"Help"

Tomorrow when I see my therapist, one of the first things I'm going to ask her is about this supposed bullshit clinical trial information my pdoc was going to get for her to give to me. Its been three weeks since I saw him and I've not heard anything back, and my guess is that she hasn't either. Actually I'm 100% positive that neither of us will ever hear anything about the subject again.

I'm so tired of the lies. So tired of the bullshit. So tired of being dismissed. I actually laughed out loud when I read the comment Anonymous Drifter left on my last post...

"I'm so glad that you're going to be receiving help."

I wasn't laughing AT you Drifter, I know your comment was left out of concern, and my laughter wasn't meant to dismiss or disregard that concern. I just couldn't help but focus in on the "you're going to be receiving help" part.

What is help? What does it consist of for someone with a mental illness or two or three? Where do you find help within the mental health community? How do you know if you're even getting help?

The word help itself has many different meanings based on whether you use it as a verb or a noun:

- assistance to; cooperate effectively with; aid; assist
- to make easier or less difficult; contribute to; facilitate
- to relieve (someone) in need, sickness, pain, or distress
- to remedy, stop, or prevent
- a person or thing that helps
- means of remedying, stopping, or preventing
- help out, to assist in an effort; be of aid to

Maybe I'm just blind or really fucking retarded (I'm sure most people assume both), but what help have I received so far? 98% of it is help I've given myself. It hasn't come from anyone else. It hasn't come from therapy, it hasn't come from medications, it hasn't come from surgery, it hasn't come from having my brain fried with ECT.

If I end up being admitted inpatient, do you know what that "help" will look like? It will consist of people getting angry at me if I'm too tired to get out of bed, because they suddenly seem to assume that once I walked through that large metal door that gets locked behind me, I mysteriously gained a new found energy that wasn't there in the weeks or months prior to that moment.

It will consist of people getting angry at me because I refuse to eat the gawd awful disgusting food that I wouldn't even force feed to starving children in Africa. Food that is on the opposite spectrum of what they offer to patients at the regular hospital, the patients that have physical ailments. They get lobster, even filet mignon....we get served "mystery" meat slathered in "mystery" sauce and salad that's already wilting.

It will consist of various staff asking me how I'm doing today and just as I try to open up and tell them the truth, they suddenly get called away because everyone else is more important than I am; and then they don't understand why I tell them to just leave me alone when they return after that.

It will consist, once I do have the energy, of attending the same groups I've attended multiple times before. Groups that I still have the information for, many of which were totally irrelevant to what is personally wrong with me.

It will consist of trying to sleep on some completely uncomfortable, skinny, plastic mattress, with a single tiny pillow, if you're lucky enough to even snag a pillow and sharing a room with some random stranger that could potentially trigger a PTSD flashback that the hospital staff completely ignores, as was my experience the last time I was inpatient.

The only thing that could possibly be different is if I they finally try to put me on the "self-injury" ward and I refuse because it consists of, and is totally geared, towards teenagers. At that point I would insist on being transferred to another hospital. I'd even prefer a state hospital over being put on a ward full of teenagers.

Just writing all this out makes suicide seem like a far more positive option...if only I didn't have a child.