This about my friend who is in
the hospital following a suicide attempt (or two, actually). I know
she values her privacy, so I don't want to infringe on that, but I thought
it might help some of you with at the very least your curiosity and maybe
with a friend with similar needs should you ever be in this situation.
On the flip side, I'm still very much open to suggestions for strategies
and anything else that might help her here. Obviously, in telling
this story I am changing her name and avoiding any identifying details,
but it is factually true and as complete as I can make things (hence the
length here; sorry).
Thanks to everyone who wrote to me in response
to my request for help about her, even if it was only with condolences
and concern. That meant a lot. Thankfully, it turns out I have
a lot more screwed up friends than I thought, many of whom have been in
similar positions and have gone pretty far down the suicide path (e.g.,
to the ER). While I haven't posted much if anything on the subject,
I went through several periods of moderate to even severe depression in
the past (and hopefully will never go there again). It's reassuring
to know there are others in that club because depression is a very isolating
disease in a number of ways, including the fact that you can't convey what
it is to anyone who has never experienced it largely because there's simply
no bridge there from everyday experience. Extrapolating from feeling
"down" won't cut it, trust me (or us, rather). Remember that when
trying to get at what would lead Angie to this point.
The following is largely constructed from
emails to a number of parties, so I apologize if it sometimes reads a bit
disjointed in terms of style or redundant details. I didn't have
time to polish this or really flesh out what is really a life story since
I promised it to more than a few of you who asked about her.
If you aren't interested, that's fine;
I don't think any of you know her personally, but if reading this jogs
any thoughts in your mind, that's what this is here for, so please share
them.
The downward spiral
It's hard to know the beginning
of Angie's story, and I honestly don't know how much to believe of the
chapters I didn't witness firsthand anyway since I'm mostly going off of
her word, but the downward spiral here includes major surgery leading to
missing a lot of days leading to being fired from her job leading to losing
her car leading to an inability to find another job. There's more
to it all than that, but she ended up in a bad place financially and was
perpetually on the verge of eviction. In other words, it wasn't just
that she mentally went off the rails; her entire life had as well.
Whether you can separate those two or not is debatable, but not by me.
I've got more story to tell here.
Angie and I have known one another for
about a year, and when I met her she had a job, car, and was up on her
rent. She had a healthy cynicism that usually translated into a witty
sense of humor. Sure, she could rag on about things she didn't like,
but it wasn't like she had a dour outlook on everything. Unfortunately,
she goes through times where she just withdraws and then (fortunately)
comes out of it... usually. She's never exactly posted a "care and
feeding guide" anywhere, but she's told me it's best to just to leave her
alone for a while when she gets like that. So I do because I either
get silence or hostility in return for any attempts to get through to her.
Obviously this loses her a lot of friends. Most give up after the
first time and rebuff her when she comes back into the light and tries
to reconnect with them. If you're wondering why I put up with this
game with ever-changing rules, I don't know. I'll go into her better
points later, but I think above all what I wanted was to understand her,
and I wasn't going to do that by ignoring her when it was clear she was
trying to make an effort to explain herself.
As you might have guessed, she has been
diagnosed as bipolar for a number of years now, and virtually all of her
problems can be traced back to that disorder and the patterns stemming
from it. For example, she tends to decide she can do without her
medication, so she gets off of it. Guess what happens then?
Yep, and the spiral continues until everything comes to a head and she
absolutely no choice but to seek out a shrink and get back on the drugs
in order to get her life back under control. She's also stubborn,
iconoclastic, etc. She doesn't like being told what to do, so eventually
she starts ignoring doctor's orders and following her own reasoning, as
fallible as it turns out to be.
I've dealt personally with depression and
other issues. While I've never been anywhere near the depths Angie
has been, I understand that it's something other than an extended version
of what all of us experience from time to time. Part of depression
is having a thoroughly skewed worldview that is difficult to overcome even
with conscious awareness that things are not as bad as they seem.
