#reference to suicide

[usslakevee]

Star Trek season 5 episode 16 Ethics is interesting. Beverly is 100% in the right. It is wrong to trial experimental medicine that has not been approved for clinical trials on a patient who is struggling to cope with a disability. However her black and white thinking will result in Worf's death, because of his cultural beliefs. (Wrong as they may be)

Meanwhile her foil, this doctor who wants to trial her experimental medicine is clearly in the wrong. Her experiments have resulted in the death of other patients. She is willing to kill to further her research, and she does not care if Worf dies as a result of her experiments. But she offers a legitimate chance for his survival that Beverly would deny him.

She is clearly wrong, and Beverly is clearly right. And yet there is the complicated question of where ethics meet a patient's desires.

And most interestingly over the course of the episode Worf's position does change. Perhaps if Beverly has been able to keep him in sick bay, had refused him the option to end his life he would have grown to accept his disability. Over the course of the episode he shifts from denying his son access to the room, and forcing himself to stand to see him, to letting Alexander see him while he lays in bed. He shifts from wanting to commit a ritual to end his life, to being willing to attempt this procedure. Who could say he wouldn't have been able to learn to cope with his disability with enough time.

[apricotbuncakes]

They're trying to make lists of us,

They're calling us the enemy to create divides in the nation, an "us v.s. them",

They're calling for our "eradication",

They dehumanize us, and call us 'filth',

They murder us,

They're taking away our healthcare,

They're making it illegal to support and respect us,

They're defining us out of the law,

And you still have the fucking audacity to say that this isn't a genocide.

This isn't even close to an exhaustive list of what we're facing, but Tumblr only allows so many images at a time. They are trying to kill us or make us kill ourselves. They don't want us cured, they want us dead. This is a fucking genocide, and I'm not going to be quiet about it.

[marymoss1971]

Here's a little something I wrote.

[museaway]

I'm not ignoring my WIPs. they're ripening in my mental cellar

[trans-androgyne]

Wake the fuck up and support transmascs, now. We are hurting. We feel isolated. We feel invisible. We feel unheard. If you think we don’t have issues of our own you have not been listening to us. If you think we all have gendered privilege you have not been listening to us. You’ve probably seen stories cherry-picked from the most privileged and passing among us, and assume we tend to be like that or on that path. It is not true. You’ve probably seen our struggles downplayed and compared to transfems’ — almost always done without actually asking the diverse transmasc community — to say we have it easy. It is not true. We are entering the public eye in a very bad way. We are mistreated for our trans masculinity both inside and outside the queer community. We are at the highest risk for suicide and sexual assault but people assume we need fewer resources anyway. I’m the one who’s had to do everything for transmascs myself in my area. I cannot do this alone. Please for the love of any gods out there love and support transmascs before it’s too late. We are suffering too.

[hekxate]

third time’s the charm (7-15/15) (1-6)

shuake postcanon reunion ‼️MAJOR CONTENT WARNINGS: blood, violence, murder, graphic depictions of suicide, minor references to childbirth, references to alcoholism

[knific]

⚠️CW suicide, noose

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sorry idk why I did this

[wearenemies]

‘there is dust on the times i love’ / ‘the sailing that gradually made you tiny in my sight’ (postcard from pete wentz to patrick stump // estate sale sign by the mountain goats // untitled poetry by tumblr user archbudzar // the letters of frida kahlo // the predatory wasp of the palisades by sufjan stevens // civilization by carl phillips // giovanni’s room by james baldwin // sendero luminoso verdadero by the mountain goats // postcard from patrick stump to pete wentz)

[strangelittlestories]

The demon appeared amidst the ring of candles and immediately threw itself against the edge of the summoning circle, trying again and again to break the barriers of salt, chalk and soul.

Alas, it was no good. The magician had invested in high quality chalk paint and superglued the salt over the top, so even the most thunder-thick and sin-hot hellstorm could not pierce the barrier.

Drops of sweat appeared on the summoner’s brow as she felt the strands of spirit she’d wrapped around the runes and candles tested - but her soul stood strong.

“Well then,” said the demon, after it had exhausted itself with its struggles, “get on with it. I suppose you want damnable power or eternal life or some boring shit.”

“Do you remember me?” Asked the woman outside the circle.

“Should I?” The demon’s sigh echoed with quiet screams.

“We met when you were an angel. You saved my life. It was down by the riverbank not far from here.”

“...oh sure, for you it was a transcendent event. For me, it was Thursday.”

“I think the meme you mean is ‘Tuesday’.”

“Yes, but the night we met was a Thursday.” The demon curled up in the middle of a circle; a sad blob of darkness in which floated two dying embers for eyes. “You shouldn’t remember me.”

