Anonymous wrote:The doctor has just released her to come home tomorrow. I am in utter disbelief. This was by far her worst attempt, and she is just going home. I wanted her in inpatient, she fucking NEEDS inpatient. And they're sending her home. As happy as I am she is alive- and believe me I am deleriously happy- I don't want her at home right now. I am so afraid the next time neither of us will be so lucky.

Anonymous wrote:OP here. Christ this thread went off the rails.
To clarify about the sleeping pills. She had a 6mo prescription for them to be filled once a month. The idiot pharmacist filled all 6 mos for her at once, 600 pills total. She also took 60 Percocet, 22 narcos and 20 hydrocodone. The narcotics were (are) mine but were just in the cabinet because I didn't need them anymore. I've talked to her psychiatrist and her therapist about how the sleeping pills were filled. That's a battle I can't deal with right now. My wife should be dead. She should have been dead before the EMS even showed up at the door. How the fuck she survived I don't know. She's coming home tomorrow and I'm scared out of my mind. I came here to get some support because how do you tell your friends, even the closest ones you have, that your wife tried to kill herself. You don't. You just paste a fake smile on your face and go on.

Anonymous wrote:Wow. A person who's taken 700 sleeping pills should be DOA, unless her stomach's pumped by medical professionals within minutes after the overdose.
No offense, OP, but your story sounds pretty unbelievable.

Anonymous wrote:I'm so glad she survived, OP. I lost my brother to bipolar disorder by suicide, and my mother attempted suicide a number of times when I was a child. I am so glad you are there for your child, and I am so glad that you love your wife and want to support her. It is really okay to be angry, too, and scared and hurt.

Unless you have reason to believe otherwise, please do approach this from the perspective that she was not in her right mind when she made this "choice". I read some really nasty judgmental posts above, and I think it's important to look at this from the knowledge that her brain is very, very broken right now, and not able to function in a way that allows her to see rational options in front of her. Just like kidney disease prevents those organs from functioning correctly, her brain illness is preventing her from seeing how much she is loved and needed and wanted. There's a really good chance that somehow her sick brain convinced her that what she did was best for you. (I had a really close friend who attempted suicide when her girls were young, 100% convinced that she was doing the best thing to ensure their happiness and security. It was completely nuts, but a totally unselfish gesture from the point of her crazy brain.) What she chose, depending on what her brain was telling her, was not necessarily selfish or weak or cruel. She might honestly have thought she was doing you a favor.

It is SO frustrating and heartbreaking when we can't just logic someone or love someone out of a brain illness. But if you think of it as an organ failing, how could love and logic ever be enough? You can't love a person enough to cure their heart disease or convince a liver to work properly by telling it all the reasons why we love it and want it to work properly. She needs medical treatment, but we are sadly still very much in the dark ages when it comes to treating the brain. Please try to forgive her if her brain can't see how much you guys love her and how much she needs treatment, just as you'd forgive her breasts for getting cancer or her intestines for having colitis. She's not choosing this.

And please do take care of yourself. The scary thing is that all the love in the world may not save your wife. Your child desperately needs you to be healthy, to be emotionally available, and to be dependable. I'm rooting for you so much.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, what do you think is triggering her deep depression?

She is bipolar. And things had been going so well, she seemed really stable, until this.

Are you journalling symptoms? Until I started journaling, I found with my bipolar nowExDH that sometimes I thought things were going well, but I really wasn't connecting the dots on the subtle signs across time.

Medication is tricky. Had she recently been through a medication change? Are you sure she was taking meds? Is she on an anti-depressant along with a mood stabilizer? Sometimes an anti-depressant can be "activating" enough to drive suicidal thought in BP. This happens because the AD can increase mania and the associated irrational thought patterns or because the AD can lift the almost-catatonia like aspect to depression enough to enable the bipolar person to DO something about their depressed feelings.

Standard bipolar treatment is a proven mood stabilizer (usually lithium or depakote) closely monitored to ensure consistent blood levels in the effective range and also supplemented by sleep aids or anti-psychotics or anti-anxiolytics in order to provide extra control for these symptoms (although often a panoply of meds to address a variety of symptoms really means that the mood stabilizer itself isn't the right one or the proper dose.)

I really think some of the advice above re: she has to want to save herself is harsh and wrong. The dilemma of bipolar and other mental illnesses is that the brain is not rational and thus unable to make rational decisions about treatment choices. Even when stable for a long time on meds, many persons with bipolar and other mental illness decide that they don't need their meds and try to go off, usually with negative consequences. It is an open question whether this desire to go off meds is a "willful choice" that patients make due to the stigma of mental illness and/or the serious side effects of meds or whether the decision is rooted in an early phase of a decline in mental status, i.e. returning mania or depression despite medication (which happens). Ellen Saks speaks eloquently in her book and in public talks about coming to terms with permanent medication of her schizophrenia. Xavier Amador also writes very helpfully on how family members can facilitate treatment choices.

