A Little Soul Searching and Suicide

One of the things that I touched upon yesterday was that I’ve been introspecting more than usual. Today I’ll talk about how close I got to killing myself and the impact of the psychiatric ward had, tomorrow I’ll touch on my struggles and search for a future.

As I wrote before, I was very close to killing myself. I even did a trial run with some klonopin and vodka screwdrivers. Very soon after that, at the pressuring of my psychiatrist, I went to the hospital and checked myself into their psychiatric ward. I recovered very quickly with a high dose of zyprexa, but I was left with a lot of time to think there and afterwards.

During my stay, I pretty much spent my time eating, sleeping, and reading. It was boring and I was the youngest person there. Most of the people had gone off their meds and were detached from reality. Also, their “library” was about 1/5th of mine and mainly consisted of romance novels and pop fiction. I read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and stuck to my room.

Initially, I didn’t identify myself with needing to be hospitalized. It was a protective step to keep me from killing myself, but I didn’t see myself as detached from reality in the same way as the other people there were. I was in a deep sense of denial about the dangers that I presented to myself. So day one I pretty much stewed in isolation. But as the days wore on, awareness of myself slowly crept into my psyche. While the others there were rather disconnected from reality, so had I, just a few months ago. It was tossed around then that I should perhaps check myself into the ward. In addition to that, I was disconnected myself. I thought that suicide was the only way to escape from the dark voices. Very quickly, I started to see that I belonged there. And that is a frightening concept to me, that I belonged in a psychiatric ward.

That realization really shattered my self image of a high functioning individual. For a year I was hammered with event after event and still made it through it and continued on. But the cracks just kept growing in size and I wound up trapped inside a wing at the hospital. All the time that the cracks were widening I still gripped onto the self image that I was high functioning and able to take it all. And in looking back, that fiction both kept me going, and made the fall even harder. I failed to keep a realistic perspective and I paid for it.

After being released, I was rather shaken, I thought of myself as not always being high functioning. But in addition to shaking my self image and still being depressed, I was also struck by the fact that a year later, I still had to deal with suicidal thoughts. I thought I was done with them and it turned out that I wasn’t. And it was a rather sober time of reflection on the fact that I really did have a deadly disease and I hadn’t shaken it yet. It appeared that I had the right cocktail, but I didn’t, and lithium alone will not be enough to keep me stable and safe. That disheartened me and started to raise a lot of questions about how I was going to live the rest of my life.

That leaves my thoughts for tomorrow, where I started to grapple with my future and whether it would look anything like I wanted.

Back, Hopefully for Good

I’ve been meaning to get back into writing this blog for some time now, but I’ve been finding excuses not to. But now I’m starting again, back at square one. And a fair amount has happened since the last time that I posted.

The rundown is that I’ve been climbing a slow and steady pace out of depression. But what comes with depression is a bunch of bad habits. Bad eating habits, television watching habits, lack of will to do things, massive amounts of smoking (nearly half a pack a day of american spirit blacks, my lungs are killing me). And even though I’m no longer depressed, I have the habits of one. But that’s starting to come to an end.

I’ve been doing things nearly every day and am making it a habit to walk at least two miles every day. The weather here in wisconsin has been beautiful (apart from some very chilly days) and I’ve tried to make the most of it. I’m also eating more fruits and trying to cut back on calories since I’ve grown a little pudgy from the zyprexa and lithium. I’ve also started to kick my smoking habit (2 days and not a single one). And now, I’m starting to blog again.

Included in all of this is a lot of deep soul searching. This last year has done a number on me and being depressed really brought it back to where I was a year ago, only more so. I kept thinking that I was over the worst of it, only to find something else to stand in my way. Over time, that really drove a deep sense of defeatism into me and in starting to shake it, I’ve had to introspect a lot more than I normally would. A process that is still ongoing.

I’d like to really get into the soul searching stuff, but I’m going to pace myself and give myself a project to do tomorrow. But, in the mean time, it’s good to be back and hopefully regularly posting again. I don’t have any excuses not to.

I’m Back and Safe From Nearly Killing Myself

Wow, it’s been weeks since I last posted. I’ve thought about posting for a while, but depression got in the way.

