TW: Self-harm / Suicide
TW: self-harm / suicide
I recently experienced my 3rd psychiatric hospitalization in 4 years and my first involuntary one. Well, partially involuntary. I wanna discuss this one for a couple reasons; firstly because it's the first one that's happened since I started this blog and second because it's the first one where I attempted to document my thoughts during my stay.
I started out with a wide-ruled notebook, but was later offered a pocket-sized college ruled one that I vastly preferred, so I copied everything I'd written up to that point including ripping out some of my doodles that were small enough to fit.
It started at noon on July 3rd. I had a scheduled therapy appointment during which I confessed to thoughts of self-harm. My therapist and my caseworker arranged for me to be transported to an emergency room and from there I would be taken to the first open bed they could find in a psychiatric institution. All of this I agreed to voluntarily.
I've censored the location and the doctor's name for privacy reasons. The "crying, slobbering fit" was so severe I was physically incapable of forming intelligible words. Every single time I write the name of a specific drug I spell it incorrectly because I was told the names out loud but not given anything with a label to read.
Some doodles I did post anxiety attack. I think that's the correct term for what happened. I'm still trying to find the appropriate terminology for whatever it is that's wrong with me.
I hope you're all prepared for many more 12 Monkeys references. Also just wanted to share the story of "Book Club Guy." There are several phrases I will never pronounce the same again thanks to him. He was discharged relatively quickly and I miss him every day.
The old man in question was barely capable of even standing and had apparently been in this hospital for close to a year. Incidents like the one described in the second paragraph happened more frequently as my stay went on as that particular patient grew more and more frustrated.
Also "Vitamin H" is a term for haldol that I heard somewhere once and I've been using it ever since.
At this point, my stay had boiled down to taking drugs and then sitting in front of the tv for hours. I felt that if that was all that was neccessary to keep me safe I could easily do that at home. I was told if I kept requesting to go home they would hold me involuntarily and so I pressed the issue really just to prove a point about how a "voluntary" status was bullshit. They essentially told me to put a pin in it and talk to the doctor again when he came back. Talks with the doctor rarely lasted more than a minute or two and I did not feel like waiting all night just to speak with someone for 60 seconds.
When the shift changed and the new nurses arrived I pressed the issue again and that's when they put me under the 96 hour hold. I requested a bible because I was bored and copied down a few verses that I liked. The hospital was a catholic institution so they had plenty of bibles lying around but only with the new testament and psalms. We also had prayers over the intercom every morning and night.
The thing that frustrated me most is that I was given very little time to talk to a professional of any kind. So one of the nurses offered to let me vent to them, which I did.
I was in the grip of another anxiety attack at the time. I was raising my voice, banging my head against the wall, pulling at my hair, etc. Me and the nurse were pacing back and forth down the hallway the whole time. At some point when I reached the end of the hallway, I turned around and a second nurse had arrived with syringe in hand and told me I needed something to calm me down.
We ended up compromising and just giving me a dose of clonazepam and sleeping in the quiet room so they could keep a closer eye on me, but I don't think I'll ever be able to fully trust nurses ever again.
If it wasn't obvious the book my parents had brought for me was Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas.
The last page or so was pretty all over the place. "The Corner Where You Can Hear God" was a corner where you could hear some type of machinery running 24/7 but only if you wedged yourself in with both shoulders against the wall. The patient who first pointed it out was half joking when he said it, but at some point I had taken to crawling into that corner to "pray." It brought some sort of comfort that I couldn't really explain.
Also fuck Wendy's and their stupid fucking ads.
I was released on July 11th at 11:52 am. As I was leaving the patient who had the outburst I wrote about on July 6th was melting down again. He insisted on leaving, and I quote, "TO-FUCKING-DAY!" He must have repeated that phrase at least a dozen times at the very top of his lungs. The image of him with half the nursing staff backed up against a wall, leaning further and further forward with each shout hasn't left my mind.
They insisted I not worry about it as they shoved me out the door.
As I write this now I don't really understand why I felt the need to write all this. I'm still not entirely sure what I've gained (or lost) from this experience.
As a child I was given a diagnosis that technically no longer exists. Our understanding of psychology changes every day. Our mental healthcare system doesn't.
I can't tell you how many times I've been told by a nurse that they just straight up don't know when one thing or another is supposed to happen. Nurses and patients alike are left hopelessly uninformed about decisions that affect the lives of countless people. If my 96 hour hold had ended on a weekend, I would have been forced to stay up to an additional 48 hours because hospitals can't be fucked to discharge people on weekends or holidays.
