When I was discharged from CCBH, I was still severely suicidal and had multiple plans on how to end it. Once my friends learned that I had lied to them to get out of the hospital, things blew up in my face. Those two friends who were one of the very few people I had in my support system, decided that they were done with me. As I was someone who had Borderline Personality Disorder, I had been abandoned, again. So I freaked out. I called a friend and ended up in an ER again. I spent 3 days in the ER on a psychiatric hold as they tried to place me in a psychiatric hospital. CCBH refused to take me back. This was the first time a hospital refused to offer me care. On the third day, I decided to call another hospital in the area to see if I could get in and they said I could. So I made the plan to get out of the ER after the 72 hours were up and then go make an appointment with assessment at a hospital called Marshall I Pickens hospital or MIP for short. This was at the beginning of February.
So I was discharged from the ER and made my appointment with assessment. I was accepted pretty easily and admitted onto the unit. I had been to MIP one time before, back when I had had my first suicide attempt in 2013 but only stayed for 4 days. I walked in to the hospitalization feeling like a total wreck. I was reeling from the abandonment and it ruled my mind. The rejection from CCBH also weighed heavily on my mind. The first two weeks I spent in MIP was just trying to do medication changes and trying to weigh the decision of whether or not to try ECT or electroconvulsive therapy. I talked it over with the psychiatrist I was working with, watched an educational video on it and talked with both the ECT doctor and the doctor's assistant. Eventually we made the decision to move forward. After the first two ECT treatments went okay, I was discharged from the hospital to continue ECT on an outpatient basis. By the time the fourth ECT treatment came along, I was feeling somewhat better from it but started experiencing major memory loss, which scared the crap out of me. So I decided to call it off.
Not too long after I discontinued ECT did my life fall apart again and I ended up back in MIP. This was towards the end of February. When I came back for the second time, I wasn't sure with what to do with myself. I didn't feel right from the ECT and then all my feelings came back as a gigantic wave and I was back in the depths again. I ended up self-harming in the hospital. Staff's reaction to that was to move me to the more intensive unit which was known as the "way back". They had the people who needed more intense help and more supervision. This didn't help things at all. This just made me feel more frustrated and out of control and led me to want to self-harm more. And that's exactly what I did. However, I never told them about it. Instead, I argued my case about not being back there and after a couple nights, they moved me back. The next few days I continued to struggle with consistent severe suicidal thoughts and extreme hopelessness. I self-harmed again but didn't tell the staff.
February 28th, 2015 NAMI entered my life. The National Alliance on Mental Illness. There was a presentation done in the hospital called In Our Own Voice and I really connected with it. I asked the speaker the question "If there was one thing you could say to someone who was really struggling or feeling hopeless, what would it be?" and I remember that his answer encouraged me, a little.
Then I went back to being hopeless again. I really struggled throughout these hospitalizations the loss and abandonment of the two friends and couldn't understand why they would leave me and I also couldn't understand the rejection from CCBH and both of those fueled my suicidal thinking. At one point, I even drew a picture in my journal of me trying to hang myself and didn't exactly hide it either. I was inpatient through the first week of March, when I was eventually discharged only upon the agreement that I would do their Partial Hospitalization Program or PHP.
One thing I did once I started PHP was start going to NAMI support groups. I found these support groups helpful and encouraging and really enjoyed going to them. It was a place I found support for the intense issues that I was dealing with. After a couple weeks attending NAMI, they announced that they had an educational class starting called Peer-to-Peer and I quickly enrolled. This led to me having support two nights a week.
I did the PHP program for approximately two weeks. I went to most groups and they had a relaxation room for if you felt overwhelmed and needed a break from the groups. I continued to struggle with self-harm though and after the third day of self-harm, they decided that I needed to be re-hospitalized, which I didn't agree with, but I didn't have a choice in the matter. So I was readmitted.
When I was readmitted, I was assigned to a different doctor than the one that I had been working with in my previous hospitalizations. I was not a fan of his and he really wasn't a fan of me. We agreed really quickly that I should be switched back to the doctor that I was with from the previous stays. He additionally also granted me to have my pillowcase while I was there. However, I was still angry that I was there because I didn't want to be. I pitched a fit in my room and kicked things around. I vented angrily to other patients about not wanting to be there. I eventually decided I wanted to sign myself out. They told me that if I signed myself out I wouldn't be able to go back to PHP. I said okay and signed myself out. This marked the end of my experiences with MIP for that year.
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