Do you have a plan? Some of you have heard this in the bad way. When you are in a crisis.
But ask yourself when you are not in a crisis. What am I making plans for right now?
Right now, I am making plans for the future. I cannot stop planning my future.
Before, I was making bad plans. Before, I would have said “I cannot stop planning the end of it all.”
Remember back to the olden days, when you spent the entire night redialing to get a ring instead of a busy signal?
Back then, in school, when we were finished our assignment, test or quiz, teachers allowed us to “put your head down on your desk.”
Being the little know-nothings we were, we would place our cute little heads on top of our cute crossed arms, not realizing how stupid we looked.
I was a fast finisher so I always got to lay my head down on my arms.
But back then, the school desks only got washed once a grading period, if I recall correctly. I need to remember to tell that to my nieces and nephew. They all carry hand sanitizer.
I’m looking for people who are going through something. But not just anything. Something significant. A shift.
Because I’m going through a shift and I need to talk about it.
And my therapist retires in two weeks.
And honestly, she was only available for an hour a week, so really, how helpful was she going to be?
But I’m going through a major shift because TMS is changing my brain.
Let’s kill suicide.
Let’s kill all of it. Or at least as much as we can.
I have recently found major relief from chronic and near constant intrusive suicidal thoughts. But I will still have thoughts. And I will still have urges.
So I still wouldn’t go into certain situations where a certain prompt, a certain look, a certain song, a certain feeling, a certain slight could trigger an urge.
I have lots of plans in place. But plans have to be discussed. And figured out. And negotiated as circumstances change.
And negotiated in anticipation of circumstances changing.
Let’s kill suicide by talking about how to handle it when the thoughts and mages and urges rise up. Since we know they will.
We can have this conversation. It’s just about life. And how to live it.
It’s just about how to live life.
Let’s just talk about how to live life.
So we can live life.
Happy Friday Eve.
🤎 🤎 🤎
d (and bella)
TMS is like having a small hammer bang against your head repeatedly. Technically, each treatment session includes 55 trains of 36 pulses (for a total of 1980 pulses per session) delivered over 20 min at 18 Hz and intensity of 120% relative to the patient’s resting motor threshold (MT).
What does that mean?
Anyone who has ever been back-up-against-the-wall in crisis has had to answer the question “do you have a plan?
It’s a question that doctors, nurses and therapists are taught to answer as they triage a desperate situation.
“Do you have a plan” enables them to determine how far along a person might be in their desperation.
Because in the world of breakdowns and crises, there are critical differences between ideation, imagery, impulses, urges, and actions.
There are critical differences in how those doctors, nurses and therapists respond and what next steps are taken.
For the person in mental and emotional pain, it can feel like a threshold test of “will you be okay for now?”
When you try giving hope to someone in pain, it only works if the hope is that something will change.
Generally, in offering hope, you must be saying “I have something – an idea, a piece of information, a source, a referral – something that will change the pain you are in.”
Because if you aren’t offering a change from the pain, then what is there to be hopeful about?
You should try Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).
Many of us have been doing it for years. Or we’ve kind of been doing it.
Maybe we’ve been inspired by CBT, but not really enforcing the changes we dream up for our would-be-better selves.
But now CBT is really OUT THERE. As it should be! Because CBT is AMAZING.
And it’s free. And it’s not really that hard.
But it’s also not really that easy since you have to move around that big old roadblock formerly known as yourself.
It never occurred to me that I might not be depressed.
I mean, really.
If all you think about is death, that equals depression, right?
Well, actually, as it turns out, no.
I think about death all the time because my OCD brain is obsessed with death.
As it happens, it’s also obsessed with some other things.
Actually, if you tell my brain that it absolutely cannot obsess about death, it will just find something else more horrible than death to obsess about.
Like torture, for instance. Or war. Or terrorism.
This past week, NPR reported on a new variation on repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) called “Stanford neuromodulation therapy.” In this advancement to rTMS, imaging technology is added to the treatment and the dose of rTMS is increased. The results are a more effective treatment that works more than eight times faster than current rTMS.
This is a really helpful piece. The suggestion about researching really resonated with me. I research like crazy when I’m in the dark. And in my last darkest hour I found Ketamine. Now I’ve got Ketamine in my back pocket if I should need it again.
Thank you to The Mighty and Cassidy Allen for a Helpful Read.
Happy Holiday Monday,
xoxo, dee and bella
I really encourage those with treatment resistant depression to explore the possibility of Ketamine treatment, whether it is through a clinical trial, hospital or provider. Those with dual diagnosis or co-occurring substance abuse and/or bipolar conditions need to seek the advice of professionals with specific expertise in those areas.
I personally had great success with Ketamine. I have Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) with suicidal thoughts. I had treatment with Ketamine over the course of 18 months. I am available to talk with anyone considering Ketamine treatment – whether it is for them or for a family member. I believe Ketamine is a treatment that can save lives because of its potential to effect significant change faster than current medications and other treatments.
The following article about Zoe Boyer’s success (YAY!) with Ketamine treatment is from the Sunday New York Times for May 30, 2021. Links to more of my writing about the Ketamine experience will follow.
Life since watching Queen’s Gambit has been colorful, swirling and bright.
For once, there is a Netflix miniseries about me. And girls like me. And he’s, them’s, it’s like me.
Granted, I don’t play chess.
And I don’t have issues with drugs and alcohol.
And I don’t have a history of extreme loss and abandonment.
But other than those small details, the miniseries is literally about me.
At least that’s what I took from it. Along with a bunch of other obvious and some less-than-obvious themes (i.e., feminism, gender roles, mother figures).
It’s about isolation. And about finding a language that enables you to express yourself and communicate in a way that’s understood by others.
I come from a family of news junkies. I remember my mother’s father sitting in our living room devouring the daily papers. And my father’s mother lived long enough to become addicted to CNN and the 24-hour news cycle. She was a 24-hour news devotee debating local and global politics with anyone who enjoyed a lively discussion.
I became a news junkie too. Mostly, I love tragedies and legal procedure. Tragedies provided me an outlet for all of the sadness depression dumped on me. Legal procedure appealed to the other parts of my brain, eventually leading me to law school and then litigation.
