So I tried to kill myself (Part 1)

So I tried to kill myself about a week and a half ago. Again.  And I think I should talk about that.

This is partly because the way I was treated by the hospital terrified/angered/hurt the fuck out of me, and I want to tell people about it.  And partly I just think it would be helpful to be talking about this. And partly because I have been reading the madosphere for years and never really engaged with it, I feel like I know all these bloggers and none of them know me, and I see the support they all give each other and I kind of would like to be part of that.  So. Um.  Hi? I don't know if this will be helpful to anyone else, but given how helpful I've found other people's blogs about their crazies in making me feel less alone, maybe this will be of some use to someone somewhere.

So I guess you should have some background on who I am and that?  It's traditional to lay out all my labels and identities and diagnoses yadda yadda, isn't it?  Let's see... I'm a 27 year old cis white poly bi/pansexual kinky geeky atheist disabled sex-positive feminist female switch with fibromyalgia, IBS, possibly TMJ disorder,  trichotillomania, with either severe recurrent depression or bipolar disorder, with anxious/panic features, who was largely emotionally/verbally but also to a certain extent physically abused as a child. And I live in Wales. I've probably missed some.  Mostly I'm just me, though.

Obviously I'm going to stay anonymous on here, I don't want family or friends that I'm not close to finding this, and I don't know about legal ramifications for talking about this if I were to identify the hospital in question. If you want a name for me, call me Red.

I've had problems with depression literally as long as I can remember.  I remember thinking about suicide in first school.  It was a long time before it occurred to me it might be an actual thing, an illness, not just... y'know, me.  That was just how life was, how *I* was.  Sometimes I was okay and sometimes I would cry for hours for no particular reason and I hated myself and knew everything would always be terrible and I would always be alone.  Sometimes I was better than okay, I was AWESOME; I was special; I could enjoy and connect with the world in a way other people didn't seem to be able to do, I could feel this incredible joy in the tiniest things and kind of step beyond the boring every day life that everyone else seemed to live and see the world in a different way.  Although I also hated myself for how I was when I was like that 'cause I'd talk too much and too fast and be too silly and too hyper and talk about things people didn't want to hear and push jokes past the point where they were funny or break the social contract in some way or other, and so I was pathetic and annoying and who would ever want to be my friend?

Anyway. Talking about my childhood could take a very long time and I've a lot to get through, so I'll move on.  History of my crazies another time, perhaps.  Very very long story short I think I was ill pretty much my whole childhood, and I remember the first time I had a period of stability that lasted a few weeks I was 16 or 17, and I was amazed, I remember wondering if this was what it was like for other people, to go actual weeks without feeling terrible or hyper, to just be... okay.  Happy sometimes, sad other times, but just regular-sad, not overwhelming everything is terrible killing myself is the only answer kind of sad.  It was at the beginning of my first long term relationship. Since then I have had periods of relative stability on and off, and periods of being anything from mildly to very unwell.  I tried various antidepressants with little success, although moclobemide seemed to help some of the time.

I had a couple of years of stability recently, I believe in part because of taking tramadol on a regular basis for my fibromyalgia (it has some SSRI properties, which I didn't know when I was taking it) - when I came off the tramadol a little over a year ago I went suddenly and severely batshit.  I was hypomanic for about a month and then severely depressed after that, and then swung between the two states with very few stable patches in between, generally having around 3-5 days of hypomania followed by a week or two of depression, although it wasn't always that neat a pattern.  It has been an absolute bitch of a year, in various different ways. In no particular order, my boyfriend of around 4 years - with whom I was trying for a baby before the crazy kicked back in (that's why I came off the tramadol) and I had to stop, because I clearly wasn't mentally fit to be a mum - broke up with me, in part because of my physical and mental illnesses, and the trigger for finally ending it was something I did when hypomanic that upset him, I had an incredibly intense and messy relationship with my best friend that lead to me having to break off contact with him completely for about 6 months, I was fired from my job because I was too unwell to work, and thus also lost my career because I had to stop the training course I was doing, and also accept that my physical state had deteriorated to the point where I would never work full time again, nor even part time unless I had a very significant improvement in my condition or treatment thereof, I lost my income but was too ill to deal with applying for benefits, I accrued a large amount of debt because of having no income, and couldn't handle communicating with the debt collection agencies and had bailiffs coming round and at least one debt went to court in my absence and is now coming out of my benefits, and there are still debts accumulating massive interest on that I haven't been able to deal with, I couldn't afford to eat, and subsisted off an average of 400-800 calories a day for months, and started developing eating disordered behaviour/thought patterns pretty much as a result of that as far as I can tell (luckily I managed to kick that one after a few months), my GP agreed that I probably had bipolar disorder, and so I had to try to deal with accepting that, and thus the fact that this could stay with me my whole life, on and off, and also try to accept the fact that despite desperately desperately wanting children I probably shouldn't ever do so, because when I'm ill I'm completely incapable of being a mother - I can't look after myself, let alone someone else - and even if I have another long period of remission it could always come back (and also deal with my sisters and cousins and several friends all falling pregnant and having babies), I realized more fully than before that I was abused as a child, and have been trying to come to terms with that, I applied for benefits eventually with assistance from friends and was rejected for DLA and couldn't face the appeals and missed the deadline, I had lots of problems with my ESA, which wasn't paid for about 6 months despite me being eligible for it, and I've watched the government welfare reforms with increasing terror, and am still waiting to hear back from my medical assessment to find out whether I'm going to be found fit for work and have to appeal... I think there's more but that's most of the worst of it.

