TRIGGER WARNING: Detailed story of suicide
It was a Friday morning and felt like any other day. The day was not out of the ordinary. But my days were normally abnormal. I had no idea what “normal” felt like.
I had been diagnosed with Bipolar and BPD for about five years and I was in a pretty severe downswing which began in December but came to a head that Friday morning in April of 2019.
For months, I had closed off the world. I sat in the dining room, in the dark, nearly all day & every day. I had literally worn holes in the carpet from sliding out the chair and sitting in it so often. I had no hobbies that didn’t torture me, no ability to watch tv, no ability to read. I did spend quite a bit of time working on writing projects although it was really only while manic. The downswings of depression left me bed bound often and if I wasn’t in bed staring at the ceiling fan for 13 hours, I was sitting in the chair, wearing holes in the rug, as I sat and waited for time to pass so I could go back to bed and pretend to be dead again.
I watched the clock so much that I wore a wrist watch so I could glance at the time. I had no appointments, and no real obligations that required planning, but my obsession with the clock was purely to count down the minutes and seconds of when I could pretend to be dead again.
The downswings of depression would hit me like a tornado warning and I had 7.5 minutes to hunker down in bed before the twister of devastation hit. The sensation of melting to the floor would sometimes cause me to fall to the floor literally and curl up in fetal position. My anxiety was also raging and left me having anxiety attacks, panic attacks, and psychogenic non-epileptic seizures. My mood swings were like a ping pong ball and every day, every hour, brought another “attack” of emotions which would incapacitate me.
Much of my attacks were unexpected but too many were like clockwork and every day at around 1:00 p.m., I would experience the emotional pain that I can only describe as being similar to the pain of watching a loved one die. My chest would feel like it was going to explode and my body would sob and cry for hours. I would call my husband 5+ times a day, half the time bawling my eyes out and apologizing for being such a terrible person.
Ultimately, my most prominent delusional thought is that my suicide would lead to a “replacement” person who would take on my roll as partner, sibling, adult child, and parent. This person would bless all my loved ones with all the greatness that I lacked, and my family would really be better off. I was (and deep down, still am) convinced that my suicide would be a self sacrifice to give my family the life they deserve; a life without me.
Every day brought devastation, rage, guilt, shame, and so much more. So I watched the clock so I could go back to bed. And at 8:01 p.m., I would happily climb into bed to enjoy my favorite time of day; the time when I could cease to exist into a comfortable darkness. At this time though, I had begun to experience serious sleep disruption which resulted in me jolting awake 40+ times a night. My mind could not stop spinning.
I had started journaling prior to this incident so I recorded my thoughts as they passed. I wrote words like “death” and “excruciating”, and carved them into the pages. I scribbled colors of black and red on the pages and wrote suicidal comments in the pages. I left it on the kitchen table, kind of hoping that someone would read it so I could get the help I needed. No one read it, but I continued to write alarming thoughts into the pages in between my terrible art.
But all of this came to a head in this normally abnormal day. I was in my pajamas and bathrobe, in between sips of coffee, preparing to make my 7 year old son breakfast before school. I remember that he wanted toast, so I opened the cabinet and pulled out the white toaster. But as I walked back across the kitchen, it hit me.
I knew how I wanted to die.
I started to experience suicidal thoughts at the age of 11 and my whole life I have been slowly creating the scene for my suicide. Piece by piece, I have been creating my suicide plan. The day, the location, the time.
And suddenly, I had a method. I had finally completed the puzzle.
Of course I had suicidal plans before but they were fleeting. I would crave suicide the way a person craves water though it was always accompanied by severe depression which left me too physically and emotionally week to follow through with the plan. I remember a time not too long before this fateful Friday, that I craved setting myself on fire. I craved the gasoline in the same way a pregnant person craved dirt. I *needed* it. But my severe depression at the time left me bed bound, thus not able to follow through with any plans.
But on this Friday, it was different. I actually really hadn’t slept at all the night before due to jolting awake and I had gotten out of bed with ample energy. My self hatred was present as I prepared to make breakfast for my son, but I had plenty of energy and my mind was racing.
So as I walked across the kitchen holding the white toaster, it all came together. After all these years, I had finally decided on a method. It was the last piece to the puzzle that I had been putting together since the 6th grade. My puzzle was complete.
The mess and pain has always deterred me, as well as the emotional pain I would cause. I could never come up with a method which was relatively clean, easy, and accessible. My obsession with suicide would usually result in my husband hiding my medication or locking up all the knives, but this method was foolproof because you can’t lock up the electricity and while a toaster was my current desire, realistically, it could be any electronic appliance. Anything from a hair dryer to a lamp, would work. The pain of the method was irrelevant. But no one could stop me.