If you've never been a member of this club, you'll never get at what she
or any other member of it is thinking/feeling by trying to imagine yourself
in her place simply because there's no bridge to it from normal experience.
Like I mentioned above, this latest phase
was the farthest down I think she has ever been. I don't know all
of the details of the domino effect or her complicity in each collision
along the way, but she ended up in a life situation that seemed to have
no way out. It looked like she was going to be on the streets.
The only thing she was holding on for were her cats. She loved this
bunch that started off as hers, plus a few more she picked up when her
sister moved and threatened to put them on the streets if no one took them
in. Now Angie was in the same position. She spent a lot of
her time online trying to find homes for them or at least no-kill shelters
to take them in.
About a month before this latest suicide
attempt (there have been several previously, though none since I've known
her), she went dark again. She wasn't online anymore and didn't respond
to any mail. I finally checked her blog and found that she stated
her intentions to sell off everything she had so she could stockpile meds
that would kill her and would do so within a few weeks. Rather than
the raving lunatic voice you're hearing her stating this in, it read as
more of a big sigh. She was just giving up. She hadn't logged
on again since the day after she wrote that. Several weeks had passed
in that time. I didn't know that though.
I wrote her several times in the weeks
leading up to this and didn't get an answer. I didn't know if she
was just ignoring the messages or whether the email didn't go through.
She had issues with messages not reaching me in the past, so I just wrote
her at another MySpace account she's since deleted. That message
sat unread in my Sent box for weeks. I checked that account periodically
and saw that she hadn't logged in there either, but I wasn't watching the
other one where she posted the blog.
I didn't bother to call because she seemed
to avoid the phone, and instead I just went over to her place that night.
It was around 10 or 11pm when I got there, and there were people around
in the back of the complex, so I didn't want to make a scene. I don't
know if she heard me or not, but I didn't want to keep banging on the door
to the point that someone called the cops. Of course, this was while
her neighbors were having a domestic squabble right in my line of sight
from her door, and I didn't want to get drawn into that or be loitering
around there when the cops showed up, so I split.
That night and the next day I spent a lot
of time on the phone with suicide prevention lines and looking for financial
assistance for her. I was new at this though, so I really only retraced
some of the steps she had so far in the latter category. There are
more resources out there than I was aware of, but it's a nightmare of red
tape to actually make use of any of them. As far as the suicide hotlines,
I wasted an entire day getting nothing but scripted responses from unimaginative
and inexperienced operators. I decided to just go over to Angie's
again and stake out her place. I'm not very good at the stalker game,
but that's the only option I had left, and I figured it was the only way
to signal that someone still cared.
Years ago when I was going out with Cathleen,
one of the fringe benefits was her dad told really great, sometimes hilarious
stories. One of the ones that stuck with me was of the serious variety
though. When the family lived in Canada, Cathleen's dad was a Mountie.
They lived in a rural enough area that people sometimes became isolated
during the winter, and the synergistic combination of the weather and the
lack of human contact often led to depression among the residents.
Cathleen's dad put out word around the
community to let him know if they noticed someone had been out of contact
for a while so he could check in on them and hopefully intervene before
depression resulted in a suicide. He packed a bag full of board games
like checkers and chess, hot cocoa, and a lot of the great stories I'm
sure he was known for, and he used to head out to visit people who had
been out of touch. He said that after a few years of this, when he
ran the numbers comparing the suicide statistics for the area over the
time before and after he began the program (which had extended beyond him
before long), he counted dozens of lives saved.
I didn't know what I could do in terms
of psychological or psychiatric therapy, but I gave it a shot with just
a guitar and my own collection of rambling stories. I went over to
Angie's that night and knocked. And waited. And knocked some
more. And waited. I just sat outside on her porch with the
guitar and played for a while between attempts to rouse her and get her
to come to the door. After half an hour or so, I wa sitting on the
patio furniture playing guitar when she finally came out. We talked
for a while and I played bits of any songs I knew by anyone she ever owned
a cd by. She looked really worn out, and finally excused herself
and went (back?) to bed after about an hour, but promised she'd stay in
contact again.