It's been a hell of a year.

I've been trying to focus on getting well, but it's been pretty fucking difficult.  Every time I feel like I start to make progress and maybe starting to sort my life out a little bit I end up having another bad patch not long after and any progress I made gets completely destroyed.  And my physical health makes dealing with my mental health even harder - even without bipolar disorder it's hard to handle being in continual pain, and all the other symptoms I get from my fibromyalgia.  Some days I can barely walk at all, even with two crutches. And I don't have any effective pain relief - I take tramadol but it has very little effect.  And I've been trying to deal with all this with no professional input bar my GP because services where I live in wales are massively over-subscribed and under-funded.  I've been on the waiting list to see a pain specialist for between 6-12 months now (can't remember exactly when I was referred, but it was last year some time), and I've been on the waiting list for counselling - just a crappy little 6-8 sessions of CBT/problem-focussed counselling/stress management type counselling for nearly 6 months I think now as well.  I don't have a CPN or access to the crisis team or a counsellor or a psychiatrist or anything.  I saw a rheumatologist once to get my fibromyalgia and IBS diagnoses, but he's 3 hours away so I can't see him ongoing.  (He was the second rheumatologist I saw, the first one was in my town, but he told me fibromyalgia doesn't really exist, and I also don't have it, it's all in my head, and there was no support he could offer me. I wrote a song about him. It's called 'cunt'.)  I've seen two physiotherapists, years ago, both of whom were completely useless and were far too overworked to give me any real care, who both seemed to think I just had a touch of backache that would get better if I exercised more.  I've not got a support worker, I haven't been assessed by occupational health or provided with any aids for walking or getting round my house - I bought my crutches and raised toilet seat myself in the end.  I asked my doctor when a friend told me these services existed (no one professional signposted me to them) and she told me I had to contact social services myself to get assessed, but cause of my phone phobia and fear of talking to strangers I couldn't do it.  I eventually found I could e-mail as a first step, so wrote to request assessment to see if I could get a support worker, and the e-mail I got back told me they could refer me to the team for helping people with managing their debts, and I didn't know how to explain that actually I needed more help than just that, and ended up just leaving it.  I'm really really not good at talking to strangers, especially about this stuff, and when it gets bad I just shutdown and get terrified of talking to anyone.  So I know some of the lack of support may be my own fault - if I was able to ring social services and explain what I need and ask for it then I might be able to get a support worker.  But the reason I need a support worker is in part to help with the ringing people to ask for help with what I need, because I can't do it!

Anyway. All this is by way of explaining that I haven't had such a great time of it lately. And whilst the most traumatic parts are past, I'm still dealing with all the fallout from it, and the depression is more pernicious in some ways than it used to be, because it has so many genuinely bad things to fuel it, I can't say it's just my brain lying to me, because there's truth wrapped up in a lot of it - I really *will* be in pain for the rest of my life most likely, I may not be able to work again, I will never have enough money to live the way I want to live or do many of the things I want to do, I may well never be able to raise a family, etc. etc.  Which makes the crazy parts harder to identify.  And rather than it just being a flare up that will pass, that I can deal with, it's started to feel like a marathon, an endurance test that's been going on and on and on, that will never let up, and so I just sometimes don't feel like I have the resources to fight it any more, and often that there's no point fighting it, that after a certain point it just becomes dumb, the sensible thing is just to give up, because it's never going to end, it's just enduring this forever.  I just feel so hopeless when it hits, and like I've been fighting this for so long and I can't do it any more.  I've felt like killing myself is the only option for a lot of the last year, but I haven't felt ready to do it just yet.  It's felt kind of inevitable though.