As I carried the toaster across the kitchen, my puzzle became complete. It started with just a thought, but it ballooned into an obsession. My son soon went to school and I was left alone with my toaster.
The compulsion to electrocute myself was my object of desire and I spent all day hyper-fixating on it. I paced the house, took a shower, wrote in my journal, and reached out to a friend.
By 2:00 p.m. on that Friday, the compulsive desire to take a bath with the toaster had grown so great that I became unable to speak in clear sentences. My energy was bountiful, my thoughts were racing past the sound barrier and my dramatic physical energy made me walk around the house in circles, repeatedly rubbing my head in the same spot as an attempt to call down. But nothing worked.
So I called my husband and tried to formulate the words to explain to him what was happening. What I wanted to say was “For the past 7 hours I have grown so obsessed with electrocuting myself that I am quite certain I am going to follow through with it. It’s all I can think about, I feel like screaming, and I need help.”
But, in that time of great distress, the only words I could speak were simple and direct:
“I need help.”
But the lack of detail in that statement did not go well in that phone call because he wasn’t sure if I needed help with the laundry, or an ambulance,
He questioned me, and at one point, he argued. But all I could say was “I need help.” over and over, until I was screaming this phrase into the phone.
Finally, after some time, he was able to put the story together and he realized that the help I needed, which was intervention, was an hour away as he was working out of the area.
At some point, I was curled up in the fetal position in the bedroom, listening to him on his other phone call the emergency service at 911. He spoke with the dispatcher and they sent police officers to my address.
My desire, the obsession and compulsion of taking a bath with my toaster was so great that I was hiding from it at the other end of the house. All I wanted to do was run down the hall, get the toaster, and retire to the bathroom, forever. So I laid on the floor and ignored the itch that I could not scratch.
After ten minutes, there was a knock at my front door. I opened the door profusely sobbing and there were two police officers. They came inside and talked to me, but the adrenaline and energy I had left me rocking back and forth and almost dancing. After a few minutes of conversation, they said that I was being escorted to the emergency room at the hospital. Knowing that where I was going wouldn’t have my medication, I quickly shoved my pill bottles into a plastic bag and then followed the police out of my front door and towards their squad car.
Of course, to make matters worse, it was now 2:55 p.m. and the elementary school next door was dismissing in ten minutes. So my walk of sobbing mess was on display for about 60 people who were waiting for the school bell to ring. My purple hair made it even more memorable and I am certain that my walk of shame to the squad car was a memorable moment for many.
The back seat of a police car was something I had never experienced. There were no seatbelts so my body rocked around in the car as the police officer turned corners. There was a large hump on the back of the seat which forced you to lean all the way forward and basically hug your knees. Soon though, within minutes, we were at the hospital.
The officer walked me to a nurses station where he explained the situation. There was a lot of waiting but eventually I was sitting on a hospital bed, next to the nurses station. At the time, I didn’t understand why I didn’t have a room, but now I know that my suicidal self should have not been placed in a room alone so my hospital bed next to the active nurses station was me being babysat.
At one point, another psych patient being babysat, had a violent explosion which resulted in them throwing their entire food tray at a nurse. His composure was astounding though and the violent patient was given a room.
My husband came to the hospital once he was home from work. He sat with me on the bed but we didn’t talk very much. I just wasn’t capable of holding a conversation so my responses were one word and soon, we were just sitting in silence as he held my hand. After a couple hours, he had to go home to our son who was with my parents. So I was alone, next to the nurses station. At about midnight, I was reassigned to a room where there were six beds and one nurse sitting in a chair, working on a computer. Soon, through eavesdropping, I learned that all six of the patients in the room were on suicide watch and the nurse on the computer was babysitting.
At about 3 a.m., I was woken up by a social worker. She talked to me about what was going on and by the end of the conversation, she let me know that she was officially placing me on a 5150 emergency involuntary psychiatric hold for three days. The social worker went around the room and placed everyone on a 5150 hold and we were all being admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
At 10:00 a.m., on Saturday, I was told the ambulance had arrived to take me to the psychiatric hospital. I was placed on an ambulance bed and they transported me to the “crisis center” at the psychiatric hospital by ambulance. Having been there many times, I knew exactly what to expect. For 23 hours, on the dot, I was to spend in a very basic room with a bed and tv. I was being “stabilized” before being officially admitted to the psychiatric hospital across the street.
