Posted by ravenstorm on July 19, 2004, at 20:44:05
In reply to Re: Suicide looming large..., posted by platinumbride on July 19, 2004, at 13:20:13
I know how you feel.
From November of last year until about April of this year I was suicidal. Every day I thought of killing myself. It was a continous and ever present thought. This all came about because of severe and protracted paxil withdrawal. The only other time in my life that I was suicidal was as a teenager and the feeling was always a transient flashpoint. This, however, was month upon month, day upon day, hour upon hour, minute upon minute absolute torture. No one I know can understand the devastation. I had a suicide kit, I wrote the suicide notes and I held the pills in my hand everyday. The only thing that kept me from doing it was the thought of my husband having to rip through the plastic over my face after he found me.
It is now July, I am on a medication that I have partially responded to. It has taken away the suicidal feelings, for which I am grateful, but I am not who I was. I am now trying to add another med and I am sick, again. I get sick from all of them when I start. But I at least have a toe hold into being ok. Yes, I still despair, sometimes daily, of ever being myself again, but it is not the same despair that I felt when I was suicidal. There is no way I could have thought or acted my way out of being suicidal. I prayed, I meditated, I exercised, I took supplements, I got massages, I got energy work, I got accupuncture. Nothing helped until I got on a med. And it is not the right med, so now I must push on and keep trying. It is not fun. It is hard. But most of all it is breathtakingly biochemical. I was in therapy the whole time I was suicidal and the therapist kept saying: "That is just depression talking, you have to change your thinking". She might as well have told me to fly to the moon.
Do I still think about suicide. Yes, in a philosophical way. In other words, sometimes as I struggle with what the hell med to try next, or feeling even worse on a new med than I felt before, I will think, well, geeze, maybe I would have been better off if I had just done it when I was suicidal. But it has no emotional grab on me and I don't really mean it. I don't feel suicidal anymore, I just feel really sad a lot.
Really sad isn't fun, but it is manageable. You will get out of suicidal. In fact, you may go all the way from suicidal to normally happy with no really sad inbetween. It all depends on the meds and the support.
It is amazing to me how bio-chemical suicidal ideation is.
DON'T GIVE UP. We are all here to do something. Sometimes its just to learn to live in a body on planet Earth. For some of us, thats a full time challenge!
poster:ravenstorm
thread:367118
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20040719/msgs/367979.html