“I know. You were the frost in the air and the ice in the water. You were a shock to the system. You woke something up in me. I studied all this,” the magician gestured to the occult tat that surrounded them, “so that I could thank you.”

“You shouldn’t have bothered.”

“It was a surprise to find out you’d fallen, I admit. But I still owe you my thanks.”

“This is exhausting.” The demon twisted uncomfortably, wringing itself out like a cloth woven of shadowfire strands. “Offer your deal, so I can hang you on your own ambition and go.”

“I would like,” the magician put all the force and care of her will into her words, “for you to watch a movie with me. In exchange, I will give up to three hours of my life.”

“...what movie do you want to watch?”

“Anything less than three hours long, I suppose.”

[wander-wren]

bothers me in trc fandom when people refer to “ronan’s suicide attempt” because it was pretty importantly NOT a suicide attempt. gansey, noah, adam, they all assumed it was, which is why gansey freaks out when ronan goes missing overnight at the beginning of trb, but it is not. it was a dream creature he brought back that had clawed him up.

i’m sure you could argue that that’s just an indirect suicide attempt, ronan’s subconscious, etc (opal tells him the night horrors are him), but i don’t see it that way. ronan is angry and grieving and violent in the wake of niall’s death. the night horrors, to my knowledge, don’t target ronan so much as they target any soft, living thing they can destroy. we don’t see this scene happen. we don’t see the day or the nightmare that comes before. we just have ronan’s word, and ronan says it wasn’t a suicide attempt, so it wasn’t.

and we can talk in circles then about whether ronan is suicidal actually—personally i think he has a sort of reckless disregard for his own life (see: drag racing, dream drugs) and has internalized a lot of the ideas about him being a “bad kid,” but i don’t think he’s actively suicidal. and that’s important to me. it’s important that ronan doesn’t actually want to die. i think he’s struggling to see the point of what everyone wants him to do (school), and struggling to envision a future for himself.

if ANYTHING was going to make ronan suicidal, truly, it should have been the dreamer trilogy. he’s isolated from all of his loved ones, literally starts dying if he’s not careful with the ley lines, and also the world is ending. we can see his same thought patterns repeating (“you’re always the car crash, ronan”) and we see him struggling with reality and identity (every conversation with bryde, who remember is part of ronan’s psyche, and also the looping dream with the mirror). and he’s not suicidal in the dreamer trilogy.

we talk a lot in this fandom about “gansey kind of wanted to live.” i think we should talk about how, despite everything, so did ronan.

[jayjamjary]

Hello Lupin III fandom. I come bearing haha funny Goemon comic.

And then this was a pretty big project and I was forced to do it on Ibis Paint X :c so I'm going to show off the draft vs final down here.

Tada. Terribly grainy video but oh well, it's the best that ibis could give me.

[apricotbuncakes]

I forgot that I’m mentally and sent this string of messages to my friend in quick succession so that they would not worry about me.

[marymoss1971]

A new fic -- very dark theme

thanks to @curator-on-ao3's excellent The Autobiography of Kirsten Clancy - Chapter 1 - Curator - Star Trek: Picard [Archive of Our Own], I've always wanted to write something with Clancy. But I had no idea what. I surely didn't consider this.

However, recently, I began thinking about Admiral Patterson. I've always suspected that he worked at Utopia Planitia on Mars--perhaps as the Director. So, I figured that he died in the Synth attack.

But this weekend, I thought "What if he didn't die in the attack. What if it's more tragic?" Anyway, Patterson and Utopia Planitia got me to thinking of Clancy and that's how this story came to be.

PS: another shout out to Curator since her Clancy autobiography showed me that stories can be written around a peripheral character.

[timethehobo]

Wish we got comic variant skins. KTJL Boomie but in his New Suicide Squad fit. Waller probably had him cut his hair then lmao.

[poorlydrawninstarsandtime]

Can the people get a Sloop...

yah 👍

[cartoon splat sfx]

[ids in alt]

[macgyvermedical]

My Experience in Inpatient Psych

So I know a lot of people on here have talked about their experience in inpatient psych facilities, but I'd like to add mine just to give all you writers out there a writer-focused one. It's below the cut just in case you have to sit this one out for your own reasons.

To give you some background, I am 30 years old and have had hallucinations since about 16 and bizarre intrusive thoughts (someone living in my house that wasn't supposed to be there, somebody poisoned my walls, etc...) for about a decade, as well as very severe anxiety since I was about 3 years old. This is something not a lot of people know about me, even people I am friends with IRL.

The only thing I am actually diagnosed with is anxiety, which I'm starting to think is a failing of the psych systems I have been a part of. I have had counseling off and on and prior to this hospitalization I took escitalopram, aripiprazole, and gabapentin prescribed by my primary care doctor- all for the severe anxiety.

