The morning that I checked into inpatient psychiatric hospitalization was a culmination of many mornings where I was, yet again, disappointed that I had even woken up at all. I knew something was wrong when I kept telling myself that my husband and 4 year old would be better off without me alive. I had one tiny moment of clarity: “but Monica, what about the trauma you’ll leave behind?” And that’s when I called my husband up to me, where I lay sobbing in a puddle on the bed, and told him, “I have a plan to kill myself today. I need to go to the emergency room.” And we went. I just remember being exhausted, terrified, ashamed, and defeated. I’m sure I could go look back in my Facebook photos from the week before, and you wouldn’t be able to tell. Suicidal ideation is insidious, and I can see how the alternative to life seems so peaceful sometimes. This was five years ago for me. I’m finally stable and happy. Im still cracked in some places, but that adds character. I’ve learned to sit with my feelings and honor them, rather than run from them. I am broken and flawed, and I am still beautiful and whole.
Gracious, yes. Isn't that so much what we have to learn? There is no fixing ourselves back to whole. There is no getting over and moving on. There is only learning to live with and love the parts of us that are broken, and to leave space for them and all the emotions they bring to us because that is really who we are- layered, complex, continually cracking and healing. Thank you, friend. I'm glad you're here.
I nearly lost my job when I was struggling. I had my 2 "best friends" walk away from me because I was acting like I was. I didn't know how to reach out to grasp the hands offered to me. It took cutting my wrist (not suicidal per se, just needed to release pain) and driving myself to the hospital to get help. It's scary and painful and messy. I wish more people would reach out instead of turning their backs. I recently just took a mental health first aid course. What an eye opening day that was! Now I'm a lot more careful about what I say, how I approach others, etc. Thank you for phrasing it as "died by suicide" instead of "committed." Words do matter and do does support and kindness and awareness.
I stopped. Everything. I shut down and barely moved from where I planted myself. Maybe something akin to sleep mode. A family member finally talked me into seeing someone. It helped pull me up (the meds weren’t that great) and I functioned.
It seemed like forever before I felt something like me, but it was less than a. Maybe even six months (it is still blurry). I still sink, but never to that depth.
Thank you for sharing and for having the courage to ask for help. People don't want to die; they want the pain to go away. They are searching for a solution, an answer to a temporary problem and trying to solve it with a permanent answer? which is suicide. Life is complicated, and people feel isolated and ashamed. People like you and those who commented are heroes in my book. Beautiful, courageous, brave individuals. I applaud you all. The love of my life passed away Dec !st and his funerals are this Saturday. I am exhausted, unable to sleep, and I would like to join him. I am fed up with life, but I know that taking my life is not the solution and I will seek help even though help is not readily available here. Some people have to wait days in emergency before getting help and therefore return home to commit suicide or you are put on a waiting list of a year or more. Looks like you have better mental health care than here in Canada. Let's be there for each other... let's not give up. Sending grace, love and blessings to all of you.
I had a mentor promise me to call him when I didn’t want to talk to anyone. When I felt like no one would hear me, and that I wasn’t worth being a burden, he assured me that in those times he wanted to hear from me most and that he wouldn’t convince me to love myself or my life but he’d just be there for me and let me fall apart as long as it meant I was still there. He used to tell me, survive for just today and then tomorrow we’ll reassess together but not to make any decisions while my brain was lying to me. I began to know when my depression was bad and that it felt like nothing would resolve it because IN THAT MOMENT those thoughts weren’t possible and I just would have to wait it out in agony until there were things I could look forward to or see the best in again. I learned not to shame myself for being depressed, suicidal or “overly emotional” etc and to accept that at an given moment that would change. And to not surround myself with “happy sunshiney” people who made light of or diminished my very real pain and would shower me with just “think happy thoughts” rhetoric and to reach for people who would give me things straight and tell me truthfully that it was ok to be upset but eventually I would and needed to move through it and that sometimes life is tough and feels hopeless and that it wasn’t just a flaw in me that I felt that way sometimes or couldn’t see my way out in those moments. But when my brother committed suicide is when I really learned how much I didn’t want that and how much pain it caused those he loved and so I could never even think about it seriously again as an option.
When I finally got some help- I remember sitting at my table & asking my best friend how you know if you need meds or not. She softly said, “I think, if you are asking that question, then it’s time.”
I had my second baby about five months before and my brain was constantly swimming in my own failure. White knuckling every day to be ok.
The first time I’d heard about post partum anxiety was from Baby Rabies, sometime between my first and second babies.
