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What I have learned from my suicidal patients

theguardian.com

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Re: What I have learned from my suicidal patients

#161

Post by hestipod »

bmer wrote: post #160
hestipod wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not freedom to "accept" being permanently and worsenginly sick and homeless or constantly living under that threat. It's not freedom to "accept" being in severe pain every day. It's not freedom to be in the "present" in those situations. Freedom is having positive choices, agency, hope. This stuff is nothing more than a psychological trick that I cannot sustain to say "I am powerless and this sucks but that's ok…

Okay, sorry for being presumptuous.

I am a fool who can't help but read things hoping something good happens even when I am so upset I want to stomp out to have SOME control of SOMETHING. So I read your long reply before you edited it. I won't tear it down because you DID remove it. I just want you to know that's the kind of thing my family does...strangers have done...the unfair and wrong beliefs about me. It's only hopes and prayers, blame like that, and ONE actionable offer that life took away in 15 years. I am sorry it's so bad for you too. I am glad you have social assistance as a foundation. Everyone should have that net and it's what I most need and not having that is why I am so distraught and angry. I have always lived a life caring about the world, other people...animals (I spend part of my meager income on a cat that was one of 12 or so from 3 litters my family never cared for properly and never spayed/neutered and all died/disappeared from their garage but her, and I took her to the vet and make sure she is cared for since they don't seem to care half the time...having to adopt her out in the end is a great stress for me because I cannot guarantee her future with me here or not)...and proved it in my actions. Always. That I am falling to pieces now and cannot even manage myself doesn't invalidate any of that.

Re: What I have learned from my suicidal patients

#162

Post by sdegutis »

0db532a0 wrote: post #156
sdegutis wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because some people choose to live in their own reality in their mind and reject objective reality outside their mind has no bearing on whether an objective reality exists. What a sad age of fallacies and confusion we live in where people even deny that they exist!

The psychiatrist opens the scientist up to the idea that the schizophrenic person, in his psychosis, may have insight into certain ideas which sane people do not, which nevertheless still may apply to them.

And a random dice roll (or tarot card reading) may sometimes correctly guess the number I’m thinking of. Doesn’t mean it’s generally useful.

Re: What I have learned from my suicidal patients

#163

Post by _mul0 »

hestipod wrote: post #161
bmer wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, sorry for being presumptuous.

I am a fool who can't help but read things hoping something good happens even when I am so upset I want to stomp out to have SOME control of SOMETHING. So I read your long reply before you edited it. I won't tear it down because you DID remove it. I just want you to know that's the kind of thing my family does...strangers have done...the unfair and wrong beliefs about me. It's only hopes and prayers, blame like that,…

I didn't take my reply down because I didn't mean it, or because I thought it was wrong. I took it down because I felt that I didn't know enough about your life. I was finding multiple aspects of your response grating making it difficult for me to remain non-judgemental. So, I decided it would be better to simply "apologize and move on".

I find your comparison of me with your family to be extremely insulting, as you know nothing about my life.

The mistake I made, which in your eyes makes me as good as a bunch of right-wing misers, was to 1) suggest a key aspect of what my own therapy was based around, and 2) share with you what _I_ found was something useful in improving my "suffering".

However, you decided to take it as yet another sign of how people are judging you (Jon Kabat-Zinn has a lot to say about non-judgementalness too, and that was another key aspect of my therapy), missing the fact that you are judging others, and in particular in the course of this interaction, me.

I do not have the resilience, capacity, or training to deal with such judgements.

I think that you can read my first response in many different ways. You chose one perspective, and perhaps, in the future you may choose to read it in other ways. Apart from that response, in which I gave you what I felt were the most valuable things I had to offer to anyone, I have nothing else to give you.

I'll leave you with a quote from J. Kabat-Zinn's "Full Catastrophe Living":

> Acceptance does not mean that you have to like everything or that you have to take a passive attitude toward everything and abandon your principles and values. It does not mean that you are satisfied with things as they are or that you are resigned to tolerating things as they “have to be.” It does not mean that you should stop trying to break free of your own self-destructive habits or to give up on your desire to change and grow, or that you should tolerate injustice, for instance, or avoid getting involved in changing the world around you because it is the way it is and therefore hopeless.