I slept off and on in the bed for 23 hours in ten minute increments because my jolted sleep continued. Social workers came in often and talked to me throughout the time. On Sunday morning, 20 hours into my crisis hold, my husband came with snacks.
At the time, my mind was racing and I was desperate to go home. As with all of my hospitalizations, the moment I am behind a locked door, my entire focus is being able to go home. So it was common for me to lie to the social workers in the crisis center and convince me that I was able to go home, even though I very much was not ready to go home.
So on this Sunday morning, three hours away from my official admission to the psychiatric hospital across the street, I admitted to my husband that I was going to lie to the social workers so I could go home. I just wanted to go home. Soon though, my husband left, but on his way out, I heard him speak to the social workers up front. After a while, one of the workers came into my room and I told them I “felt fine” and wanted to go home. Of course, the social workers denied my request after consulting with a psychiatrist.
After 23 hours, on the dot, I was in an appointment with a social worker where I answered all their questions honestly.
“Do you have a method?”
“Do you have a plan.”
Soon after the interview, I was driven in a white car to the hospital across the street. Immediately I sat in a chair at the nurses station where they did a thorough examination, including my blood pressure and weight.
I was quite loud though. I was desperately social and striking up a conversation with anyone that so much as glanced at me. I was speed walking through the main room of the hospital and I spent much of my time writing until my hand cramped, or coloring detailed adult coloring book pages. There was nothing else to do except the only television in the hospital was set to a Spanish channel. So I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, and colored in between. I eventually had a stack of papers which I carried around with me.
The worst part of this hospital, which I’ve been to plenty of times before, was the food. It was terrible school cafeteria food which was literally leftovers from the nearby jail. Small milk cartons, mystery meat, boiled eggs with every meal and canned fruit cocktail for “dessert”. The only saving grace was the decaf coffee which was available once a day and I added enough sugar to overflow the cup.
A few hours after my admission, in the middle of writing yet another poem, I was called to talk to a psychiatrist.
I explained the situation, they reviewed my years worth of medical documentation and they listened to my complaints.
While the suicidal obsession was my reason for being there, it was my racing thoughts, booming energy, obsessive writing, and jolting awake every ten minutes, which the doctor found the most concerning. She said that I was experiencing a “mixed state” of Bipolar 1 Disorder and she described it was “agitated depression” which described it pretty well.
She prescribed me to take 50mg of a new medication, Seroquel. She said that it has heavy drowsiness effects and taking 50mg would help me sleep. She kind of described it as a medication I could take “as needed” to help me sleep off mania.
I took it at 8:00 p.m. during the evening medication round and I sat at a plastic table coloring and writing until 10:00 p.m. I didn’t feel drowsy, so I went to bed pretty disappointed and still jolted awake every ten minutes.
The next morning I woke up as usual, took a shower, and then sat down on my bed, with the door cracked. I worked on a very intricate and detailed picture of an elephant, my favorite animal. But as I colored for quite some time and reached the halfway point of the picture, something happened.
A depression filled my body, starting at my fingers and toes. The darkness crept into my body and suffocated my heart. Within moments, seconds actually, I died on the inside. My hand went from coloring tiny pieces of a beautiful picture to literally scribbling all over the page. In one stroke, I ruined my picture.
But I didn’t care about it, I felt like I was dying. So I scribbled furiously, destroying what I had cared about only five minutes early. I laid in the bed, beneath the blankets, and sobbed.
But at 10:00 a.m., on Monday morning, my name was called, and I met with a psychiatrist. I was expecting to stay for another 24 hours but he explained that because the hold was officially placed at the medical hospital at 3:00 a.m., I technically was released from the hold in the middle of the night. I was free to go. My feelings had changed since Friday. I was still in emotional distress but no longer actively suicidal.
I also explained to the doctor that the Seroquel that I had taken the night before seemed to have zero effect on me. He said that that was kind of odd, but continued the prescription.
I called my husband and he promised to come pick me up as soon as he could. I sat around all day, waiting to go home. But at 3:00 p.m., he finally came to pick me up.
The feeling of going outside after being behind locked doors, is just indescribable. But also, the emotional feelings after being hospitalized can be massive. After being released from a hospital, I feel weak and sensitive to all sensory inputs. The sun is too bright, the music is too loud, and I feel like I’m going to collapse at any second or shatter like glass. Home feels foreign and so very wrong. I wasn’t really planning on ever coming home. The plan was to swim with the toaster, but that didn’t happen. So there I was; at home.
