No more thoughts…until now….

Last year I was hospitalized (self-admitted) because of severe suicidal ideation.  I spent a week in an emergency mental health ward and then was released and stayed in a recovery facility.

I’ve been to therapy and still see my therapist.  I have a psychiatrist and still take my Wellbutrin.  I’ve had ups and downs, but since I was discharged I haven’t had any more suicidal thoughts…until now.

I’ve worked at CBT, I journal regularly, I don’t isolate, I have a support system.  My wife is wonderful, and we have a strong relationship.  I’m close to my two college age daughters.  I remember how much pain I caused them when they first found out about my depression.  My daughters didn’t know how deep my depression was until they visited me in the hospital and in the treatment facility.

Over the last few days, suicidal thoughts have been creeping back in.  For the first few months after discharge, I may have had a few moments when I contemplated suicide.  But those times were few and far between.  Now those thoughts are coming more often, and they’re staying longer.

One of the symptoms of my depression was the time I spent on this website and others like it.  I used this website to get ideas on how to kill myself, and I surfed the internet for websites that had to do with how to kill myself.  Before when I was deeply depressed I went into a gun store that allowed customers to try out guns at an indoor shooting range.  I had read how some other people used the guns to commit suicide.  I then thought about parking my car in front of a train as my preferred way to commit suicide so that my wife and daughters would think I had an accident.  Each time I had suicidal ideations I was able to pull back.

Those thought were gone until now.  I’m not as depressed as I was, but for the first time in almost a year I thought about suicide for several days at a time.   I don’t know if it’s more courageous to commit suicide or more courageous not to…