> Acceptance as we are speaking of it simply means that you have come around to a willingness to see things as they are. This attitude sets the stage for acting appropriately in your life, no matter what is happening. You are much more likely to know what to do and have the inner conviction to act when you have a clear picture of what is actually happening than when your vision is clouded by your mind’s self-serving judgments and desires or its fears and prejudices.

Re: What I have learned from my suicidal patients

#164

Post by hestipod »

_mul0 wrote: post #163
hestipod wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a fool who can't help but read things hoping something good happens even when I am so upset I want to stomp out to have SOME control of SOMETHING. So I read your long reply before you edited it. I won't tear it down because you DID remove it. I just want you to know that's the kind of thing my family does...strangers have done...the unfair and wrong beliefs about me. It's only hopes and prayers, blame like that,…

I didn't take my reply down because I didn't mean it, or because I thought it was wrong. I took it down because I felt that I didn't know enough about your life. I was finding multiple aspects of your response grating making it difficult for me to remain non-judgemental. So, I decided it would be better to simply "apologize and move on". I find your comparison of me with your family to be extremely insulting, as you…

I don't know what you are on about or doing...the post you took down was full of insults and retorts to things I didn't say and simply wrong about me. It was cruel and projecting. You said several strange and aggressive things like I should stop pretending I care at all about other people, the planet, or animals...no idea where that came from nor is it true in any way. You said several untrue things what were oddly blaming. Now you say you weren't wrong and meant it and aren't sorry. I am just not dealing with that anymore from anyone, anywhere. I shouldn't have replied at all to begin with as I saw this coming. Take whatever shots you need to. None of it matters anymore. Goodbye.

Re: What I have learned from my suicidal patients

#165

Post by trianglem »

sysbin wrote: post #33
ThrowawayP wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people just have a terrible fate and nothing that comes in their life changes it because not everyone gets a good job, significant other, place to call home, and the healthy body. There's actually a term for this, SLS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shit_Life_Syndrome Apparently it was coined as a "ha ha, only serious" joke but came into more general usage in the UK: https://authenticmedicine.com/did-i-discover…

Fate is a real thing and so I can see how SLS started as a joke. I didn't know of the term SLS (thanks for sharing).

Fate is not a “real” thing. What are you talking about exactly when you say fate?

Re: What I have learned from my suicidal patients

#166

Post by danaliv »

brookside wrote: post #80
jdietrich wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

STAR*D presents us with a "glass half full" problem. It's absolutely true that the majority of people will recover from depression with suitable treatment, but that leaves us with a minority who won't. I'm not sure how to communicate those facts effectively to a wide audience. It is absolutely imperative that people with depression seek treatment and keep trying even if the first or second or fifth treatment fails, o…

The term "treatment resistant depression" bothers me because, I think, a more accurate name would be "placebo resistant depression". Sorry to come off as frustrated; I'm like others in this thread with 10+ years of trying various therapies and antidepressants to end up feeling more, not less, hopeless. David Burns does a good job explaining why antidepressants and psychotherapy don't typically work in his most recent…

I loathe this term. It’s like they’re shifting the blame for ineffective treatments onto the depression. If the treatments don’t work, the problem is with the treatments. Come up with something else!

Re: What I have learned from my suicidal patients

#167

Post by throwaway39940 »

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #38

> To feel depressed about the state of your life is to demonstrate capacity to imagine something different, and that spark of imagination can prove a motive to change. This was arguably true for me, but not in a good way. I'm pretty sure that I started having intrusive suicidal thoughts because my depression had motivated me to try to change. Said changes utterly failed to even make a dent in my depression, finally c…

> All the generic "there is hope" and "antidepressants really work" and "go to therapy" talk that tends to surround mental illness discussion really bugs me because virtually nobody acknowledges the damage that's done when these things fail (and they fail frequently).

Exactly.

When highly suicidal last year my reasoning was that I'd tried so many therapies (medication, talking, multiple practitioners) without success that I cannot be fixed and it's time to leave.

