Please excuse any grammatical errors or the fact that the discourse I use may be somewhat childish.
I’m currently hospitalised in a psychiatric ward after a suicide attempt on the 14th of May. Overdose was my first preferace at suicide and I took copious amounts of morphine, valium, lorazepam and codeine. Fortunatetly for me my body realised the danger it was in and was able to remove a lot of the codeine and valium before i was able to ingest a lethal dose.
For most of my life I’ve suffered from Social Anxiety Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder, the natural progression of the two lead to an extreme depressive phase in my life for the last 2 years, resulting in my total isolation from society at a time where I should be having the most fun I can (I’m 19 btw and a university student).
My case of social anxiety is a fairly extreme case, I constantly “read minds” and have an inability to have a conversation with anyone (including the few aquaitences i have, i dont believe i have any friends) because as we converse my mind seeks hidden meanings or messages in their discourse and/or body language, and the the origional meaning of the language disapears, or more accurately, is confused with what my mind takes as some negative connotative meaning. I feel as though I’m living in a psudo form of A Beautiful Mind (the movie), where every has some hidden code they want to convey in what they say.
I believe everyone has some coping mechanism, and for many years I would engage in any and all drugs i could get my hands on. My favourite being methamphetamine and a long running daily habbit of smoking cannabis. These worked a charm for a period of time, but at a moments notice, everything tended to change (and i believe this correlated to when my prescriped meds were upped to stupid amounts), and i lost the only coping mechanism i had at the time. So the only thing i had left was avoidance.
I must admit, avoidance was somethign i did enjoy and it helped with the extreme anxiety I would feel whenever I left the house, but it always led to a even deeper more intesnse depression, something I had little way of dealing with.
2 months after I decided that drugs werent helping my anxiety but only making them worse, and avoidance was my new bad habit, I decided that I had had enough, and living my entire life this way; avoiding all social situations. So being in an extremely numb state of mind I decided that suicide was the answer. I obtained 100mg of lorazepam through prescription and around 500mg of codiene, 250mg of diazepam and 250mg of Morpine, I also took approxmately 5grams of fluoxetine (hoping to cause a serotinin syndrome if the mixture of opiates and bezodiazapenes didn’t stop my breathing). I waited for mothers day to pass, to spend 1 happy day with my family before I decided to take all these substances.
Well, it didnt work, and here I am, my 2nd week of hospitalisation and atleast another 2-6 weeks to go. I’m hopeful though and a think thus far the hospital has demonstrated some good programs which will be able to help me cope with the outside world as my outpatient program continues.
I’ve realised ther suicide is not the answer, and the pain ive seen it cause on my family is unbearable.
I have no friends to tell this story so im glad i was able to find this site and share a little part of my life. Good luck to everyone on their journey and I hope you’re able to find your way to a more comfortable life.
3 comments
Glad you’re still around and I wish you luck on getting back on track. You’re a really talented writer, I suffer from social anxiety as well and as I read this I found myself thinking that you described it in a really accurate way. If someone asked me to explain my social anxiety I wouldn’t really know how to put it into words, but you described it very well. It’s exhausting going through life like this. I explained to a friend last week how leaving the house for 20 minutes to go get lunch for myself was such a draining experience because of my anxiety. Anyways I know it sucks but hopefully the rest of your hospital stay will teach you some things to help cope better.
thank you very much thousandcuts. i know how difficult it is to live with this disorder and i understand your pain, but unfortunately from an outsiders perspective it seems as if we’re “weak”. It’s an incredibly painful and hard thing to live with, and society is developed in such away that by using avoidance, we only make our lives worse.
Please leave your details, If you’d like to chat further!!! I feel so alone as I’m sure you do too.
This is my first time really writing on here/commenting. Is there anyway to PM?
Cellar door. A fan of Donnie Darko? (I enjoyed the film)
I also have social anxiety/avoidant personality disorder.
Apparently this is common among those thinking of suicide.
We humans are such social creatures…we need each other so much, we can barely stand life without another.