Quite frankly, I should have been in inpatient psych at least a few times before this, and it's by sheer dumb luck that I've survived to continue this blog.

On Friday, I was at home alone and made a few pretty bad decisions. I wont say what they were because frankly they're embarrassing, but they have to do with self-harm. I was scheduled to work Saturday and at about 9pm I realized that if I drove myself to work I would crash my car. Since my wife drives me sometimes, I figured I would just ask her to.

I told my wife and she asked- even if she drove me to work, since I was a nurse, would I be able to keep myself safe around insulin or other potentially dangerous drugs? I couldn't answer that question. We talked for a couple hours and came to the conclusion that I probably needed to go to the emergency department.

At this point I figured they would evaluate me and release me because I couldn't possibly meet the criteria for inpatient. I was wrong in this assumption. After telling them the decisions I had made that day, the feelings of wanting to die in a car crash, plus about a previous attempt, they recommended inpatient. Turns out, when you're a nurse, you can make some really bad life choices with the knowledge you have, and they didn't want to take any chances.

I was given paper scrubs to wear (so I couldn't hurt myself with my clothing or a hospital gown). I was also given a patient companion (someone who sits in the room and makes sure you don't hurt yourself).

They gave me the option of signing myself in voluntarily, or putting me on a writ of detention. A writ of detention is a piece of paperwork that allows a medical professional or law enforcement officer to hold someone for 3 days in a psychiatric facility against the person's will for the purposes of psychiatric treatment. Whether you sign the voluntary or get placed on a writ, you cannot sign yourself out. You need to wait until the psychiatrist taking care of you thinks you're ready to go.

I didn't believe at this point I needed to go inpatient, but I took the voluntary option because there are some perks, like being able to leave within 3 days if appropriate. At this point I was convinced I was probably going to have to call off work Saturday and Sunday, probably be out of the hospital Monday, have a few days to rest and be back at work on my next scheduled shift after that, which was Thursday.

Well, that's not what happened.

Because of some of the decisions I had made, along with bed availability, they wanted to keep me in the observation unit overnight before they sent me to psych. I stayed overnight in a unit that shares staff with the unit I work on, so I was taken care of by my coworkers. This was surprisingly not that bad. I like my coworkers and they were really professional about it.

Saturday I felt like I was in a fog all day. I couldn't watch TV. I couldn't color or write. I worked out some in my hospital room and paced the halls once or twice. Mostly I hung out with my wife and occasionally talked with my companion, but even talking was difficult. I had refused ativan because I felt like I had no hope of finding a medication that made me feel better, and I figured I didn't want to take the one medication that might actually work and then not be able to get it ever again.

Around 7PM I took a 45 minute ambulance ride to the facility. Getting my blood pressure taken is a big anxiety trigger for me, but my brain felt so scrambled that I couldn't express this well. They took it every 10 minutes on the ride there and by the time I got there it was in the 170s/100s (BP goes up when you're having severe anxiety). This was not their fault of course, but no matter how much I thought about telling them or refusing the BPs, I just couldn't do it.

When I got to the facility I was greeted by a tech who took my BP again (150s/90s this time), showed me around and looked through my personal belongings (basically just the clothing I came in with since my wife took my phone and wallet knowing I wouldn't be able to have them on the unit) to make sure I didn't have anything I wasn't allowed to on the unit. She showed me around my room and was really thorough with telling me how things worked, what the rules were, etc..

The rules included:

No patients allowed in other patients rooms

No personal belongings that had strings, belts, or laces, or that could be used as a weapon

No caffeine after lunch and no free access to caffeine

No personal electronics (including eReaders and watches). There was a TV in the day room and 2 phones mounted to the wall for patient use

A little later my nurse came into my room and asked me a ton of questions. Here's the thing about any hospital- you get asked the same questions over and over. By the time I'd gotten there I could give my story in under a minute. Or at least, that's what it felt like. There were only 2 clocks on the unit, at the nurses stations.

The unit itself was laid out in a "T" shape. There was a main nurse's station at the place where the two hallways intersected. At the end of the long hallway there was another smaller nurses station, a cafeteria/day room, and a "comfort room" which was a small room off the day room that had a collection of the oldest and worst donated books that have every come together on a bookshelf.

I did some pacing that night and then went to bed, but didn't sleep particularly well.

On Sunday morning the tech woke me up to take my blood pressure, which was, not unsurprisingly, still high. It was about 5 AM so I got up and paced the longer of the corridors for about an hour. Breakfast was served at 8 and the food wasn't that bad. The coffee was about the worst I'd ever drank, which I suppose helped with the no caffeine goals.