That said, in the early phase when a person is nowhere near stable on meds, it may take more involvement of the spouse or other family member in treatment choices. The scientific literature and best practices are clear that outcomes are best when families are involved in treatment. You should be meeting periodically with your wife's psychiatrist and therapist to understand her med regime and recommended social habit patterns (social habits like sleep, exercise, diet, interpersonal interaction and self-care are also proven to improve outcomes, see studies on IPSRT aka Interpersonal Social Rhythm Therapy) so that you can support it at home.

Yes, it's true that bipolar patients have to take responsibility for their own care, but, IME, this can only begin once the person is sees improvement from meds and is beginning to stabilize. It is only at that point that they are rational enough to reflect on aspects of their life that they can control that contribute to stability, what kind of help they need from family members and what kind of back up plans should be put in place.

OP, if this is her 3rd attempt, I have to ask -- does she have proper legal plans in place? A will? A power of attorney (POA) naming you as able to make medical decisions on her behalf -- and her I refer to more than just the typical living will or POA that clarifies resuscitation wishes in various scenarios, but a POA that enables you to make medical decisions on her behalf and which waives HIPAA/privacy rights, which often cause a problem for families who need to provide care and thus need to know about treatment. Now might not be the time to push getting those in place, but if you don't have these you definitely need to seek counsel. NAMI has info on this.

Also, OP, you and your child definitely need your own therapist to help you deal. Feeling anger is normal, but conveying it to your wife and expecting some kind of apologetic response or change in behavior is not necessarily a reasonable expectation with this illness. As another PP said, the thought process is very irrational. Try to find a PhD clinical psychologist who provides psychotherapy and has lots of experience with mood disorders.

Anonymous wrote:You're angry because that was an incredibly selfish thing to do and she was abandoning you. You have a right to be angry.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm so glad she survived, OP. I lost my brother to bipolar disorder by suicide, and my mother attempted suicide a number of times when I was a child. I am so glad you are there for your child, and I am so glad that you love your wife and want to support her. It is really okay to be angry, too, and scared and hurt.

Unless you have reason to believe otherwise, please do approach this from the perspective that she was not in her right mind when she made this "choice". I read some really nasty judgmental posts above, and I think it's important to look at this from the knowledge that her brain is very, very broken right now, and not able to function in a way that allows her to see rational options in front of her. Just like kidney disease prevents those organs from functioning correctly, her brain illness is preventing her from seeing how much she is loved and needed and wanted. There's a really good chance that somehow her sick brain convinced her that what she did was best for you. (I had a really close friend who attempted suicide when her girls were young, 100% convinced that she was doing the best thing to ensure their happiness and security. It was completely nuts, but a totally unselfish gesture from the point of her crazy brain.) What she chose, depending on what her brain was telling her, was not necessarily selfish or weak or cruel. She might honestly have thought she was doing you a favor.

It is SO frustrating and heartbreaking when we can't just logic someone or love someone out of a brain illness. But if you think of it as an organ failing, how could love and logic ever be enough? You can't love a person enough to cure their heart disease or convince a liver to work properly by telling it all the reasons why we love it and want it to work properly. She needs medical treatment, but we are sadly still very much in the dark ages when it comes to treating the brain. Please try to forgive her if her brain can't see how much you guys love her and how much she needs treatment, just as you'd forgive her breasts for getting cancer or her intestines for having colitis. She's not choosing this.

And please do take care of yourself. The scary thing is that all the love in the world may not save your wife. Your child desperately needs you to be healthy, to be emotionally available, and to be dependable. I'm rooting for you so much.

It sounds like you haven't been the primary caretaker of someone with mental illness. This is different than organ failure or heart disease.

The disease itself drives them to refuse treatment, actively rail against it, or grasp at their caretakers to "fix" them. But end of the day, OP, you need to realize the ONLY person who can really help your wife, who can really make her better, is herself. She has to do the work, she has to embrace the treatment; and lots of mental health treatment feels hokey and silly (which is partly why many very smart people with depression have such a difficult time with the therapies).

Your job is to love her, and tell her you want to be there with her to get better, and you have to just wait and see if she will make progress. But always be mindful that you can't cure her, and to look out for the well being of your child and yourself as she tackles her demons.