Preventing Suicide

 Today is World Suicide Prevention Day.

As someone with a family member who's actively considered suicide, I can say that preventing it is about as difficult as finding that proverbial needle in a haystack. Luck is more involved, I think. Luck that you find your loved one before it is too late, luck that your loved one was inexpert at handling guns or calculating dosages or carving into flesh.

But there are ways to address the underlying risks for suicide. Screening our children--and ourselves--for depression and other mood disorders is a start. Seeking treatment. Supporting increased research in finding better treatments.

MAKING OUR INSURERS REIMBURSE MENTAL HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS ADEQUATELY AND MAKING THEM COVER LONGER-TERM TREATMENT THAT WORKS.

I hope that got your attention.

Because here, in the state of Maryland, it is close to impossible to find outpatient adolescent psychiatrists and therapists 'in network'. If your child is hospitalized for depression, once 'stabilized', your child is discharged to outpatient care. If your child needs more intense treatment, there are few resources available, and those that are require you to relinquish your child to the Department of Social Services.

Private resources are located out-of-state, and are obscenely expensive. Insurance doesn't cover these expenses, nor does the public education system, which won't pay for out-of-state placement in educational programs that can help emotionally ill children. To obtain access to in-state private resources in Maryland, you almost always have to be dually-diagnosed with a learning disability (ADHD) and/or a spectrum disorder (Autism, Asperger's) in order to get the placement and resources needed.

So yeah, I am angry. And committed to yell and stomp my feet and make noise until we really do achieve parity in treating emotional illness. Depression IS a brain disease, just as is bipolar and schizophrenia and addiction. We wouldn't deny diabetics their insulin or cancer sufferers their chemo and radiation. So why deny our children the help they need?

Help me prevent suicide. Make some noise. Be vigilant for the signs and symptoms that signal depression in those you love. Love them by asking if they want to harm themselves, and if they say yes, get them help.

One Survivor's Story

Peace, Linda

Gratitude #20

Sometimes it's the smallest things that mean the most: the meetings that end on time, the rain that holds off until you get home, your youngest's idea to use flour tortillas for the hamburgers instead of the rolls not picked up. For these small events and non, I am grateful.

And thanks for this cool article about the utility of ketamine and other psychedelics to treat depression and other psychiatric ailments. Grateful because it's good info for my day job, and better, gives me an idea for joiperidone, aka JM-25, the mythical medication starring in PURE.

Compliments of Scientific American.

Peace, Linda

Infinite Jest No Longer

David Foster Wallace died this past weekend. He was a brilliant writer, and I suspect much of his fluid, exuberant prose was fueled by his mental illness, described as depression today in an obituary in the The New Tork Times.

Although having read his writing, I cannot help but think he was possibly bipolar.

After 20 years of relatively successful treatment, Mr. Wallace suffered from what we clinicians call 'Prozac poop-out', a term for when antidepressants of any type fail to work. Electroconvulsive therapy also proved futile, as did inpatient hospitalization.

My heart goes out to Mr. Wallace's family... and to all those touched by mental maladies. Which is, in the end, all of us.

The Writing... Thank God for the tedious nature of my current revisions. My father is currently going through serious medical problems of his own, which tends to consume my heart and mind. I'm unable to give much 'good' to my writing, although, of course, I write through my angst.

Peace, Linda

Betwixt Angst and Comfortably Numb

This thing, not a feeling yet not just a thought, has been running through me like an underground spring, trying to well to the surface. It - whatever it is - has been lurking in my academic life, as well as my writing life. And my personal, too.

It goes something like this: sometimes we feel lousy. Not just a bad hair day kind of lousy, but the kind of nasty where we want to scream, hit people, curl into a tight ball on the floor of a dark closet, cut ourselves with exacto blades, play with long coils of rope, lose ourselves in the comfort of gambling, food, booze, or sex. The dark, dark emotions that dog us like stubborn shadows. And we want them to go away. Now. Because stewing in this maelstrom of negative emotion/feeling/angst/insanity makes us extremely uncomfortable.

But there are pills, you see. Some you can get from your family doc, others you can easily score from a college roomie, a dealer loitering in the Lexington Market parking lot, or a friend's medicine cabinet.

And the question is: do you take the pill?

Fascinating article and discussion on this delicate balance, courtesy of Judith Warner