When my oldest was tiny, I found myself completely in love with him. Terrified to miss a second. The drive home after his birth, just hours before at a birth center, feeling like every car was waiting to hit us. Our first trip to Target when he was just a few weeks, carrying him through the parking lot, and knowing exactly what it would sound like when a car would hit me and I’d drop him
and he would hit the ground. Knowing I would fall down the stairs at my sister in law’s house while I carried him. Being so incredibly angry- mostly at myself, for being such an absolute failure. At everything. At my job. At getting us out of the house. At not fucking up dinner. At sleeping. At keeping the house clean. At being on time.
Sometimes I’d be mad at my dog, for no apparent reason. Just so much anger.
I got brave enough finally to ask my doctor.
After not listening to me, she handed me a questionnaire & left. When she came back, she told me I wasn’t depressed. “This is how motherhood is. You have to get used to it. You are just stressed because of your job.”
Yet another way I had failed. I cried on the way home & berated myself for wasting her time. I didn’t tell anyone until the conversation with my best friend 3 years later. Those terrifying thoughts returned after my second baby was born but now I was having terrifying flashes of chasing down my 3yr old & hurting him. I never wanted to. But I kept imaging it. I still hated myself.
Luckily the conversation with my new doctor was a million times better. I cried. She listened. She reassured. She asked what I wanted to do next.
Two years later I was off medication, my youngest son was born and was coming up on skull surgery in 3 months. (He was born with frontosphenoidal craniosynostosis, and had CVR/FOA at 10m.) We were getting ready for a family camping trip and I had my first panic attack.
I didn’t go back on medication for another year and a half. When again, I finally got
so completely exhausted from just trying to be ok, trying to achieve “fine”.
It took a little bit of tinkering, and a later diagnosis of ADHD, and my anxiety & moods are doing better. I am not having more babies and I don’t intend to go off medication.
I still struggle with the idea of loving myself. Tolerating myself sometimes seems a lot more reasonable. And there are still days where I’m pretty sure everyone would be better off without me- I don’t actually want to die. Just, be magically subbed out I guess. My husband does an amazingly good job of reminding me that it sounds an awful lot like anxiety is talking when I’m feeling like that.
I’ve reached a place where when it does feel bad, it’s not usually for too long. I have good people I can talk with. I recognize the patterns as they get going. And I’ve more or less accepted that anxiety is pretty hard wired into my life. (In retrospect, it pops up all over my childhood & the rest of my life. Having babies made it much more apparent.) but it’s manageable now, even if it will never totally leave.
I once asked for help in college by searching the university database for my psychiatrist's email, sending him a message about my night thinking I'd like to die, and politely asking him to up my zoloft prescription. He admitted me. It was awful being in the ER, but the program he got me into was the help I didn't know I needed.
All of this, Jill. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for sharing your experiences, your pain, all of it. It means more than you’ll ever know. I’m always cheering for you.❤️
Asking for help is the hardest thing in the world to me. There are a very few tiny number of people in my life I’m willing to ask, and even then I often don’t ask. I truly admire people who can ask for help. Even when it seems like they are asking for a lot.
That being said I have been hospitalized for in patient psychiatric treatment more than 10 times. I quit counting at 10. I have bipolar disease. Each time I checked myself in simply because I had lost all control. My first experience was so good I knew it would work. Each time I knew I was suicidal or had suicidal ideation. Or I was too depressed to move. Or else I knew I was in a psychotic episode.
I saw my therapist yesterday. I see her once a week. She said I was doing phenomenally well. And, I have been doing very well for about 5 years. It is still a LOT of work.
Now, I am sitting in a very privileged position. I have insurance through my husbands work as well as Medicare because I receive social security disability for my mental illness. This privilege affords me the right to seek medical or mental health treatment with no worries of copays and very few bills. And, I had surgery on a deviated septum in April and because of that I met my deductible, and I have gotten all my medicines free since then. I take a LOT of medicine. That privilege/gift is HUGE!
I hope this helps someone. At least a little. Oh, and the first time I was hospitalized we had absolutely no money and I received charity care.
How do you get past feeling like your problems are insignificant compared to things others have been/are going through? Thank you for sharing this because this is exactly how I feel and I’m sitting here crying. I started counseling this year and it did feel like it was helping but I stopped going because I felt stupid, like I didn’t deserve to be there since I didn’t have some huge trauma to talk through.
I think the significance of the trauma is relative to each human being. We all have things that have traumatized us, or held us back in life in some way. You should return to counseling. It may be what you need to get past that feeling. Or at least a start...
