Posted by SLS on December 27, 2012, at 7:15:29
In reply to thanks » SLS, posted by g_g_g_unit on December 27, 2012, at 0:47:24
> I just wanted to thank you all for your support and suggestions. I feel a little too overwhelmed to respond individually at this point, but I realize that I have quite a difficult decision ahead of me -- namely to continue with life, treatment and all the attendant hardship it brings -- or to surrender to my own nihilistic impulses. Right now, I feel like I'm in a hole that I'm not going to dig myself out of. I also realize that no one can make that decision for me.
This is absolutely true. I am a believer that people have a right to choose their own destiny, even if that means choosing death. I have reached the point on two or three occasions when I contemplated a "rational suicide", or what I like to call autoeuthanasia. They shoot horses, don't they? However, I would council you against making a decision to move in that direction while you are experiencing such a severe episode of depression and anxiety. I am sure you actually "feel" doomed. This usually passes in cases like yours. I don't think it would be rational for you to commit suicide while you are in this state. You can choose to leave life anytime. Why do it today? I lived many years believing that suicide was to be an inevitable conclusion to my life. However, on a daily basis I was able to rationalize living for just one more day. I have never made plans nor investigated methods. One would think that I would have researched the thing. Nope. I wanted to distance myself away from suicide as much as possible. I don't want to have the tools ready to act on impulse. As long as I chose to live that one more day, it made no sense to add to my morbidity by investigating suicide. I seem to always work to gain positive energy.
I know that I have said this before, but I find hope in uncertainty. If you can conceive of a treatment that you have not yet tried, there is hope that you might find therapeutic success. If you cannot conceive of such a treatment, then let other people do it for you. Hopefully, this will be your doctor who offers you untried alternatives. Perhaps you will find hope in treatments that are not pharmacological. Certainty can be a killer. I reached my only state of certainty a little over a year ago. I could not conceive of any treatment that I had not yet tried. In my mind, I had run out of alternatives. I was certain I was doomed to live in a chronic state of severe depression and the pain and ruination that accompanies it. Thus began my existential crisis. My thoughts were deep, intense, and destructive. It is not that the thoughts were without fact to justify them. It is that they were exaggerated by the depressive state. The depressed brain sees life through unrealistic filters. There are no positive thoughts. The brain simply does not generate them. What's worse, it seems that the brain generates and exaggerates negative thoughts. So, in the nomenclature of behaviorists, the result of these filters is a lack of reward and/or a preponderance of punishment. Before making any decisions, you may want to wait for the negativistic brain state to subside so that any choice you make will be the result of a more objective deliberation. If you wait, I am hoping that the world will seem different enough for you such that you don't choose death today nor tomorrow.
> It isn't so much the depression -- if it was depression alone, I could make some changes (maybe work, move out of home) which would help a lot; it's the relentless anxiety and OCD and agoraphobia which rule my life, and which I feel no reprieve from.
Depressed people commit suicide more often when anxiety or anger are present. Anxiety is an intergral part of OCD. It is often considered a type of anxiety disorder. You must be in a hellish state right now. You must be ruminating to the point of exhaustion. Do you feel the intense anxiety viscerally? Do you feel it in the pit of your stomach and experience heart palpitations? I experience these things when I am overwhelmed and are plagued by thoughts of inevitable doom. There seems to be a neurobiological substrate for the suicidal brain. Mine was created by a depressive rebound from discontinuing Viibryd (vilazodone) abruptly. It sure didn't feel biological, though. However, my doctor knew better. The beast will beguile you. I do not believe that your suicidal brain state will last for very long. However, you might need help to process your existential crisis - the thought content of which reflect real issues - until your suicidal state subsides.
Try not to feed the beast.
Anyway, let today not be the day that you act irrevocably. You will get through this. You will be okay.
Are there any crisis services available to you? Please keep reaching out.
- ScottSome see things as they are and ask why.
I dream of things that never were and ask why not.- George Bernard Shaw
poster:SLS
thread:1033817
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20121217/msgs/1033963.html