Hey, Mental Health GAF.
I've been lurking for a while, reading your posts and have been moved by them many times. I've wanted to post here before to show my support but avoided doing it. So, my thoughts are with you, I know Christmas can be a really tough time. Believe me, you're not alone.
I've struggled my entire life with drug addiction and mental health problems. I suffer/ed long bouts of depression and mood swings, gender dysphoria and eating disorders. At the age of 13 I asked my parents for help but was told by my mum that depression didn't exist, or at least didn't in our family. So, I turned to drugs: cigarettes and skunk weed at 14, cocaine addiction at 17, ecstasy, heroin and opiates from 18 until 24.
At the age of 24 I was burnt out. I managed to ween myself off the drugs but in doing so, lost the friends that I had. My mental health problems remained and now I found my self isolated, lonely and in a low paid job; I relapsed hard at the age of 30 and started on amphetamines and various research chemicals. The last five years have been a blur of mostly misery with some suicidal thoughts. I came out to my folks and work friends as trans about three years ago.
Then last year I was abused. Mentally, for a prolonged period I endured threats of physical and sexual violence. I feared for my life. I'm not going to go into much detail but I felt trapped with nowhere to turn. I stopped posting on forums and I felt despair like I had never felt before and so very alone. Then I did what I do best: turned to drugs.
A drug binge coupled with my mental state triggered a massive paranoid episode--a breakdown. I ended up in accident and emergency where they said I should wait hours to be seen but I cut my wrist in a hospital toilet. I didn't have a knife, so I had to improvise with a car key and credit card. It took a few minutes but eventually reached the veins. My wrist was in a terrible state, bruised, swollen, lacerated and last thing I thought I would see would be a dirty hospital toilet covered with my blood. Truly, I wouldn't wish what I felt on anybody.
The hospital kept me on a ward under observation. They found me in the toilet and attended to my wrist, then the police turned up and I told them about the drugs which they removed from my (parents) house while I remained under observation. My poor parents. In the hospital another wave of paranoia hit me, this time regarding the police and drugs. Even though my head was swirling, I managed to leave the hospital around 6am. Consequently, I was reported as a missing person on social media and a helicopter was sent out to search for me.
I attempted to walk home - I was desperate to get home. And I had convinced myself that I'd died, so when my father in his car found me by the road, I pushed him away and accused him of being an evil apparition. I was not well. I cut across country through fields and the journey took me all day. It was late night by the time I reached my road, only to find my house surrounded by police vehicles. I ran away, wandered around in a state of panic, slept rough in an industrial park and then managed to find an unlocked caravan in someone's driveway, where I waited until sunrise. My psychosis got worse and I now believed my parents were gone and like a ghost, I would return to an empty house.
At sunrise I walked home: police cars were gone. I let myself in and found my parents still awake in the lounge and hugged them. I cried for a while and when I calmed down we rang the police to inform them I had been found. They came round later on and were incredibly nice to me. The drugs had seemingly passed through my system completely by then and my episode had also abated, so they said there was no point going back to hospital immediately and that mental health services would contact me and to not worry about the drugs. They showed me more kindness than I deserved.
Later that day I cut my wrists with a ceramic kitchen knife. I took the knife upstairs to my room, held my wrists over a rubbish bin and slashed my left wrist twice and then my right once, then laid down with my hands in the bin, bleeding out. I feel so bad when I think that I did this in my parents house while they were downstairs. I was in such a bad place I can't even put into words. My mum forced open the door when she came up to check on me and had no reply. So, I ended up in the same hospital with towels wrapped around my wrists, head spinning. I hadn't lost too much blood, again they tended my wounds, put me in an observation ward, my parents stayed at my bedside. Some mental health care professionals talked to me and next day--to my complete surprise--I was discharged into my parents care. How was I not sectioned?
My parents insisted I stayed in their bedroom while they slept downstairs and checked up on me every half hour. I spent two weeks in bed (in which time I handed in my notice for my job) trying to make sense of what had happened to my life. Then I looked at my slashed wrists and it was too much, didn't want to go on, ashamed of everything I was, had and had not done with my life, no job and no hope. I took apart the plug from a desk fan, removed the metal pins, plugged them in one by one to the socket and then placed my hand down on them. I tried a few times before I gave up because of the pain--the palm of my hand had been burnt so that it appeared I had no print, just flat skin. I cried and had to tell my parents what I had done. A few days later I visited my doctor and she prescribed me citalopram which helped a lot with the depression and then had to see a psychiatric nurse who after one short consultation gave me a clean bill of health. And that was that.
It's a few months later and sometimes I feel like I need help but don't really know where get it; I'm thinking maybe narcotics anonymous or similar. I don't know. I just thought I would post here and share my story. I still don't have a job, I don't sleep well, find it hard to trust people and sometimes break down. I am trying to learn from this experience, be a better person but every now and then I feel so low and worthless.