The morning that I checked into inpatient psychiatric hospitalization was a culmination of many mornings where I was, yet again, disappointed that I had even woken up at all. I knew something was wrong when I kept telling myself that my husband and 4 year old would be better off without me alive. I had one tiny moment of clarity: “but Monica, what about the trauma you’ll leave behind?” And that’s when I called my husband up to me, where I lay sobbing in a puddle on the bed, and told him, “I have a plan to kill myself today. I need to go to the emergency room.” And we went. I just remember being exhausted, terrified, ashamed, and defeated. I’m sure I could go look back in my Facebook photos from the week before, and you wouldn’t be able to tell. Suicidal ideation is insidious, and I can see how the alternative to life seems so peaceful sometimes. This was five years ago for me. I’m finally stable and happy. Im still cracked in some places, but that adds character. I’ve learned to sit with my feelings and honor them, rather than run from them. I am broken and flawed, and I am still beautiful and whole.
Gracious, yes. Isn't that so much what we have to learn? There is no fixing ourselves back to whole. There is no getting over and moving on. There is only learning to live with and love the parts of us that are broken, and to leave space for them and all the emotions they bring to us because that is really who we are- layered, complex, continually cracking and healing. Thank you, friend. I'm glad you're here.
I nearly lost my job when I was struggling. I had my 2 "best friends" walk away from me because I was acting like I was. I didn't know how to reach out to grasp the hands offered to me. It took cutting my wrist (not suicidal per se, just needed to release pain) and driving myself to the hospital to get help. It's scary and painful and messy. I wish more people would reach out instead of turning their backs. I recently just took a mental health first aid course. What an eye opening day that was! Now I'm a lot more careful about what I say, how I approach others, etc. Thank you for phrasing it as "died by suicide" instead of "committed." Words do matter and do does support and kindness and awareness.
That sounds so so painful, Sarah. I'm sorry. I am really glad you took yourself to the hospital. What a huge step!
I stopped. Everything. I shut down and barely moved from where I planted myself. Maybe something akin to sleep mode. A family member finally talked me into seeing someone. It helped pull me up (the meds weren’t that great) and I functioned.
It seemed like forever before I felt something like me, but it was less than a. Maybe even six months (it is still blurry). I still sink, but never to that depth.
Thank you so much for sharing your personal story, Brad ❤️
Thank you for sharing and for having the courage to ask for help. People don't want to die; they want the pain to go away. They are searching for a solution, an answer to a temporary problem and trying to solve it with a permanent answer? which is suicide. Life is complicated, and people feel isolated and ashamed. People like you and those who commented are heroes in my book. Beautiful, courageous, brave individuals. I applaud you all. The love of my life passed away Dec !st and his funerals are this Saturday. I am exhausted, unable to sleep, and I would like to join him. I am fed up with life, but I know that taking my life is not the solution and I will seek help even though help is not readily available here. Some people have to wait days in emergency before getting help and therefore return home to commit suicide or you are put on a waiting list of a year or more. Looks like you have better mental health care than here in Canada. Let's be there for each other... let's not give up. Sending grace, love and blessings to all of you.
I had a mentor promise me to call him when I didn’t want to talk to anyone. When I felt like no one would hear me, and that I wasn’t worth being a burden, he assured me that in those times he wanted to hear from me most and that he wouldn’t convince me to love myself or my life but he’d just be there for me and let me fall apart as long as it meant I was still there. He used to tell me, survive for just today and then tomorrow we’ll reassess together but not to make any decisions while my brain was lying to me. I began to know when my depression was bad and that it felt like nothing would resolve it because IN THAT MOMENT those thoughts weren’t possible and I just would have to wait it out in agony until there were things I could look forward to or see the best in again. I learned not to shame myself for being depressed, suicidal or “overly emotional” etc and to accept that at an given moment that would change. And to not surround myself with “happy sunshiney” people who made light of or diminished my very real pain and would shower me with just “think happy thoughts” rhetoric and to reach for people who would give me things straight and tell me truthfully that it was ok to be upset but eventually I would and needed to move through it and that sometimes life is tough and feels hopeless and that it wasn’t just a flaw in me that I felt that way sometimes or couldn’t see my way out in those moments. But when my brother committed suicide is when I really learned how much I didn’t want that and how much pain it caused those he loved and so I could never even think about it seriously again as an option.
When I finally got some help- I remember sitting at my table & asking my best friend how you know if you need meds or not. She softly said, “I think, if you are asking that question, then it’s time.”
I had my second baby about five months before and my brain was constantly swimming in my own failure. White knuckling every day to be ok.
The first time I’d heard about post partum anxiety was from Baby Rabies, sometime between my first and second babies.
