Suicide Awareness: Josh's Story Part 2

This is a continuation of part 1 which you can read here. This part will outline Josh's experience at the hospital program he attended. Please keep in mind that this is one person's journey and it may very well be different journey than others who also experience depression. But despite differences, there is no one story that is more truer than the other. Everyone's truth a journey is valid and matters.

We left off at me arriving to the hospital, unaware of what was to come. I was escorted into my room after checking in with two roommates that I didn't know and will all of the sudden changes and unknowns, I found I got no sleep at all on my first night. Mornings at the hospital started pretty early, so I found that at least I was able to move around and get up by 6 AM. This is when I was able to meet some of my fellow peers for the first time and get some information about the program. The program was structured to be a 30 day program with the possibility of early dismissal. Days at the hospital were strictly scheduled to try and bring normalcy and organization to the patients lives. We were allowed to leave our rooms at 6 AM but breakfast was not until 7:30 AM, so most people didn’t leave their rooms until then. After breakfast there was a combination of free time, one on one sessions with a psychologist, nurses to take your vitals, group therapy, and other activities. After my first breakfast in the hospital I was introduced to the team that would be working with me (psychiatrist, pharmacist, career counsellor, and nursing staff). 

My first session with Dr. K was very frustrating if I'm being honest. The night before I felt like I had this sincere conversation with my EMT and felt normal for the first time in forever, but this first session with Dr. K felt like it couldn’t be further from that experience. There was no understanding between us and I felt like it couldn’t be more apparent. I saw him as cold and rude, but now I understand that this was more due to my own mindset at the time than his presence. To tell you the truth he was honest and blunt and he didn’t sugar coat things, but it was what I needed- I just couldn’t see it at the time. I was so stuck in my own ways of thought that I couldn’t believe or see that someone else could be right.  Within two days of sessions with Dr. K I was diagnosed with a mild case of depression and prescribed Zoloft which made me uncomfortable. I was determined to fix my issues by myself so the thought of being forced on medication was hard to swallow. I do want to mention that they can't force you to take medication while you stay in the program, but if you refuse, leaving the program will be much harder- or at least that’s just the feeling I got while I was there. I was also against using medication to fix my mental health problems because both my family and friends had fairly negative experiences while on antidepressants, so I was scared about what effects it would have on me. I do want to clarify that medication is not a bad thing like I first thought and I truly believe it is a helpful tool to help in one's own journey to recovery, but I think there’s still a lot of stigma against it and I've heard of some misdiagnosis stories that I feel like we’ve all heard before. 

As I spent more time in the hospital I started to warm up to my environment and the fellow patients. No longer did I see myself as above them or have a fear of them, but instead I saw them for who they were- people no different than me trying to make a change in their lives. Everyone came from different backgrounds and had different reasons for being there. A positive for the program I was in, is that because we were all close in age and were forced to see each other everyday, you formed pretty quick bonds with one another. I can only speak for myself but I started to rely on everyone around me and this in turn helped me open up to my friends and family more. What was impossible before suddenly became seamless and I thought that was a pretty interesting development in myself. 

About a week into my stay at the hospital the first friends I made started to leave the program. This later became a problemI needed to overcome for a couple of reasons. First, there was a constant influx of people joining and leaving the program throughout my stay and while yes you naturally open up to these people, it's also hard to say goodbye. The friends you relied on in the hospital move on to greener pastures and you’re left behind starting over with new people and this cycle can become demotivating quickly. When the first people I connected with left the program I kind of shut down for a couple of days. I didn’t really want to open up to the new people coming in, so I hid in my shell. It took me what felt like weeks but what was probably actually closer to 4 days to start to open up to the new patients. I later tried to take a more big brother/guidance role in the hospital to try and give back what S and SM did for me. The second problem with friends leaving was that I put pressure on myself in a lot of different ways. The program is supposed to take 21-30 days but both S and SM left before they hit the fourteen-day mark. When you’re in the hospital all you can think of is getting released, so it almost becomes a competition to see how long it takes you to leave (yes I know that’s the wrong mentality to have and it's not a race to get yourself better but it's just how the environment evolves. While the hospital is a good place to heal you definitely crave freedom while inside). So the expectations (my own and of friends) for someone like me were pretty high since I was calm and only diagnosed with mild depression. Not hitting the same benchmarks left behind by S and SM felt devastating to me. It felt like I was falling behind my peers and my effort to try to change wasn’t enough. This all eventually began to pile up causing me to go into a slump, where I was then beginning to regress my progress a lot. 