That sort of jump-started her for a while.
She got back online more often and was more communicative. She had
apparently written something expressing the suicidal thoughts to her family,
and they (living out of state) had called the cops to check in on her.
Following visits by the police as well as me, she sent out a thank-you
message to all of us. She also wrote me separately saying, "I'm sorry
I've been such a shitty friend to you, especially lately. I've been so
wrapped up in my own...misery or whatever that I feel almost embarrassed
to talk to people, especially friends who I have respect for. I feel
so fucking far removed from everything. You're about the only friend I
have left who hasn't just given up on me. I'm sorry for being a shitty
friend. Please know it's not personal. I'm lost and I don't know
what I'm doing anymore. Please don't stop being my friend." I told
her I hadn't and didn't expect to. It wasn't her best moment as a
writer.
Hurt
Unfortunately, the usual pattern
started up again shortly after that and she decided to off herself for
real. Friday night (more than a couple weeks ago as of this writing),
she attempted to overdose on whatever medication she had on hand.
She threw most of that up, but enough stayed in her system that she ultimately
passed out. She awoke but was in a daze from the drugs and spent
most of the next day passed out again before attempting to slash her wrists
(and much else) with a razor blade on Sunday. She finally called
911 and they brought her into the ER, then transferred her over to a nearby
psychiatric facility.
I didn't know any of this until she called
me from there on Tuesday and filled me in on the attempts detailed above
and said I could pass this information on to her family. She also
stated at the time that she was to be transferred to a state hospital,
and filled me in on the situation with her cats. Though she had been
trying to find placements for the cats including several rescues and humane
societies, she had been stuck with all of them so far, and they were still
in her now indefinitely abandoned apartment.
I went to visit her at the facility on
Wednesday (they only had visiting hours on MWF and weekends), which was
the day before she was to be transferred. I picked up her keys and
some other belongings so that I could get her apartment key over to her
next door neighbor to go in and feed the cats. I delivered that to
them after the visiting hour was over, although I didn't know how reliable
the neighbor will be in that regard. I also knew things couldn't
go well with her away from the apartment since she was behind on her rent
and would have no control over what became of her belongings if the apartment
manager decided to proceed with an eviction.
I expected to receive a call from Angie
with updated contact information once she arrived at the state hospital,
but Thursday passed without any word. On Friday I called the facility
and left my name and number with a receptionist who, according to policy/legal
reasons, couldn't "confirm or deny" Angie's placement there. The
receptionist said she would forward my number on to the social worker there,
but I never heard anything back from them.
Since some time has passed since I committed
a lot of this to text, I'm no longer sure exactly when Angie finally reached
me by phone. She could call out on the payphones at the hospital,
although it cost quite a bit and she didn't have any money with her.
I think someone at a nursing station had let her use the phone there out
of pity since she was alert and oriented and was able to express her concerns
very clearly. Being a suicide case, it made sense to bring her anxiety
down. She gave me the numbers of said payphones so I could reach
her there. At that point in time she had yet to see a psychiatrist
or meet a social worker assigned to her case. (In fact, she didn't
see either for more than a week.)
Over the next week after she arrived, I
talked to her just about every day for as long as I could or the nurses
would allow. Obviously she was worried about the cats and her apartment
as that was clearly an unsustainable situation. The neighbor I gave
the key to might be reasonably described as a crack whore. By that
I mean that there was a crack pipe in her ashtray ("That's my brother's,"
she said when she saw I noticed it) when I was dropping off the key.
And I had been propositioned both times I had encountered her before on
the two occasions I visited the complex trying to pull Angie out of her
slump. The propositions were, of course, in the oblique manner required
by the laws regarding the world's oldest profession (i.e., "You got any
money I could borrow? Well, what are you doing later tonight?
You want to get together?"), but it was clear enough what she meant to
anyone but a public defender delivering a summation. I had called
the neighbors around that time to check if they were indeed checking in
on the cats, but received nothing more than "Oh, yeah. They're doing
fine" in response. It wasn't very reassuring.