So I guess it's not that surprising that I ended up trying to kill myself a week and a half ago.  In some ways it feels like it came out of nowhere, nothing happened to trigger it, nothing went wrong, no bad news, no one hurt me, I went to a local music festival and then the pub and chatted to friends all night and laughed and joked and went home and swallowed 60 carbamazepine 100mg tablets.  In other ways it feels like this has been coming for a long time, and it had been getting closer over the past few weeks, for all I'm appearing to function more than I was, I've just sort of run out of hope and got too tired of fighting.  I know some of my friends were worried about me, I'd talked about struggling with suicidal feelings with a few of them, and although that's always been a feature of my depression I think people were aware it was worse this time.  But there wasn't really anything anyone can do.  No one can reach into my head and make it better.  People talked to me and spent time with me, listened to me when I talked about crazies, tactfully made sure I was taking my meds.  What else could they have done? I know the obvious answer is to say that I should have been sectioned if I was at risk, but it's a very hard call to make for your friend, especially given being sectioned is a deeply unpleasant experience by all accounts - it's not to make you well, it's just to put you in a place where you can't kill yourself - it often makes people *more* ill, not better, and it can have serious long term ramifications once it's on your file.  All that is irrelevant though, given there's basically no chance the doctors would have sectioned me.  Again, massively underfunded and oversubscribed.  I couldn't even get counselling, there's no way they'd section me unless they thought I was actually going to kill someone (else) as far as I can tell.  I saw the mental health team here once, years ago, a matter of days after I'd made a sober attempt to kill myself my slitting my wrists - it wasn't a planned and well executed attempt, it was an act of desperation, and I wasn't entirely sure if I was ready to die, but I wanted to get as close as I could and see if I could manage it.  I opened up something that sprayed blood, but didn't *spurt* so presumably wasn't an artery, and when a friend guessed what I was doing (they were tipped off by me suddenly becoming very calm when we'd been talking on the phone earlier and I'd been desperate and tearful beforehand) I admitted it and agreed to go to hospital.  But it was still, y'know, a suicide attempt.  And I was told that I wasn't ill enough for them to even offer me counselling, because I was seeking help, so I couldn't be that bad.  So just having suicidal thoughts really wouldn't have gotten me sectioned round here.  And given I've had suicidal thoughts since I was a child I doubt my friends really will have realized that I was at risk more than before. They're not professionals, they have no training in this shit, they're just good friends that care about me, some of whom have their own crazies so have some understanding of what I'm going through.

I know I probably don't sound too bad right now, I currently have more insight than I have in quite some time. It's only the last couple of days that I've felt like there is maybe even some tiny possibility that things might somehow be alright.  I'm mostly trying not to think about it, because I'm very very far from being sure things will be okay, and I'm scared that if I look at anything in my life straight on I will plummet again, but I'm managing to deal with the hours okay, and focus on here and now, and I have enough insight right now to know I don't always want to die, and that I have been happy before.  I'm not really certain of very much beyond that, and that happiness still seems inaccessible to me, but it's still vastly better than where I was.  Yesterday I actually had a nice day, I actually enjoyed things.  Still not that deep-down happiness, but closer to feeling actually happy than I have in a while.  Mind you, I also seemed to have tipped up into a minor hypomanic episode, I was talking a lot and fast and had far more energy than usual and ignored the pain to do things, ignored consequences/pacing (and have been in a ton of pain and very tired today as a result) and felt confident and personable and able to talk to strangers and stuff.  So probably not a sign of increased stability, but at least it's a let up in the wanting to die, which is very very welcome.  I'm not sure where I am today.  I've been a little physically agitated, tapping a bit, and I've written a lot, words are coming easily, which happens more often when I'm up, but I'm not euphoric and I don't think I was talking lots or especially fast.  I haven't had lots of physical energy, I'm exhausted and in pain from yesterday, but being able to write all this indicates more mental energy than usual.  So I guess probably very slightly up, but only a teeny bit.  I'm nowhere near the unpleasant highs where my brain is going too fast and I can't concentrate on anything or think and I'm talking too fast and too much and way too openly and impulsively and I'm continually tapping and twitching and want to do something but can't do anything and want to rip open my skin because I feel unbearably... something, I don't even know what, like I want to do something but it doesn't even exist, a feeling like hunger or thirst but I don't know what so I can't sate it, and I want to fuck, good god do I want to fuck, and I want to get my nipple pierced, and I want to make things and I want to cut my hair and I want to meet people and talk to everyone and do all the things and I can't do any of them I can't even finish a thought because it jumps to the next one and everything's disconnected and jerky and and and. Yeah.  There are degrees of hypomania that are genuinely enjoyable and useful, but it often tips over past that into a place that's as unpleasant as the downs, just in a completely different way.  And there are the mixed episodes.  Those are horrible and dangerous.  They're probably when I feel most *crazy*.

Anyway. Right now I'm about the closest I've been to stable in a little while, so I'm going to try to get down as much as I can about what happened. These are very long posts, I'm really no good at brevity, so I'll try to split them up into sections.  Next one is what I remember about the overdose and subsequent trip to hospital - Part 2.

Edit to add: I have written a summary version, given this has gotten so long, for people who don't fancy the 10,000+ words version. It is here.