This post can be triggering if discussion about suicide is a difficult topic for you to read about. If you are sensitive to this issue, please use this time to close the browser window or go to a different website.
Ah, so here we are: Bipolar and Suicide.
According to this Psychiatric Times Journal Article, approximately 50% of Bipolar people have attempted suicide. That number is staggering. One in two of us will attempt suicide in our lifetime. If that doesn't indicate the pain people with Bipolar Disorder go through, I don't know what will.
Have I attempted suicide?
Vaguely. Let me just state now that my encounters with suicide are nowhere near the severity of others who suffer with Bipolar, but this is a blog about my experiences, not theirs, so...
When I was 7 years old, I was having intrusive thoughts due to OCD (undiagnosed at that time, you can read that post here). I wanted the thoughts to stop. The only way I knew how to do that in my 7 year old brain was to stab myself in the general area of my torso, like on a movie I had seen (I would sneak out into the hallway and watch TV while my mom sat on the couch...got all the good scary shows in then).
One day, I went to the kitchen and picked out the sharpest kitchen knife I could find. I pulled my shirt up over my 7 year-old pot belly, and put my hand over my chest, determining which side my heart was in. Of course, not being an anatomical expert at 7, I placed the knife more in my stomach area, below my sternum. I was alone at the time. My mom was at work. My dad was on one of his disappearances. I stood there in the kitchen, and slowly pressed the tip of the knife into my skin. It hurt way more than I expected, and I stopped. I looked down. I had barely even drawn blood. That made me frustrated. I tried again and again, getting slightly more blood, getting the knife tip a little more in. But it was too painful. I put the knife away and looked at my stomach. Stabbing myself through was not going to work. I didn't have any other ideas, so I went to finish my math homework.
As time passed, I still hadn't come up with any ways of really killing myself. The knife was out. I didn't know about pills, hanging, guns or what not. But the thought was all-consuming and with me throughout my childhood.
When I was about 19, I was still uneducated about drugs and pills and what not, being in a very religious and sheltered household. I swallowed as many vitamins, tylenol, laxatives and supplements I could get my hands on, thinking the interactions would kill me or something. It was an impulsive decision, one born out of hate for myself. I ended up shooting those things out of both ends of my body, and slept for 24 hours. After that, I was fine. I was also discouraged. I started googling how to kill myself with pills. I felt like an idiot. The 40 or so pills I had taken were not good for my body, but they were nowhere near what was needed to kill myself. I debated going to the store and buying tons of benadryl, but there was no guarantee that the same type of thing wouldn't happen again. I put suicide off again.
Those are really the only two "attempts" or "encounters with suicide" I have made. They weren't very serious attempts compared to a lot of Bipolar people out there. But they were very real attempts to me based on my limited knowledge of killing myself at the time.
Now, I still have suicidal thoughts, and they are a regular part of me. They are nothing new. They come in, and stick around. Sometimes I write suicide thoughts down as a cathartic experience, other times I just ignore them. There have been times more recently where I have seriously considered suicide, but after doing a lot of research, determined that the ways would be too uncomfortable, too messy for people to clean up after, or have no guarantee of succeeding. The last thing I would want to do is decide to punch my ticket off this ball of dirt, and wake up with brain damage or some other chronic problem due to a failed attempt.
When the thoughts come now, I contact my psychiatrist, and we usually make a medication adjustment. Having a family helps me as well. I think about suicide, and what it would do to my daughter. I couldn't do that to her. It would scar her for life, and she would always be under the umbrella of my own selfish, morbid decision. She is so bright, sweet and well-adjusted and I see a wonderful future ahead for her. I couldn't dim her light from my own desires to put myself out of my own misery.
Mood tracking helps as well, for it gives you a bit of a scientific, objective look into your mental illness. I use an app called Mood Tracker (it has four yellow faces on it, one with a thunderstorm, one with a lightning bolt, and so on). It's free. I've used it for a couple of years. If you track your moods diligently, you can start to see patterns. You log your sleep, your meds, your mood, and any misc. notes you want to add. You can also email the file to yourself or your doctor or therapist. It's pretty easy to use and when I get suicidal thoughts, I can usually go on there and see a decline in mood over the period of a few days, even if I don't realize the decline at the time. As I said in a previous post, depression hits me hard and it's hard for me to recognize the signs of it.
I wonder if my suicidal thoughts were worse as a young person. They seem to get better as I get older, although I am currently on medication so that could definitely be lessening the seriousness of the those thoughts. I was not on medication as a young person, although I definitely needed to be. As I have mentioned before in this blog, the only time I have been hospitalized was when I was feeling majorly suicidal, just as I was receiving my Bipolar diagnosis and getting put on correct medication.
When I have the thoughts of wanting to die, which still do occur, I delay any further decision for 24 hours. I keep delaying my decision of whether or not to kill myself by hours or days. Usually by that time, I can get past the thoughts. As I mentioned above, writing my own suicide letters sometimes helps me get the thoughts down on paper and gets some of the stress out.
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