I'm going to put my 25,000th post here. I've had a rough year and it helps me to know I'm not alone.

I'm not sure what happened to me, but it's like I got too old and weary of keeping up the facade; I revisited the stuff that got me in so much trouble in college, the stuff that turned a four year science degree into a nine year adventure: the profound depression, the hallucinations, the obsessions, the psychotic self-destructive feelings and behaviors, that maybe I'd go swimming naked in the deep ocean with the great white sharks just to feel something real. I think I now understand people who cut; my own methods are merely Rube Goldberg versions of the same intent.

Fortunately I tend to be an affable and amusing sort, even at my very worst, a danger to myself, not others. In college the campus police and local cops always treated me as a welcome diversion from their usual graveyard shift routines of domestic violence and drunk-and-disorderlies. Hah, ha, we picked up Hunter running barefoot with bloody feet. But my illness does put huge burden of worry on my family and friends. They'd be very sad if I was eaten by the sharks. I think of my mom: Her mom did become a danger to herself and others and was forcibly removed from her house by police and paramedics in an hours long siege. Tied to an ambulance gurney my grandma was still cussing bloody murder and trying to bite anyone who got too close to her face.

For much lesser non-violent reasons I ended up locked up in the psych ward with a crash course of new meds, including a powerful anti-psychotic.

These new meds seem to be working well, I can ignore the voices in my head, especially late at night, but I am reminded once again that I'm not a good judge of my own mental state and that here in the U.S.A. there are few social safety nets but those you build for yourself. Locked up in the psych ward with me there were people who had no advocates but extremely overworked social workers. That's not right.