Just after breakfast I met with a psychiatrist on an iPad for about half a minute, and I'm not exaggerating there. The only questions he asked were whether I was suicidal and whether I would be fine with tripling my dose of aripiprazole in light of the hallucinations. I had had a 50-lb weight gain in the last year so I asked to switch my med. He switched the med to cariprazine. That was all.

I had a much longer meeting with my nurse later. All the nurses did an excellent job of assessing me, asked tons of questions, and it seemed like they really tried to figure out what was going on. That day I also met with a social worker, and a therapist, and a nurse practitioner. Each of them did an assessment to see what my needs were while I was there.

There was also a music therapy session where I cried my eyes out to Because of You by Kelly Clarkson.

I was really tired by the end of the day but I also didn't think I could sleep so I asked for trazodone. I should clarify that when I say "I" in this piece I really mean my wife convinced me to ask because I legitimately didn't believe I needed or deserved any of the things I asked for at this point. To my utter shock and surprise, they gave me the trazodone.

My first night on trazodone was amazing and I realized I hadn't slept well in a long time. With trazodone I fell asleep and stayed asleep until the blood pressure cart came rolling down the hallway at 5am. The second I got up on Monday morning I was wide awake.

I paced a lot Monday. I went to a goals session in the morning where I gave a goal to write 3/4 of a page. I didn't know if I could do it or what I was even going to write about, but I know I like to write and it might be a reasonable introduction to getting back to life.

I also was having kind of a rough day brain-wise. My brain was coming up with all the ways I could hurt myself in my room. There weren't a lot of them, but it was trying. I told the nurse during her assessment and she asked if I felt I could keep myself safe. I asked her what she would do if I said no. She said they could move me to a more secure part of the unit and give me more supervision. I knew what part of the unit she was talking about, and I didn't want to go there (no space to pace, and pacing was keeping me alive right then). So I told her I could keep myself safe (if anything, the idea of moving was good motivation to do stay safe in itself). I hallucinated some black and white blood cells falling from the ceiling and music coming out of my vents.

I also had another meeting with the social worker to figure out discharge plans. I voiced in the meeting that I wasn't sure that I could trust my wife, since it felt like at the time she was the one who exaggerated my symptoms to get me in here. The social worker said we had really good communication skills, since this was something I felt needed to be said in front of both of them and we both stayed really calm through the whole thing.

I finished the day with an art therapy session that really helped me turn a corner. The prompt was to draw the emotion(s) you felt right now on one side of the paper, and to draw the emotions you wished you could feel on the other side. For the first time I realized that my emotional state was actually really bad and that the suicidality hadn't come out of nowhere, and that I needed help.

When my wife came to visit later that night I was able to tell her about my breakthrough, even though I still felt a little bit like she had done something to get me in here and I still wasn't sure I needed to be inpatient.

Tuesday was a lot better. I felt like I had woken up out of some kind of fog and I had no idea how long I'd been in it. I went to goals group, a spiritual group, and group occupational therapy. My goal was to be more social and I made a friend and we paced together and worked out. I read a quarter of The Martian by Andy Weir (my wife brought it for me because the best thing on the bookshelf was Louis L'Amour). I wrote about how good I suddenly felt. Turns out, I thought, a few days of good sleep, lots of therapy, and a new medication or two will really change things.

A quick side note about The Martian. I highly recommend it to anyone who is chilling in a psych hospital but has the ability to read while they're there (I sure didn't the first few days). I don't really know why, but the first few times I read it, I felt like they had created this superhuman character in Mark Watney just so they could throw a ton of wild things at him for the story. This time reading it, as a suddenly not suicidal person, I realized anyone with Mark's skill would have done the same thing and not just died on Sol 7 to get it over with.

Wednesday I woke up not feeling nearly as good as Tuesday, but still like the fog had lifted. I was a little disappointed (I hallucinated my cat (thanks for coming to visit me, Corina), some spiders, and just felt kinda meh. But I remembered how good I felt the day before, and that really kept me hopeful about going home.

I saw the psychiatrist again and asked to go home. He joked a little about me staying till Christmas, but ultimately he said as soon as his note was in I could go. I ended up leaving at about 12:30 with my wife.

In the time since leaving I have required a lot of support from my wife. The medications are all locked up, so are the blades and anything I could use to hurt myself. My wife has me in eyeshot at all times. I can't drive due to intrusive thoughts, so she does all the driving now. I quit my job because I feel like it was a big part of why I ended up as bad as I was. As someone who has been a pretty independent person this is a big change of pace, but something that is really necessary to my healing.

Ultimately at the end of my hospital stay, I was prescribed escitalopram, gabapentin, trazodone, cariprazine, and then a few days later propranolol. I'm currently on a total of 5 psych meds and honestly I don't care one bit because its so much better than being not on them at this point in my life.