Angie was of course worried more about
the cats than herself (continuing the pattern that followed from the preceding
months), but her life at the hospital wasn't all the great either.
She was and still is in an open ward where she's surrounded by women who
are in the clinical, technical sense of the expression, completely nuts.
Whereas at the other, intermediate facility she was placed mainly with
similar patients (i.e., botched suicide attempts for the most part with
an elderly dementia case thrown in), here the ward had every variety of
crazy including some very paranoid and violent women who would snap for
irrational reasons that basically left their fellow residents vulnerable
to their psychotic whims.
While I was on the phone with Angie one
day, one of the women spontaneously began yelling at another who was sitting
across from her, then attacked her, apparently because the aggressor believed
the other had stolen her money (Reality check: No one has any money in
these places; personal effects are locked up). The nurses ran over,
held her down, and shot her full of thorazine or something along those
lines; I'm going by what Angie said in the play by play she narrated over
the yelling in the background.
I realize the last place you want to put
someone depressed to the point of suicide is an environment that would
merely drive them back to it, so one of the tactics I've been trying with
Angie to keep her spirits up has been to get her to see the humor in her
situation over incidents like this. I always ask her to tell me the
stories about other patients, what they've done interesting (e.g., the
incident described above is a good example). I always refer to things
humorously such as, "What's new at the Star Wars cantina?" Angie
is a brilliant writer capable of taking the most ordinary material and
making it poignant and hilarious, often at the same time, something David
Sedaris
is usually recognized as the master of. I tell her she's collecting
great material here and remind her how amazing her author's blurb will
be on the book jacket when she's published.
My conversations with her during this time
were exercises in hostage negotiations or a different kind. Whenever
she gets really down and is crying, I tell her something I know she'll
disagree with until I can get her to say (with some coaching, admittedly),
"Fuck you, bitch." Then she says it and laughs. It's nothing
more than a band-aid for something chronic that has festered over time
and in the absence of professional attention, but it's the best I can come
up with.
The whole time she was in the hospital
I never once got through to a professional to ask them anything about her.
This was in spite of numerous calls and messages left with secretaries
and on voice mail. I was on Angie's contact permission sheet, but
no one seemed to care.
Further down the spiral
On Wednesday evening, just short
of a week after she had been admitted to the state hospital, I received
a frantic message from Angie saying that she had called her aforementioned
neighbors to check in on the cats and found out her apartment had been
broken into. Worse still was her apartment manager was in the process
of cleaning it out. Dani and I headed over to her place to see what,
if anything, we could salvage. When we got there, then place was
already a mess. It was around 8pm when we arrived, and the apartment
caretaker and his girlfriend were cleaning out the place.
Even at her worst, Angie was never a slob.
She was never terribly organized, but she always kept her living room neat.
Now things were strewn about all over the place. Someone had broken
in and had gone in and out of the place several times through a window
in the back. The apartment workers had started the clean-up by boxing
things up to be thrown out, but whoever was (or were) breaking in emptied
everything out all over the floor to sift for valuables. Angie's
computer and laptop were stolen (even though one didn't work at all and
the other barely did, but the monitor was new anyway). Her purse/wallet
were also gone as far as I could tell. It was public knowledge that
she was out of place since she left in an ambulance with police escort,
so it could have been anyone. Spilled milk at this point.
Dani worked on rounding up the cats while
I tried to salvage as much of her belongings as I could. We had brought
over a couple pet carriers and fortunately Angie had three more in the
apartment. Naturally the cats were scared and confused by the fact
that they had been more or less left alone in the apartment for over a
week. To her credit, the neighbor(s?) had been leaving out food for
them, but the place reeked of cat urine. Since the clean-up was already
in progress, it was impossible to say what state the litter boxes were
in as they had been tossed out already. The cats had stuck around
throughout all of this, even though the door was wide open most of the
time.
