Trigger warning: Discussion of suicide, depression
Author’s Note — the title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem
After my last diary (www.dailykos.com/...) talking about my experience with suicide ideation and ending up in the hospital, it was suggested to me that I might blog about my experiences with the various therapies I am trying now I am back in the outside world. I hope this is useful or interesting to someone else, but at the very least it might be cathartic for me.
Last week I saw my psychiatrist (whom I will call Dr G) for the first time since my discharge from the hospital and had to tell him everything that had happened, in much more detail than I described in my post. That was unbelievably painful, my sense of shame over what I had almost done and the people I would have hurt was almost unbearable. But the story needed to be told and Dr G was as empathetic and sympathetic as you could want. In a way, that felt bad too. Not one person has yelled at me or reamed me out for behaving the way I did and the truth is I feel like I deserve it. But I also know I’d probably have a complete breakdown if anyone actually did it.
I had lunch with a friend today and told her I feel like a china ornament — as though the slightest knock could make me shatter into a million pieces. I’m not used to feeling fragile. I’ve always grabbed life by the scruff of the neck and kicked it into submission. So I hate this feeling that even normal adversity is enough to send me spinning off my orbit again.
Anyway, Dr G added a new medication, in addition to the two I already take, to deal with anxiety. He also referred me for transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is a relatively new technique and when you read about it sounds more science fiction than clinical practice but I am assured that it does work for some people. The plus side is there don’t seem to be any major side effects, so the worst case scenario is that it doesn’t work. I can live with that. I have an evaluation next week so I’ll report back on how that goes.
In the meantime, I’m also attending group therapy sessions. In the hospital, I found these quite helpful, despite being quite skeptical at the time. Those sessions were amazing in part because the therapists got the patients to talk to each other, which sounds hokey but was actually an incredible experience. The group session I attended today was very different. The group was small, two doctors and three patients, including me. But each of us only interacted with the two doctors, not with each other. It was a very different experience to the hospital groups and to be honest I am not sure if I will continue with it. I have to give it a chance of course but this first group was not very promising, alas.
As far as my mood goes, I have good days and bad days. Yesterday was a very bad day — my concentration was shot, my ability to feel even mildly interested in anything was just absent. Today is better, perhaps just because I got out of the house. Seeing my friend for lunch was also a definite positive — she has had her own struggles with depression and it was good to talk to someone who understood on a personal level. The weather has turned sunny and warm, which is always good for my mood. But I’m also exhausted. That’s one thing about depression that doesn’t seem to be well-advertized — it saps your energy to do the things that might make you feel better. It makes it very hard to fight, especially on the bad days, because fighting takes motivation, energy and will, and depression takes those things away from you. But despite that, I am determined not to be beaten. Fuck you, depression. I will not let you win.