Once upon a time, there was me. I was a drunk. I wanted to die. I couldn’t handle the way I was living anymore. So I went into a recovery house. I failed. I went to another one. Three years into sobriety I had a mental breakdown. Things have been fucked ever since. But through it all I’ve also had this eating disorder, see. So it’s not enough to try to get my life back from mental illness. I’ve got an eating disorder too.
Treatments Archive
- Sub-Categories
- Lifestyle Changes (25)
- Medications (32)
- Therapy (19)
07 May 2013
My Experience with Detox and Outpatient Rehab
My alcoholism reached a head in spring of 2013, brought to desperation by the death of my wife and my subsequent despair. By this point I was drinking from three pm onward everyday, first wine and then vodka, whiskey or rum. Nothing would bring her back, but I could annihilate myself. It was starting to dawn on me, though, that this was making me nothing but miserable. I wasn’t going anywhere or doing anything. I wasn’t socializing or running errands. I could barely cook. Being on disability, I wasn’t working. My full-time job was getting to the bottom of the bottle.
27 Mar 2013
How The American Mental Health Care System Failed Me (And Everyone I Know)
I arrived at the hospital at 8pm. They tell me at 11pm that the psychiatrist is actually not here. So I will have to spend the night, and I would be seen in the morning. This was especially frustrating considering I was used to this. I have been generally ignored by physicians in emergency rooms most of my life. Especially as a mentally ill, disabled person. We are pushed to the back burner. Even in an ER that currently had three patients who were there for bone injuries.
04 Mar 2013
DBT Skills: Emotion Regulation
This is the final installment of the DBT Skills series. I want to say a special thank you to Breyonne for her hard work in writing this series – I know it will be useful for so many of our readers!
When I first heard the words ‘emotion regulation’, the first thing I thought was, Oh great. Another therapist trying to tell me that feelings are just feelings, they can’t hurt me, they can’t kill me, blah blah yadda yadda. And I’ve been to enough therapy, enough counseling, enough self-help meetings to know this, even if only theoretically. So I wasn’t prepared to learn a whole lot from this module. I couldn’t have been further from the truth.
30 Jan 2013
Needles, Fear, and T
Trigger Warning: for those afraid of needles.
I have a fear of needles.
It is a pretty common fear. It kind of makes sense. I mean, needles do hurt, often just a tiny bit and but sometimes quite a lot, depending on what they’re doing. Plus, they invade some of the most private parts of our bodies and remove parts of us or put new things inside of us. It’s creepy. And people don’t always ask permission before they put needles inside us (although they almost always should). Needles can help us, but they can also harm us and/or reveal things about us that we may not wholly want to know. Needles can be violating.
28 Jan 2013
More lists
I really want to sleep without sleep meds. I have had insomnia off and on for almost twenty years, since I was fifteen. When I was younger, it was usually trouble getting to sleep. As I got older, it became trouble with staying asleep. I took Ambien every night for around a year, which at first was bliss. It stopped working, though, and I spent three weeks sleeping almost not at all. Then I got Lunesta, which I have taken every night for the last year. If my options are really not sleeping or taking meds, I am definitely willing to take meds.
16 Jan 2013
Abilify Quick Facts
Abilify is a second-generation antipsychotic. It works by regulating dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine levels in the brain.
09 Jan 2013
Go Back to Sleep
These are my nightmares.
I have them a few times a week. Sometimes every night.
Sometimes they are just feelings. No dreams. Just waking feelings of fear.
I did not know nightmares were abnormal for adults until I started reading about it. Apparently a very small percentage (under 3%) of adults report more than 2 nightmares per week, or even year. Maybe that’s wrong. It is from wikipedia. But now it makes sense when I have told people about these, how no one seems to share the experience.
07 Dec 2012
What Every Trans Person Should Ask Their Mental Health Provider
For me, deciding to see a therapist about my gender dysphoria was a huge step. It was the first time I had told another human being face to face that I thought I was transgender. I was lucky; the psychologist in the area who is known for taking trans clients was full up and couldn’t take me. She recommended a colleague whom I had never heard of. I gave her a chance, and she turned out to be phenomenal. She was non-judgmental, listened well, asked insightful questions, and in the end became someone whose insights and ideas I trusted.
28 Nov 2012
Sobriety & Resentments
No one ever said that this whole sobriety thing would be easy but I have found that it gets a whole lot harder the longer I go. I went to AA, I got a sponsor; I did everything that they told me to do. I even managed to go to a meeting a day. Yet at the same time the longer that I stay dry the more social situations that I find myself in where I am saying to myself, maybe one more would be okay. Take for example last night, I was asked over for a social occasion and it inevitably lead to me picking up, a beer in this case. But that beer lead to Tequila shots which led to, etc. etc. I got scary drunk, more drunk then I have gotten in a long time and while nothing bad happened, and I made it home safely and managed to crawl into bed. But see my alcoholic mentally ill mind tells me that because I did that, because nothing “bad” happened that it must be okay for me to drink again.