropping out of the course the moment I received the diagnosis would have been smart but waiting until my third third year was going arse over tits wasn’t a smart move either.

I had this idea for awhile that all kids in the states were raised to believe that one day they could be president.  Now my parents never instilled in my young mind a notion that I could run the country but they did from a young age instill the notion that I could do whatever I wanted to do if I worked at it.  There is a song I like which has a line in it that goes “the best you can do is the best you can do”  and this is entirely right however one of the most stupid things anyone tell you to do is do your best, firstly because half-assing anything is just stupid and secondly because it promotes the asinine notion that your best is good enough.  If the best I can do is score 25 out of 30 that matters squat if the pass mark is 27.  What I am getting to is accepting limitations.

I never had fanciful notions of what I wanted to be when I grew up but I also, until about now, never accepted that bipolar should be a limitation.  

Anyone who has read this site for more than a few weeks will recognise this.  Andy Behrman,a manic-depressive author, said of people with bipolar 20% kill themselves, 20% need constant care from family and friends, 40% lead jobs as cashiers and tellers and 20% lead highly productive lives.  I have always wanted and continue to want to be in the last 20% the highly productive ones, right now I drift closer to suicide though.  Now while this is a crude model it is still a model.

I need to figure out what my limits are due to this disease.  Maybe the limit will be as simple as taking a year to get my head sorted and then go and start on that path to a career.  Maybe the limit is working in the local supermarket.  Either way I am not getting any closer to figuring this stuff out by making concessionary attempts at this degree.

So this is what I am going to spend me weekend talking to my parents about.  Wish me luck.

Infuriating disparity or Arrrrgh

Hello

Today, as is becoming custom, I met with T today.  We will come to that in the next post.

Yesterday I met with Dr P’s staff grade doc as he (Dr P) is away on holiday.  The staff grade, Dr G, was late.  I was supposed to see her at half one and eventually saw her at quarter to two.  I was hoping and praying for two things: one, to get more than three days supply of lithium and two, to have a short appointment.  I left an hour later after picking up a three day supply of medication.  I had hoped to go home today and come back next Wednesday, instead due to only getting at most a four day supply I got three days to see me until Friday, four over the weekend and then I need to be back here on Tuesday to get the rest.  The hope of spending a relaxing week at home is gone, instead the weekend will be rushed and I need to make two hour-long round trips to the hospital all because of a comment I made weeks ago.  Yes, I am still suicidal but consistently the thing that makes me feel guilty when I think of doing anything is that my parents would be left without a son, how horrible do they think I am that I would not only kill myself but do it whilst in my parent’s home.  The only real reason that I can come up with for withholding the lithium is complicity.  This is of course not a real reason but an asinine one.  It is just infuriating that they think I am of enough risk to restrict the numbers of days of lithium I can have at time but they are perfectly okay with me being out in the big bad world with high bridges, nooses, fast trains, razor blades and all sorts of other ways to off myself.  It is the disparity more than anything.  It is made even more nonsensical given the last time(s) I tried to off myself it was by hanging.  At least with a lithium overdose I could change my mind or more likely vomit so violently that I would bring up enough that I wouldn’t die but that I would feel pretty grotty for a few days. /rant (nerd jokes rule)

Balancing act

I met with T today and we discussed suicide.

We came to the conclusion that suicide is an escape hatch from unbearable pain.  I told him that I can’t envision a day when I will be happy to have the escape hatch locked and inaccessible.  To which he told me that I needed to find reasons to live.  Right now I only have reasons not to die.  Somehow that distinction is important.

T likened the likelihood of need the escape hatch to a see-saw (/ teeter totter ?) with life on one side and death on the other.  The more reasons you find to die the more the balance slips to death and the more reasons to live you need to counteract the weight.

Right now the balance is not balance, in fact it is quite tilted.

Sorry for being a boorish dullard with all this talk of death.

These thoughts will be over soon no doubt