While Dani was trying to account for all
of the cats (one of whom was hiding in a kitchen cabinet; another in the
underside of the couch), I focused on the material things. I knew
we couldn't save the big items like her furniture, but I collected everything
that was personal to her: photos, artwork, cards/letters. A
lot of you know about my family and Hurricane Katrina. We were lucky
that we didn't suffer any losses, but for a time we didn't know if that
was the case. I was here in Texas, and my parents evacuated to northern
Mississippi
where they holed up for ten days until they received word power had been
restored to the area. For much of that time none of us had any idea
what kind of damage they expected to find when they returned. My
greatest concern was that all the photos had been lost.
After Katrina, I spent my next couple trips
back in Louisiana surveying the damage around the area. We visited
homes in neighborhoods where I and members of my extended family had lived
when I was younger. The most heartbreaking thing in all the damage
were the photo albums that were ruined by the water. In many cases,
you could tell the family had returned at some point to retrieve them.
They were pulled off the shelves and were just discarded on the floor when
they found that nothing could be saved. Even the frame photos on
the walls were destroyed because the storm surge pushed the water that
high.
On my last trip home, I brought back all
the photos with me and spent days scanning them into my computer.
I realized paranoia is sometimes justified if something is that important
to you. Now I have the physical photos, the scans on the computer,
a backup on an external hard drive, and dvd-roms in a safety deposit box.
Yeah, you could say I value you my memories, and I project those values
on everyone else because I know they'd miss it if it was gone.
As far as I was concerned, Angie's past
was the thing most worth saving. She could always get a new couch,
but I didn't know if she'd even have a place to put one anytime soon.
Instead, I concentrated on collecting the photos first and foremost.
Many of them were scattered on the floor in the living room, then there
were loads more in boxes in the bedrooms. Also mixed in was a lot
of the artwork she had created over the years. I knew she liked to
paint from her designs on a couple walls she experimented on at one point,
but she had never shown off her other work. It all added up to the
case why she was important as a human being, something she seemed not to
be able to make for myself.
After some dumpster diving for things that
had already been thrown out and rummaging though the wreckage of the apartment
for the rest, we filled the car up with as much as we could take.
We got the apartment manager (an asshole, I should mention for more reasons
that I have time to go into) to very reluctantly agree to let the cats
stay one more night since the humane society and other shelters were all
closed, so that meant we could take some of Angie's clothes as well.
After all, anything we didn't leave with was no longer going to be hers.
That night we posted the "Pets in need
of IMMEDIATE help" bulletin looking for homes for the cats, although it
was admittedly too late to do a lot of good. I also called a couple
"cat people" friends of mine and got the heads-up on some resources we
hadn't tried previously.
I know what you're thinking at this point.
"Alex, I thought you fucking *hated* cats?" Yes, I do. I've
got no use for them, but I'm also a really bad liar. There was no
way I was going to get on the phone later and tell Angie, "Well, we placed
one, but the rest ended up with the city." Like I said, the cats
were all she was living for, and I couldn't stand to be the bearer of bad
news here.
The next morning we headed back over and
collected a few more belongings now that we had more light to see by and
make some sense of the chaos. Dani had corralled the cats into Angie's
spare bedroom the night before, so they were easy enough to collect now.
However, in spite of calls to a bunch of shelters and groups, only the
SPCA had a vacancy, and even then only for one cat, but we brought them
all over to the facility for them to chose from, not really sure what we
might do with the rest (though hoping it wouldn't come to a city shelter).
Of course, this is why I brought Dani along.
Not only did she care about the cats more even that I did, she was also
able to make a much more convincingly emotive case than I could, what with
all the crying and all. They agreed to take all the cats in, even
though it meant shuffling their animals around to utilize vacancies at
other facilities in the network. Ultimately, they took all but two
who were ornery at the place, and I have since placed them with an experienced
cat owner who didn't have any at the moment (i.e., her ex took their cat
when they split, believe it or not).