Around Christmas my depression intensified to unseen levels. I was having flash backs and flash forwards where I relived all the horrible experiences of my past and dreamt up impossible but horrifying futures. I’ve had this before, but it was getting out of hand. After talking it over with my psychiatrist, we decided to try out an antidepressant, specifically the SNRI welbutrin. It was recommended because it had the least chance of flipping me into a mania, and that was the last thing that I needed if I wanted to stabilize.

Things were looking good after about a week on it. I felt my energy level getting boosted and the flashbacks were almost gone. But I wasn’t completely better. I still had those flash forwards where everything looks bleak and I believe that I’ll end up a substantial failure. This was coupled with severe anxiety, which is almost always present in my depressions. And after a while, the constant threat of failure and doom ate away at my will to live.

It started off as just a desire to disappear. I wanted to disappear from any obligation because it seemed that it would turn out for the worse and I also wanted to disappear from my mind that was telling me these things. Medication wasn’t working quickly enough and I began to think that it would never work. I was wrong in thinking this, but I was not very rational at the time. What was worse is that as I had more energy than in a typical depression. I started to have small mood swings that made me impulsive as well as deeply despairing. This was nearly fatal.

I began to plot out how I was going to kill myself, but I didn’t know what to do at the time. I didn’t like the idea of hanging myself and I didn’t like the idea of the pain involved with cutting my wrists. I was also overwhelmed by a fear of failure. If I failed then I would wear the scars of my attempt for the rest of my life. That was too much to bear. But being a pharmacy from all the drugs that I have been prescribed, I figured that I must have something in there. And I settled on klonopin with alcohol. But I didn’t know how I would feel when killing myself. I wanted it to be peaceful and relaxing, nothing violent like I had just poisoned myself. I am very upper middle class when it comes to suicide. So I did a test run with a few milligrams of klonopin and some vodka screwdrivers. I didn’t know if it would kill me, but I figured that it would give me a taste of what it would be like to try. I passed out rather quickly and woke up to my girlfriend standing over me later that night. She didn’t know what I had just tried, she thought I had fallen asleep on the couch.

After waking up, I had my plan in place. Klonopin was what I desired, a drowsy stoned way to die and I had the means. Really, it was just a matter of time before I downed the rest of the bottle and my xanax with some alcohol and I would finally have escaped my brain and it telling me that I’m a failure. I didn’t want to set a date and time, what I wanted from it was an escape from the feeling of pure failure and helplessness. It was, in a way, a reminder that I was still in control of something.

For the next couple of days I didn’t do anything, but I remembered that I had to schedule an appointment with my psychiatrist. From there it sprung into my mind that I needed to at least talk to someone, anyone, and maybe get a little help. So I called and surprisingly got in that afternoon. In retrospect, that timing probably saved my life. I went and I explained everything to my psychiatrist, who was very worried. We discussed what to do next and she began to make phone calls to check if my insurance covered in-patient care at some psych wards as well as whether they could admit me if needed.

I wasn’t sold on the idea of committing myself. I hadn’t been to a ward before and I had no clue about what my freedoms would be or what I could do. The thought also scared me tremendously. Going there would be admitting that I was too dangerous to myself to be left alone. That’s a hard one to swallow and it ripped away at my dignity. It was also a question of just how split my mind had become, if I committed myself, then I would essentially be taking the stance that my brain was trying to kill me and I couldn’t do anything about it. It’s a hopeless option, one where you cannot do anything for yourself except for give up your freedom. In addition to the pride, it also meant exposing myself to my parents. I have sheltered my parents from the darker parts of my mind for quite some time now. I never wanted to admit to them just how damaged I can get at times, and the thought of showing myself to them made me feel like a failure. A thought which is entirely incorrect, but in the throws of a depression, everything makes me feel like a failure. Seeing it this way, I initially baulked at the idea of going. I was going to wait a few days to see if the suicidal thoughts stuck around, and if they did, then I would go and admit myself to the ward.

But that night, I talked to my girlfriend about what had happened and what might happened. I told her about the klonopin experiment and from there on it was tears between the two of us. It shocked me enough to realize that people still cared and that I would be hurting them if I killed myself. And so I decided to commit myself.

I’ll go from there tomorrow and talk about my experiences in a psych ward.