People who are less coherent than me, less capable of masking than me, less capable of controlling their emotions than me are trapped by the thousands in shoddy institutions run by emotionally disconnected bean counters kept alive by a dying backwater religion that steals billions from us every year.
I don't even know what to do anymore.
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do you still have that video where it's gootecks doing the pog face but it cuts to a picture of budd dwyer with 'jacquees - at the club' playing in the bg?
ther segregating myf uckin boneS!
I have too many bones
Bacteria do have souls, but binary fission doesn’t produce new souls 99% of the time, so most single celled organisms share these sprawling souls that just get bigger every time they divide. Over time they compact down into these big mats of soul get compacted into geological layers that gradually accrete to the world soul. Sexual reproduction creates new souls but they’re much shorter lived as a result, and rarely make it into the bedrock, so most of the world spirit is from the Proterozoic.
Okay yeah on one hand, my gender and sexuality and mental health has nothing to do with doing my job, so I get how announcing my identity and who I am / am not attracted to could be considered as "Inappropriate for the workplace".
That said, everyone who sees me (gestures to cis-passing, straight-passing, masking neuroatypical self in gender-conforming work clothing) and assumes, in the back of their head by default, that I'm a straight cis allo neurotypical person, so the topic has already kinda been brought up in a way. My saying "actually, no" isn't so much an abrupt announcement as it is correction of an assumption.
And correcting those assumptions is important, especially for persons like me who occupy positions of authority, who appear in court and in community conferences, with business owners and CEOs and at-risk members of the public, 'cause when I say, "these are my pronouns, I'm this" then people like me can feel safer, and people who aren't like me get to see that one of us exists in the real world and isn't some scary hypothetical phantom.
And in the future, when someone says "you can always tell who's trans" or "autistics can't hold down real jobs" or "bisexuals are flirty and promiscuous by nature" or "asexuals aren't real, they're just basement-dwelling terminally-online tweens", they can remember that one time they met me in a professional setting where I was who I was and the world didn't end.
So when they see someone who, by chance, does match the image of their stereotype, they'll know that's just normal human variation and not a universal role.
So, it's not so much that I want to "insert my deviance into the workplace"- it's just me saying, "look at me. I'm here. We're all here, and for every one of us you see, there's a hundred others that you don't. Because you don't know what we look like, and wouldn't know unless we told you."
The status quo, the closeted life, is, "becareful who you come out to, because you could be surrounded by enemies, and you wouldn't know until it's too late".
When I wear a pin, when I out myself in a small, subtle way, I say back: "be careful who you lash out at, because they could be surrounded by defenders, and you won't know until it's too late."
It says, "if you couldn't recognize me without this flag, then how many more of us might be out here with me?"
And the statement "you cannot attack me, we're safe here" should not be banned in the workplace
probably feels good as fuck to be a 1960s house wife blissfully dissasociating on barbiturates and speed and your husband comes home and starts screaming at you for no reason and in the state of fugue you calmly grab the hot pan of oil off the stove
What's that? I couldn't hear you, there's a lot of locusts outside my house for some reason
I was meant to be a street corner doomsday preacher but I don't like public speaking so instead I just have anxiety
hey guys I gotta run to the store real quick can you keep an eye on My Demise Which Steadily Approaches
There are many points in my readings of Jung where he will describe a theory of the mind or society, and I will go "hey wait a minute, this is the medieval doctrine of signatures. Jung clearly also knows this is the medieval doctrine of signatures, so why isn't he mentioning that to the audience?" It begs a lot of questions!
what’s your opinion on nihilism
Baby's first atheistic philosophy. Built for edgy teens who had their first introspective thought a week ago. The problem is, people use the term nihilism to justify being lazy with their own beliefs - that's why u get a lotta dummies claiming they're nihilist, despite doing zero research on what it actually means to practice that philosophy (which is a lot more neutral on things than pessimistic)
Just because you gave up believing in a religion doesn't mean that you should simply stop growing either. The "I don't believe in God"-part of your worldview is the least interesting part, and it's not the finish line, that's the fucking start. Now you gotta figure out WHY things matter -- despite God, despite 'floating on a rock in the middle of nothingness' -- that's when you've put in enough effort to reflect on yourself, and not a moment before.
I think there are far more constructive philosophies out there that explore how life really operates besides nihilism. Just because we're 'floating on a speck' doesn't means shit, it's not like you nor I in our day-to-day lives can even recognize that we're floating on a speck, so it naturally doesn't matter to our daily lives, our cultures, our ethics, or anything, really.
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bedlamtoons reblogged this · 11 months ago
