I generally don't talk about my psychoses. They're varied and complicated, include both delusions and hallucinations, and I'm better at the strictly affective disorders. When I'm not in the midst of them, I'm perfectly high-functioning and appear otherwise totally normal. In any case, this is worth mentioning, since it's related to suicide.
I've been hearing two voices recently. One is Lucifer, and one is his minion, Astaroth. Lucifer gave me commands and told me I would be rewarded in the afterlife if I followed through with them. I'd rather not say what these commands were, but they would have left me and others dead. He predominated for a while. Later on, Astaroth did most of the speaking. Astaroth is a female demon who at one point was a young woman who committed suicide in despair. She explained to me in extensive detail her past life as a battered woman who died at 23.
I was planning to commit suicide a few days ago on Saturday. I did not say in that thread that for the past two or three weeks, I was being commanded by Astaroth to do it. When I chose not to follow through, she was screaming at me. She said I let everyone down by not killing myself. She also said I knew perfectly well I was just forestalling the inevitable, and that now I would only suffer worse because of my inaction. But she didn't stop there, she continued to debase me, working through my life and pointing out every time I failed to do something important, or was the cause of someone else's disaster. She brought up my middle years in elementary school, when I had the misfortune of being involved with bullies who were bigger than me, and she said I deserved everything they said and did, that I was weak, that I'm in everyone's way. Then she disappeared, and it was quiet again.
Voices aren't new to me, but I don't like talking about them with clinicians. They know that I experience it, but I don't go into any detail about what the content is. I'm 24 now, I've been hearing them since I was 14. Ten years is a long time to get used to them. Antipsychotics, even at extremely high dosages (e.g., 1200mg of Seroquel per day, 25mg of Zyprexa), have not quieted them. The first time I revealed that I was experiencing any kind of psychosis was after my suicide attempt at the age of 17. A doctor woke me up and asked me why I had tried to kill myself. I vaguely remember telling him, barely awake and almost comatose from the treatment I was given, that I was on a mission from God and had failed and needed to atone for my failure. But being hospitalized later gave me a chance to talk about them in a different kind of clinical setting.
So from all that, you'd definitely get the idea that these voices are malicious, but that's not always the case. Sometimes they're neutral, at times they've even been positive. It doesn't seem to be mood-congruent. But I'm so used to them that I don't feel like I need to fear them. They're just there, they can't touch me or in any other way interact with me. And since antipsychotics of various kinds have not seemed to affect them, I expect to live with it for the remainder of my life. I'm okay with that.
But I'm digressing; the point of this post is to disclose a detail about myself as it's related to my experience on Saturday. So, there you go.
I've been hearing two voices recently. One is Lucifer, and one is his minion, Astaroth. Lucifer gave me commands and told me I would be rewarded in the afterlife if I followed through with them. I'd rather not say what these commands were, but they would have left me and others dead. He predominated for a while. Later on, Astaroth did most of the speaking. Astaroth is a female demon who at one point was a young woman who committed suicide in despair. She explained to me in extensive detail her past life as a battered woman who died at 23.
I was planning to commit suicide a few days ago on Saturday. I did not say in that thread that for the past two or three weeks, I was being commanded by Astaroth to do it. When I chose not to follow through, she was screaming at me. She said I let everyone down by not killing myself. She also said I knew perfectly well I was just forestalling the inevitable, and that now I would only suffer worse because of my inaction. But she didn't stop there, she continued to debase me, working through my life and pointing out every time I failed to do something important, or was the cause of someone else's disaster. She brought up my middle years in elementary school, when I had the misfortune of being involved with bullies who were bigger than me, and she said I deserved everything they said and did, that I was weak, that I'm in everyone's way. Then she disappeared, and it was quiet again.
Voices aren't new to me, but I don't like talking about them with clinicians. They know that I experience it, but I don't go into any detail about what the content is. I'm 24 now, I've been hearing them since I was 14. Ten years is a long time to get used to them. Antipsychotics, even at extremely high dosages (e.g., 1200mg of Seroquel per day, 25mg of Zyprexa), have not quieted them. The first time I revealed that I was experiencing any kind of psychosis was after my suicide attempt at the age of 17. A doctor woke me up and asked me why I had tried to kill myself. I vaguely remember telling him, barely awake and almost comatose from the treatment I was given, that I was on a mission from God and had failed and needed to atone for my failure. But being hospitalized later gave me a chance to talk about them in a different kind of clinical setting.
So from all that, you'd definitely get the idea that these voices are malicious, but that's not always the case. Sometimes they're neutral, at times they've even been positive. It doesn't seem to be mood-congruent. But I'm so used to them that I don't feel like I need to fear them. They're just there, they can't touch me or in any other way interact with me. And since antipsychotics of various kinds have not seemed to affect them, I expect to live with it for the remainder of my life. I'm okay with that.
But I'm digressing; the point of this post is to disclose a detail about myself as it's related to my experience on Saturday. So, there you go.
