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Alive but unwell

ACF85

I haven't posted on here for some time. About a month, at least, I think. 

I've been in a mental health hospital for over the past two weeks. I became too much for my aging parents to worry over and opted, after being given the choice, to hospitalise myself. So I'm voluntary, not sectioned, and can go out. I still consider myself to be suicidal but I am hoping that my hospital stay (as yet of unknown duration) and my sharing of my testimony on here can be of some benefit. If not, nevermind.

The psychiatrist seems quite sure that I have Asperger's Syndrome (Level 1 ASD) and the common comorbidities of depression and anxiety are hopefully being accounted for when it comes to working out my medication ('drug cocktail'). Access to occupational therapy here is useful and I am treated well by staff and even try to socialise with other patients on my ward and those I meet in therapy. Pathetic yet charming, I imagine it must seem.

I don't know where it's all leading. My dream of becoming a teacher crashed and burned as I have now officially been withdrawn from my training course. No wrongdoing on my part (beyond honesty that I need help) but I'm really not in a good place to appeal. The way I was hung out, left high and dry, broke me and is partly why I'm now in hospital, a broken man. I'm haunted by this rejection as much as my failure in being a husband, a father, a son and a brother. So I'm homeless, jobless, dreams and ambitions are over. And, for all I know, I could be discharged from here with no medication, awaiting the excruciatingly long autism diagnosis all the time. They'll likely try to get me into a council flat and make sure my benefits support me but it's small fry when I know I've just had enough of it all.

If this is autism, it has broken me as much as it has defined me. The rawness of defeat haunts me. My past haunts me. My present terrifies me. My future is laughable in its negligibility. 

A middle-aged, autistic man. Burnt out, rejected, lost. Suicide is logic to me, not just an emotional release. I can't stand it anymore. But I keep going. Alive but unwell.

Please note my experience of living with despair. Autistics are more likely than others to take their lives. The cold logic of not being sure that the massive overdose I was planning would be enough brought me here in the end. Now I get checked on every so often, with a regular 'privacy window' check that I haven't  somehow succeeded in strangling myself with my bare hands in this 'safe' environment.

And the sobering thought is that it does and can get much, much worse than this.

Is this really worth living? Apparently you have to reply in the affirmative, or else. 

A

Parents

  • I just wanted to say thank you for your replies. They do mean a lot and they do help. As with any forum/online community, I think also of those who can benefit from reading the exchanges without replying. Often I've benefitted from posts that I just can't find the right words to reply to but they have helped me to see things from a different perspective.

    Initially, when I was really struggling to make sense of why university life and the prospect of getting into a professional career in my late teens/early twenties seemed so hard and unlikely, I read into social anxiety as I did into autism. I spent some time on a social anxiety disorder forum and felt a connection with other people's experiences on there. I still feel the symptoms of social anxiety in me, namely the feeling that I'm being observed, analysed and judged in some way by others, even to the point of reading my mind - although this doesn't quite become delusional, but does border on paranoia. So hopefully reading into experiences of social anxiety (neurotypical or neurodivergent) and being more open with this anxiety with the psychiatrist here can be beneficial. Otherwise I love being around people. Just when it comes to 'connecting' with people, I always feel so out of my depth. Like a voice in my head just saying: 'no, that's not for you...you're different'. And being in this half in love with life/half resenting life state of mind, feeling trapped in it, generates panic (as if I were actually caught between a physical as well as a metaphorical 'rock and a hard place') and despair just seems a more natural, default response to the pain and frustration of being 'on the outside'. 

    I like watching the film 'Adam' (2009), which I kind of assume is known in AS circles. The part where he is breaking down in tears because someone is asking him to come out with him and he seems so visibly torn between his fear of the unknown and his need to feel loved and accepted. It got to me, that part. I watched it with my then-wife, who was later given her AS (ASD level 1) diagnosis. All the re-lived pain through the years seemed to be settled with her beside me. Now I'm still living while always trying to make sense of why I ever walked away from her. The re-vived pain of now being a soul torn from a soul-mate. I must move on somehow but it's so, so hard. If I had of had an outright affair and/or been abusive, it would somehow have made more sense in that I have received my just desserts. But it has been my sense of morality and a yearning to do the right thing that leads me to the place I am now at. And I know that no-one can possibly get close to despising me as much as I do, and this is because I just don't care about myself anymore.

    Yet in saying this, I feel the void/the abyss inside me widen and shrink uncontrollably in fluctuations that come and go. My despair relents before returning to torment me. So I'm just as clueless as ever, really, in using my logic to work out what is wrong with me. Mood disorder (bipolar, cyclothymia or otherwise) or the way in which a man with AS deals with the existential angst of his mid-life crisis? Both seem true in their own ways - classic 'neurosis' even without the 'psychoses' that others around me share. If medication can help, so be it, but AS can't be medicated for. It seems like it's just the way I am. 

    So, I've rattled on for more than I intended, as always, but I shall end on a positive note. I'm in a terrible storm, sometimes in the eye of it, sometimes caught up in a 'twister', but I do know that it will pass - 'this too shall pass'. Suicidal ideation and then actualisation is very real but if I can fight it, I believe that anyone can. And I cannot begin to express how little self-esteem and self-belief I have. Somehow I just know that faith, hope and love somehow do remain. Somehow I just know that tomorrow, whenever it comes, will be a brighter day. 

    A

  • in reply to ACF85
    ACF85 said:
    I've benefitted from posts that I just can't find the right words to reply to but they have helped me to see things from a different perspective.

    And so have I, so I completely agree with you on this.

    I admire your active approach to seeking solutions to problems and I thank you for sharing your experiences of this.

    I send you my very best wishes.

    Number.

Reply
  • in reply to ACF85
    ACF85 said:
    I've benefitted from posts that I just can't find the right words to reply to but they have helped me to see things from a different perspective.

    And so have I, so I completely agree with you on this.

    I admire your active approach to seeking solutions to problems and I thank you for sharing your experiences of this.

    I send you my very best wishes.

    Number.

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