When my oldest was tiny, I found myself completely in love with him. Terrified to miss a second. The drive home after his birth, just hours before at a birth center, feeling like every car was waiting to hit us. Our first trip to Target when he was just a few weeks, carrying him through the parking lot, and knowing exactly what it would sound like when a car would hit me and I’d drop him
and he would hit the ground. Knowing I would fall down the stairs at my sister in law’s house while I carried him. Being so incredibly angry- mostly at myself, for being such an absolute failure. At everything. At my job. At getting us out of the house. At not fucking up dinner. At sleeping. At keeping the house clean. At being on time.
Sometimes I’d be mad at my dog, for no apparent reason. Just so much anger.
I got brave enough finally to ask my doctor.
After not listening to me, she handed me a questionnaire & left. When she came back, she told me I wasn’t depressed. “This is how motherhood is. You have to get used to it. You are just stressed because of your job.”
Yet another way I had failed. I cried on the way home & berated myself for wasting her time. I didn’t tell anyone until the conversation with my best friend 3 years later. Those terrifying thoughts returned after my second baby was born but now I was having terrifying flashes of chasing down my 3yr old & hurting him. I never wanted to. But I kept imaging it. I still hated myself.
Luckily the conversation with my new doctor was a million times better. I cried. She listened. She reassured. She asked what I wanted to do next.
Two years later I was off medication, my youngest son was born and was coming up on skull surgery in 3 months. (He was born with frontosphenoidal craniosynostosis, and had CVR/FOA at 10m.) We were getting ready for a family camping trip and I had my first panic attack.
I didn’t go back on medication for another year and a half. When again, I finally got
so completely exhausted from just trying to be ok, trying to achieve “fine”.
It took a little bit of tinkering, and a later diagnosis of ADHD, and my anxiety & moods are doing better. I am not having more babies and I don’t intend to go off medication.
I still struggle with the idea of loving myself. Tolerating myself sometimes seems a lot more reasonable. And there are still days where I’m pretty sure everyone would be better off without me- I don’t actually want to die. Just, be magically subbed out I guess. My husband does an amazingly good job of reminding me that it sounds an awful lot like anxiety is talking when I’m feeling like that.
I’ve reached a place where when it does feel bad, it’s not usually for too long. I have good people I can talk with. I recognize the patterns as they get going. And I’ve more or less accepted that anxiety is pretty hard wired into my life. (In retrospect, it pops up all over my childhood & the rest of my life. Having babies made it much more apparent.) but it’s manageable now, even if it will never totally leave.
I once asked for help in college by searching the university database for my psychiatrist's email, sending him a message about my night thinking I'd like to die, and politely asking him to up my zoloft prescription. He admitted me. It was awful being in the ER, but the program he got me into was the help I didn't know I needed.
All of this, Jill. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for sharing your experiences, your pain, all of it. It means more than you’ll ever know. I’m always cheering for you.❤️
Asking for help is the hardest thing in the world to me. There are a very few tiny number of people in my life I’m willing to ask, and even then I often don’t ask. I truly admire people who can ask for help. Even when it seems like they are asking for a lot.
That being said I have been hospitalized for in patient psychiatric treatment more than 10 times. I quit counting at 10. I have bipolar disease. Each time I checked myself in simply because I had lost all control. My first experience was so good I knew it would work. Each time I knew I was suicidal or had suicidal ideation. Or I was too depressed to move. Or else I knew I was in a psychotic episode.
I saw my therapist yesterday. I see her once a week. She said I was doing phenomenally well. And, I have been doing very well for about 5 years. It is still a LOT of work.
Now, I am sitting in a very privileged position. I have insurance through my husbands work as well as Medicare because I receive social security disability for my mental illness. This privilege affords me the right to seek medical or mental health treatment with no worries of copays and very few bills. And, I had surgery on a deviated septum in April and because of that I met my deductible, and I have gotten all my medicines free since then. I take a LOT of medicine. That privilege/gift is HUGE!
I hope this helps someone. At least a little. Oh, and the first time I was hospitalized we had absolutely no money and I received charity care.
How do you get past feeling like your problems are insignificant compared to things others have been/are going through? Thank you for sharing this because this is exactly how I feel and I’m sitting here crying. I started counseling this year and it did feel like it was helping but I stopped going because I felt stupid, like I didn’t deserve to be there since I didn’t have some huge trauma to talk through.
I think the significance of the trauma is relative to each human being. We all have things that have traumatized us, or held us back in life in some way. You should return to counseling. It may be what you need to get past that feeling. Or at least a start...