i just wanted to share because i’ve never heard this talked about before.

TRIGGER WARNING

talking about “severe” self-harm and self-mutilation / self-harming behaviors that cause significant bodily injury and risk severe complications. nothing detailed, i don’t describe methods or what things looked like but i get some people are sensitive to self-harm being framed that way.

. . .

when i was in a psych hospital in october, my psychiatrist prescribed me naltrexone to help with self-harm urges. she told me she was “outraged” that nobody had put me on naltrexone before which i think is a bit silly considering my other dr hadn’t even heard of it being used that way but.

usually it’s used for addictions like alcohol or opioids but i looked it up when i got home and did find a few studies about naltrexone’s effectiveness for treatment-resistant severe self-harm/self-mutilation. so like obviously i don’t think this should be the first line of treatment. i know for me personally my doctors were concerned because i wasn’t improving fast enough since they were worried i could die at any time from non suicidal self injury. i’d been hospitalized 8 times and every time i would start self harming afterwards. at the time i was hospitalized for cutting off a part of my body which i almost bled out from. i’m bipolar and borderline & regardless of what mood i was in i would pretty much always self harm. like i could have a great day and then go home and later that day need to go to the ER. this has been going on since i was 14 and im 20 now. what im trying to say is that psychotherapy is the best treatment for self harm, i just didn’t know that medication was an option for treatment resistant self harm.

it was hard to tell if it was working at first because my self harm was never very consistent. i would do it every few days to few weeks but when i did it would do a lot of damage. now that it’s been like half a year i am pretty confident that it’s helping? there have been a few instances but i feel like my actual drive to self harm has reduced. like i still have ideation i guess but those thoughts rarely turn into actions because i find myself just like not wanting to. the severity has also decreased when i do self harm. it took me like an hour usually to make a cut i was happy with but since starting the medication i tend to get sick of hurting myself part way through and i stop earlier.

this is sort of silly but sometimes i will try to motivate myself to self harm but i never end up actually doing it. like i know this sounds like im trying to get myself to do homework not cut off my arm but ill be like “after work i should cut” and then i dont do it.

after i got discharged i told my older sister like “they put me on a pill to make me stop cutting myself and i think its working” she started crying and sort of laughing like “they can do that?” even if it didnt work i think seeing her reaction was really impactful. like i know i worry my family a lot, especially my mom and my sister. when i got taken by the ambulance after the “at home surgery” thing my moms ex bf (who still lived with us then) said that he walked past my moms room and my little brother was sleeping in her bed while my mom was at the hospital w/ me. he and my other sister literally didn’t know what was going on they just saw me being carried out of the house by the first responders. i also had surgery on my 19th bday and was in the hospital from the day before to the day after because i had an infection from self harm. (also apparently the patient next to me had the same birthday as me??)

so i just wanted to spread awareness especially for people who have treatment resistant and/or severe self mutilating behaviors. doctors are only really trained to treat self harm that looks one way, and it does make me happy that there is more research being put into that type of self mutilation because i’ve found that traditional methods don’t really help. i’ve also found that with any kind of talk therapy my therapists would get distressed and frustrated when i wasn’t showing improvement quickly enough and i understand that because me stopping was sort of urgent, there were many times i almost died and it was a risk whenever i cut myself.

not sure how long ive been clean. i don’t like to measure it that way because i feel like it makes relapsing a bigger deal than it already is and makes me unmotivated to keep going if my streak resets..: but i haven’t had any major incidents since october. technically not since late september since while i was discharged oct 3rd(?) i had been in the hospital for 10 days before that…, that is like 7 months?