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CW: Mental health and suicide. Today's emotions can be summarised as a mix of defeat and rage. To set the tone, this is not share as a "woe is me" post. This is shared as a "This is the stuff I'm dealing with that I wanted to share with you, so you maybe feel less alone too" type of post. At the start of March I went for a Mental Health Assessment of sorts at my local practice, with the Community Mental Health Team. I was with that person for an hour (along with Dan to offer input if needed) and summarised my mental health as best I could. To do that briefly here, current diagnoses are Depression, Generalised Anxiety Disorder, OCD, Complex PTSD and Borderline Personality Disorder. I have had at least 6 different rounds of therapy, with different therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists, using a variety of methods. I am on my 4th different type of meds - Sertraline. I still struggle on a weekly basis with certain levels of passive suicidal ideation (Passive suicidal ideation is having suicidal thoughts come up, but not making plans/actions to die by suicide or hurt myself) and feel like I'll be working part time for the rest of my life as I kept burning myself out working full time. My drive is low unless it's helping others, which is familiar to a lot of us, right.
I am fed up of talking about myself. I am fed up of the guesswork of meds; are my conditions partly due to a lack of serotonin/dopamine/norepinephrine or not having them get sent to the right places at the right times? I wanted to see if I could be considered for Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), which involves electrical stimulation of the brain by applying a weak direct current to the scalp. It is NOT Electroconvulsive therapy. It's taken me quite a while to build up the courage to request it, and I had to be quite firm with my GP to even be put forward to ask for it. I won't go into my reasons for wanting to try it, but it's safe to say after 22 years of being "officially" depressed, the drugs/therapy/myself is not working. Today I received the call from the assessor that "It's bad news" and after the team reviewed my case, I couldn't be considered for tDCS. That in itself was pretty disappointing, but when I asked them why - again, a bold step for me instead of just sadly going "OK" - they didn't know the reasons, which gives me nothing to work with. I asked them to get that information if possible, because otherwise it's not a very helpful "No". We agreed a follow-up phone call next week to see what alternative next steps I could take at this stage. Whew. So that's the rant over and no doubt I'll feel sheepish and like i could have explained myself better, but I think it's important to post whilst things are fresh (and when things have sunk in and been thought about, but now is not the time).
