hsphaven

I am both in pain and emotionally dead. I don’t know how I can be in so much pain and so empty at the same time. I guess the pain doesn’t fill me, but consumes me. It is hard to write in this state. Nothing will take this awful feeling away.

This all started on Tuesday night when I called Lifeline. If you read my last post, Despair, you would know why. Lifeline ended up calling the police. I hid the pills I wanted to use for another suicide attempt and locked the door. A male and female police officer shortly arrived at my house. I met them outside wearing no shoes and carrying only my phone and ear muffs. The male officer wanted to talk to my dad, who was asleep, but I didn’t want him to.

“It’s ok, you’re an adult, we don’t have to talk to your dad,” the female officer assured me as she saw I was getting distressed.

She asked why I hadn’t taken my usual medication that night.

We sat in their car as they were worried my feet would get cold and talked for a bit. I told them that I went skinny dipping at night.

“Note that down,” the female officer told her partner.

I was touched by how caring and attentive they were.

The female police officer asked if I was still feeling suicidal. She said sometimes people calm down after having a chat and are able to get through the night. I said I was still suicidal. The last five weeks have been absolute hell and I knew it wasn’t over yet. So the police called for an ambulance, but there were no ambulances available. They ended up driving me to the hospital themselves. I didn’t complain as I liked their company. They were some of the nicest police officers I’d met. The waiting room was chockers, but we were allowed to go in through the ambulance entrance. We ended up waiting there for the rest of the night, listening to a man in one of the cubicles who, whenever he spoke, would repeat the same sentence exactly three times. It was enough to drive anyone mental. He didn’t want to be there and wanted a smoke. “Where’s the fresh air, where’s the fresh air, where’s the fresh air”, he’d yell.

“You have to stay as you’re under the Mental Health Act,” the nurse told him.

“You’re killing me, you’re killing me, you’re killing me!” he yelled.

We were all getting tired. I think the police officers were also romantic partners because they would rest their head on each other’s shoulders. They sat there looking up the footy on their phone and scrolling through Facebook. It was nice to see their human side.

I’ve been revolving through hospitals for seven years now. Part of me wanted help, but another part of me felt they didn’t care and there was nothing they could do for me. I remembered the time the nurse threatened to drag me out using their security even when I was so unwell and suicidal. So at around 6am, I got up, pressed the green button and tried to walk out the sliding doors. The two cops stopped me.

“You can’t go sweetie,” said the female cop.

“There’s no help here!” I told them.

“Yes there is,” the male nurse said.

The cops created a bit of a bed for me out of chairs so I could lie down.

They were on the phone to their colleagues to organise some cops to take over when their shift finished at 7:30am.

“She has tried to leave,” the female nurse told them.

At 7:30am three male cops arrived.

“I don’t want you to go,” I told the female cop, starting to cry. I hated the way I got attached to anyone who showed me kindness.

“We have to,” she said.

“Thank you, bye!” I said to them as they turned their backs and left through the sliding doors.

When they left, I completely broke down. I was surrounded by three male cops and none of them were anywhere near as kind as the first two. I started to dissociate. I felt like everything was a dream. I could no longer speak and I felt like a little child. There was a step ladder a maintenance person had set up as they worked on something in the roof. I climbed up the step ladder, the kind of thing I would do when I was a child (I would climb everything from trees to the Kmart shoe shelf). Then I got down and started pacing around the hospital, but the cops told me to stop. I was seated further up the corridor away from the step ladder. I sat down and rocked on my chair, clearly distressed, while the three male cops stood around me. I then stopped rocking and sat very still. I remained in the same position for some time to the point where it felt like my whole body had turned into an object. Eventually I was able to move again and I felt the chair. I rubbed the chair up and down, over and over. I then slipped off onto the floor. I lay on the floor, and someone covered me with a blanket. I overheard another male’s voice.

“Is she really such a threat that she needs police standing around her?” he said.

Finally a man from the psych team came and told the police they could leave. He kept telling me to get up off the ground, but I struggled to move. Finally I managed to pull myself up onto the chair again. I didn’t look at him and I didn’t speak. I didn’t want to speak to anyone from the psych team. They were the whole reason I was in this mess. I had gone to hospital asking for help a month ago and the psych people sent me home. Later in the week I was brought in by ambulance in a coma as I had overdosed.

I got up and tried to leave again.

“Call security,”  the psych man said. A “code grey” was called and a bunch of security officers got in my way and wouldn’t let me leave.

A part of me liked that they cared enough to stop me. This strange, confusing struggle was well articulated by Lynn Williams, who wrote Personal Accounts: A “Classic” Case of Borderline Personality Disorder:

My longing for rescue made me, especially after I entered the treatment system, run, flee, turn to authorities for help, be chased. In fact, I fled from security (that is, I left the psychiatric unit), running away but still wanting to be caught, to be contained but not suffocated—primal feelings that I couldn’t verbalize then. To say it was an altered state of consciousness is putting it mildly. All I can say now is that there was something I wanted to be gone but at the same time didn’t wish to lose.

“Are you going to put her on a treatment order?” one of the men asked, but the psych man said he wasn’t going to.

“After we have a chat I can let you go home,” the psych man told me.

I was led into a small room with two seats. The psych man tried to talk to me but I couldn’t speak. I felt like I had all these people in my head arguing about what to do and I was mentally congested.

“I know you can speak,” he told me, but I couldn’t.

He told me he was going to leave me for ten minutes and come back.

He left, and shortly a nurse came in with two white tablets of diazepam and a thin, yellow olanzapine wafer. I wouldn’t take them. I managed to say one word: “bad”.

“If you don’t take them we will give you an injection,” the nurse threatened.

So I took the stupid pills and the wafer which I knew was full of shit. I felt like I was going to vomit. It still wasn’t enough to bring my voice back.

I was just a little kid, and reached for people’s hands to hold.

The psych man came back.

“I need you to tell me what you want from this service,” he said. I couldn’t answer him. I was reliant on his judgement.

In the end he said he would give me a 48 hour admission in the 4-bed psych unit I’m usually put in.

I couldn’t speak to anyone for the rest of the day. I had to write everything down. I spent most of my admission in bed and I barely ate. The most caring nurse was a young girl called Shay, if I remember her name correctly. We re-wrote the notes my case management team had written about me years ago so that the hospital better understood me. In the notes it said not to refer me to the hospital Betty worked at. Shay asked about that, so I told her about Betty. Shay said Betty was not meant to give me her number but she understood why she did. She said she saw lots of patients who were like troubled youth and her heart went out to them. She thought Betty must have got into trouble.

During my final night I emptied the plastic rubbish bin bag and tied it around my head. I wanted to die, but in the end it got so uncomfortable I took it off. I was frustrated that I couldn’t kill myself. I went to the nurse’s station and lost it, crying and hitting the chairs, telling them I am so alone and want it all to be over. I was discharged today, even though I’m still suicidal. I don’t understand why people fuss so much over you when you first arrive, but then want you gone, even when you are still a danger to yourself. And in fact, after all this, I feel even more suicidal than I was before I went to hospital. I am at a complete loss as to what to do. I have only just left hospital and here I am thinking of calling Lifeline again and repeating the cycle.