It was during this time I started reading my favorite novel “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coello and going into some heavy reflection. The book focuses on the topics of discovering your own personal destiny and the hardships that comes with it. For someone like me who struggled to find their identity and purpose in life, it was the perfect push to get me to think in new ways about how to better myself.  With a new pep in my step I was ready to move forward again. I took a more active role in group activities and tried to not only help myself but everyone around me. It felt amazing and this new satisfaction led me to a new thought: if I don’t want to live for myself then I can live my life for those around me. This idea kept evolving as I grew and I was finally able to accept that while I didn’t have a personal ambition yet there was still an abundance of time to find one and in the meantime I can live my life helping people around me. I decided then and there to open up to my friends about the situation I was in. 

I started with my three best friends and the responses couldn’t have been more heart warming. SI and SU actually came to visit me in the hospital. Neither drove at the time so they had to take a long ass bus ride to get to the hospital, but that visit meant more to me than the world. It showed me how much they actually accepted me and the brotherly bond we had formed. My other friend was in complete shock and I even remember her initial response after she thought I was messing with her was her straight up balling her eyes out. In high school we both were going through hard times coping with our mental health issues and it felt like we bonded through helping each other. It's because of this I remember her saying “how could you almost abandon me like this”. I know this might sound silly, but these words stuck with me to this day and I can't express how much they meant to me. After high school ended we drifted a little apart since we were at different universities and she got very busy with school. I went from feeling like we were codependent on each other to our friendship slipping away. Hearing those words reinforced to me that our friendship was unbreakable. 

By this point all the progress I was making was clearly visible because I earned a day pass soon after confronting my friends. A day pass at the hospital is exactly what it sounds like- you basically get to leave with a chaperone (for me it was my sister) for a certain amount of time. Day passes can be for half a day to a full day to even a few days depending on the circumstance. Since this was my first and only day pass in the hospital it was only for the day and I was to be returned by curfew. My sister and I had the day all planned out. We were gonna get breakfast, hangout a bit at home and run a special errand before chilling for the rest of the night. 

During my suicidal months I stopped caring about my appearance and really let myself go so one of the goals I made at the hospital was to regain my self image.  With this is mind one of the things I was looking forward to on my day of freedom was actually a haircut. I've gone to get my haircut by the same girl for quite a few years.  She's someone I knew and trusted but I still felt too embarrassed to tell her my current situation, so she has no idea how happy that haircut made me that day. When we got home to chill before a movie I decided to let my larger friend group know about what was going on with me. These were friends from high school mostly who I played games with almost every night so it was pretty strange for them to have me disappear for two weeks without a word (one of them who will go by T actually reached out to me to make sure I was ok and that’s what sparked me to let them know what was going. Just wanted to thank him for reaching out to me because it did make me emotional). They had a lot of empathy for my situation and made the conversation super comfortable. But 8:30 PM came by pretty quick and it was time for me to head back to the hospital and that was truly painful. I finally got a taste of freedom and normalcy but it was too short lived. But my one day off did teach me that I was able to reintegrate myself back into society with no problems and it motivated me to get back my freedom. At this point I continued with my routines and programs, really trying to work hard to better myself. Days and on my 21st day I was released from the program. 

Overall the hospital did a lot of good for me. The programs helped me find new coping mechanisms, start to think about my life/career path after the hospital, get me back into working out, and helped me get on a stable routine. Most important of all it gave me a safe space to sort out all my emotions and reflect on myself.

Stay tuned for the final part, where Josh talks about his recovery after the hospital. For anyone else who would like to share their story about any matter, please reach out to us at yegwellnesscollective@gmail.com