The typical suicide response ("call a crisis line" or "talk to your GP") is reasonable, but many suicidal people are far beyond that. For them the community sends around the Police to lock you up in a ward (ie "you're now scheduled") and many of those people - myself included - find it the most horrific experience of their law-abiding lifetime and understandably double down on getting away before they're unconscionably locked up again.

In a nutshell the mental health system often destroys the last hope someone had by imposing punitive sanctions with minimal insight or empathy. Have a read of a random selection of non-custodial suicide case studies at http://www.coroners.justice.nsw.gov.au/Pages/findings.aspx and judge for yourself.

The real issue here is how to better supervise the delivery of psychology and psychiatry programs so ineffective solutions for a specific person are gracefully transitioned into something else before all hope is lost. A severely depressed person isn't well-equipped to assess treatment and practitioners are too incentivized (or perhaps imprudent) to self-regulate their ineffectiveness.

Re: What I have learned from my suicidal patients

#168

Post by bmer »

hestipod wrote: post #164
_mul0 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't take my reply down because I didn't mean it, or because I thought it was wrong. I took it down because I felt that I didn't know enough about your life. I was finding multiple aspects of your response grating making it difficult for me to remain non-judgemental. So, I decided it would be better to simply "apologize and move on". I find your comparison of me with your family to be extremely insulting, as you…

I don't know what you are on about or doing...the post you took down was full of insults and retorts to things I didn't say and simply wrong about me. It was cruel and projecting. You said several strange and aggressive things like I should stop pretending I care at all about other people, the planet, or animals...no idea where that came from nor is it true in any way. You said several untrue things what were oddly b…

At this point, I am fairly sure you're baiting me...or, that's just me reading the worst in this interaction. Not sure. I'll ask the moderators to restore my post for the record. In any case, this has been an interesting learning experience.

Re: What I have learned from my suicidal patients

#169

Post by pasabagi »

heavyset_go wrote: post #151
pasabagi wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, of course. However, first, I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who prefers depression to sexual dysfunction, weight gain, or nausea. Second, you can just try different medications until you find one that has none of the above problems. To be honest, I find the discussion of side-effects in anti-depressants really strange. Depression is an extremely dangerous, life-threatening, life-ruining con…

> However, first, I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who prefers depression to sexual dysfunction, weight gain, or nausea. All three of those can be depressing in their own right. In the past, I stopped what was effective treatment with certain drugs because of those side-effects. If you look at the clinical trial data for vortioxetine, the nausea component was so bad that many people dropped out of the st…

I guess I have never experienced weight gain, and I don't really care much about sexual dysfunction, but I really don't get how these things aren't completely irrelevant in comparison to depression. To me, it's like somebody saying they might not take chemo because they have such beautiful hair.

As for nausea, it's my understanding that it typically shows up pretty quickly, so I don't see what the problem is with just changing the medication.

Re: What I have learned from my suicidal patients

#170

Post by techdreamer »

hestipod wrote: post #159
techdreamer wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's me again. (Sorry). "I had a nightmare just last night about a victim I recall from early in my career...in such a horrible personal situation...who died in such a terrible way. She didn't have to. She was pushed to it and then allowed to because nobody she reached out to would help. I've seen dozens like that...and not a single one of them had to die." I wonder if your earlier career gave you PTSD and if your cu…

It's too late to edit and I need to just not read or post anything anymore since it never helps and makes me more depressed and angry seeing how true my assessment of the world is. But I couldn't stop worrying I made you feel bad should have expounded on my first sentence in my last reply. You have been there kindly since my first post here. I appreciate that. You are clearly a good human being. That's just not enoug…

hestipod, You are a very kind person - worrying about me, with all your problems. Don't worry about me, (I was worried that I was upsetting or needling you after I posted). NONE of your problems are your fault. None of them. I just wish that there were some way soon of you getting the help you need.

Please don't worry about me, I've been through some things, (probably toughened my exoskeleton), (or something :). You are not unnoticed and I can only repeat I wish there were some real help that you will get. I am ok.

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