That was quite an ordeal. I was drained
beyond being physically exhausted at getting up at 6am to be let in my
the apartment caretaker (not to be confused with the asshole apartment
manager) before he had to be at another job. (Actually, I gave him
a ride.). It was a huge relief, and there was a big cathartic rush
of emotion at the point we had the cats placed since we had saved everything
else that was able to be saved.
I called Angie that night and she was grateful
about the cats more than anything else. She didn't even care about
what had been stolen. She couldn't believe the cats had been saved
and asked me repeatedly if we were bullshitting her. She had spent
more than a month emailing and calling rescues and getting nowhere with
them. It pretty much took driving up to their doorstep to get them
to take the cats in, something she couldn't do without a car.
A warm place
Throughout much of this, I have
been in touch with Angie's dad, brother, and sister. (Her mom passed
away about ten years ago due to cancer.) Her history with her family
is very checkered, and I don't know who's right or wrong in any of it.
However, after sending them several updates on her condition and the recent
events in her life (the text of which served as the basis for large sections
above), they still had not called her. I called them on this fact
because, honestly, no matter what's happened in the past, that's a pretty
shitty thing to do when your daughter/sister is locked up in a state hospital.
Angie's dad emailed me and said he "took
exception" to my stating this (even though I wasn't as succinct or undiplomatic
with them as I was above). I didn't even see the point in responding.
I began a reply, but never got very far with it and ultimately never completed
enough to send it. As it turns out, saying nothing was probably the
most effective message I could have sent. Angie's dad finally called
her last night (as of this writing... only two weeks after being admitted
to the hospital). I spoke to her earlier, and he will be sending
her a ticket to head out to move in with her brother, something she had
been avoiding irrationally even on the verge of eviction.
This is quite a turn-around both in terms
of her circumstances and her emotional state. Angie was exuberant
on the phone, and it wasn't just medication (she's on an antidepressant
and a mood stabilizer). Having the cats taken care of and having
a place to live when she is released from the institution tomorrow were
a huge relief for her. I no longer had to jump-start her with talk
about what she should write; she was talking about how she planned to pen
anecdotes of her stay at the hospital over the course of her bus trip to
her brother's.
I'll be meeting her at the bus station
on Thursday afternoon and getting some of her things to her, mostly clothes,
driver's license, her birth certificate, and one of my old digital cameras
to replace hers that was lost in the burglaries so she can continue developing
her photo skills (and dicking around with Photoshop with what she captures).
I know it's a cliche to say I hope this
isn't the end of the story but rather a new beginning. She definitely
deserves one.
[Cue that "Everybody's Talkin'" song from
Midnight
Cowboy]
Thanks
Finally, a big thanks to all who
had something to offer during this time. There's a big stigma around
mental illness of any kind in ways there isn't when it comes to acknowledging
physical ailments. No one likes to admit they've been in a state
they didn't want to be in, so I especially appreciate all the anecdotes
and advice since much of it was very personal, and even I don't usually
like to talk about the years where I dealt with my own depression.
It's oddly comforting to know how screwed up my friends really are.
Thanks for all the support.
Angie, a postscript.
The following is a letter I just
sent to Angie's dad and stepmom. They bought her a bus ticket to
comer out to visit them on her way to live with her brother. I thought
those of you who have been interested in her story would appreciate the
follow-up as well.
Angie's on her way. We had
some time to visit at the bus station. She opted not to take a lot
with her of what I brought of her belongings. She said she was just
a bit freaked out right now and didn't want to lose track of things if
she brought more than the bag she had with her.
I suspect she'll try to put up a confident
or maybe even defiant front if she has the energy, but she's still very
fragile. She kept commenting on the surreality of the experience
and the fact that she had "never done anything like this before."
I told her she was on an adventure. You are very much getting back
your little girl for the time being, so please realize she ought to be
handled carefully. I plan to stay in touch with Angie and keep reassuring
her through this as well.
Thanks for getting her out to see you guys
and making her feel connected while she's still adrift in life.
-Alex.
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