I continued to take the Seroquel but after about four days, something happened. As each moment passed, I felt better and better. I found myself singing, showering every day, laughing for the first time in months and months. By Friday of that week, 7 days after the toaster, I had spent all day cleaning the house and I washed the car for the first time ever. As each day passed, each hour, I felt more and more alive. My sleep was exceptional. The past few weeks of jolting awake had ended.
I found myself enjoying the moments of life. I enjoyed eating for the first time. I enjoyed simple tasks like checking the mail and just existing on my front porch in the late afternoon over coffee. I enjoyed being alive for the first time in my entire life.
I still experienced waves of depression though which were very obviously chemical crashes as I would be enjoying the simple act of watering my plants, to becoming suffocated with devastating grief. The waves happened a couple times a week, but they were devastating and really ruined my experience of enjoying life for the first time.
I met with my regular psychiatrist a week later and explained how I felt. After being on Seroquel for nearly ten days, I saw dramatic improvements but still experienced some symptoms. It felt like I had spent all my life in a hole, and Seroquel got me out of that hole, but I was still standing on the edge. The dose was stepped up to 400mg over a one week period.
The depressive episodes completely stopped, as did the racing anxious thoughts, paranoia, fatigue but little sleep, and the jolting awake all night. Over time, every day became normally normal and quite boring. I established a routine of self care and regularly participated in hobbies which I could not enjoy before.
There have been times when I have skipped a dose of Seroquel, just one night. The next morning, or sometimes in the night, I will experience an overwhelming period of depression, anxiety, or mania. All of my experiences with missing just one dose, involve some sort of dramatic meltdown, which was once experienced in a drive through car wash as well as the parking lot of Walmart where I found myself searching for somewhere to lay down on the ground and losing the ability to walk because of the depression suffocating me.
But if I stay on schedule with my medication (I also take three others), I experience almost no depression, limited anxiety, little suicidal thoughts, and limited mania. I am taking 50mg of Seroquel in the morning and if I skip that, I usually become manic by 3:00 p.m.
When I first got home from the hospital, I couldn’t stop thinking about the toaster. Not that I was suicidal anymore, but I was positively terrified that it would happen again, and next time, I would follow through. So I became obsessed with my recovery. Thinking about a future toaster event kept me focused on being proactive. So I created a “suicide wall” in my bedroom where I kept important numbers for help, pictures of my family for comfort and a literal list of reasons to not off myself, which includes the joy of drinking orange juice.
Soon though, I also became obsessed with the idea that the “high” I was feeling from Seroquel was a manufactured high and I was taking “a drug” which was giving me a false reality. I researched this topic heavily and found that Seroquel is in fact used recreationally, however, it is used for the sedative effect. So drug users will take 50mg to “come down” from an upper. There are people who use it recreationally that find themselves in a sense of “high” but, as the experts explained, that is a result of the person actually being mentally ill and taking the Seroquel, which they should be taking routinely. So the “high on life” feeling that I was experiencing was real and I felt great comfort in that.
Unfortunately, despite dose increases, the feeling of the “new” wore off, as it always does. The “high on life” feeling cooled off and my enjoyment of simple activities became less. But, the slightly less “high on life” feeling has allowed me to live my life for the first time, ever.
It has been over a year since I have experienced a severe depression that lasts for more than a few hours. My mania is still present, but it is much less severe and manageable.
For the first time in my life, I am functioning creatively outside of mania. I am now able to work on a project consistently, instead of only being able to produce content at 3:00 a.m. after a week of no sleep and believing I’m a genius.
I still experience numerous other mental illness symptoms, however, my life has changed dramatically since starting Seroquel. I am now able to function on a daily basis. I no longer call my husband sobbing, I am enjoying being awake.
I no longer watch the clock. Most days, I have no idea what time it is because I am so busy doing things. I don’t wear a watch anymore. The carpet is still worn where I sat in the chair in the dark dining room, but I no longer sit there. I no longer spend hours and days laying in bed, silently staring at the wall. The journal I started is now sitting in my bookshelf collecting dust. My suicide wall of pictures and reasons, is not really used or thought about.
One side effect that I deal with in taking Seroquel is weight gain. I used to weigh 130 pounds, but that was due to not eating well because of depression. Seroquel is famous for increasing appetite but I have found that I actually enjoy food for the first time, so I am pretty certain that my gaining 50 pounds in the last year, to 180 pounds, is because I am eating the way a person should, instead of starving myself.
I am sure that things will change, as they always do. It is common for a psychiatric medication to lose its effectiveness over the years. I am guessing that after some time, I may have a downswing which is the result of the Seroquel no longer working, but for now, I am enjoying the little things, including just existing on my front porch with a cup of coffee.
-Duckie May
