First Attempt

Someone asked me the other day if I was still searching for answers to the reason why my daughter decided to take her life.  I'm sure I'll always be looking for the answer to that question "why" but for now, what I'm really trying to do to is fill in the gaps.  The gaps in my knowledge of who she was.  I'm trying to find out who the girl was who decided one day when she was 12 that purging was some kind of coping mechanism or solution to whatever emotional pain she was experiencing.

For some reason tonight, I was looking through her email which I still have access to.  I hadn't looked at her email in months but I had logged on about a month ago because I have this fear every once in a while that I'm going to lose access to it.  I had kept promising myself that I would write to the person she had gotten Riley from, her Pomeranian-Chihuahua, just to send pictures of him all grown-up (which I did).  In the course of this casual search, I decided to look at one of her folders that I hadn't looked at in a long while.  In it was a text exchange she had with someone.  It was enlightening yet disturbing.  A look into her state of mind at the same time as a couple of the last entries that I've been writing...August of 2010.

She talked about her eating struggles of the last 11 years, getting her body to work normally again, how exhausting it was and how it wasn't easy to give up that way of life and be "normal".  Yet at the same time, at the start of the text conversation, there seemed to be a thread of strength and determination running through her words to get better...until I got to the part of her talking about being alone.  Spending so much time alone.  How she had to listen to her roommate and a friend talk about her through closed doors for two days in a row.  How they spread rumors at work that she had cancer or "something" while she was actually in treatment.  At that point, my blood froze and my heart stopped.  Although I had heard these stories before, this was Tiffany telling it in her own words...as if from beyond the grave!  This wasn't just a made-up story; it was really true!!

And I thought...someone like Tiffany, suffering from the disease that she did, would never share her struggles willingly and especially not with someone who was talking about her behind her back, spreading rumors, making her life miserable.  Would this reticence on Tiffany's part make that person dislike her so much as to drive Tiffany to despair?  It certainly drove her out of the apartment they shared.  I wonder if that could be considered a form of bullying; at the very least, the worst kind of gossip, criticism or persecution, I guess.  But we're talking adults here; we're not talking about high school students, for crying out loud.  But interestingly enough, it was 5 days after Tiffany moved into an apartment by herself that she attempted suicide for the first time.

It was about 4:00 pm on an overcast fall day.  It was October 22, 2010 and I was in Poughkeepsie having my laptop repaired.  I had been in Stamford shortly after the text conversation I mention above took place (end of August) at the request of Ryan.  Tiffany had threatened to drink herself to death so Ryan had called me and "Mom" drove to the rescue.  Tiffany was beyond angry and drunk like I'd never known her to be but I let it roll off my back.  I stayed with her that night, telling her I had come to "save" her (silly me) which she scoffed at but she assured me that she would never kill herself, that she didn't have the guts to do it and so I left the next day.

Who could believe that only 2 short months later that I would be sitting in my car at the Poughkeepsie Mall on a conference call and see a CT phone number pop up on my cell phone?  I wanted to tell the person on the conference call that I had an incoming call but sometimes you get someone you can't get a word in edge-wise so I had to wait until I could end the call.  I think I called the number back and Stamford Hospital answered.  Stamford Hospital?  How could that be?  The person I spoke to said that my daughter had been brought to the Emergency Room and that she had taken an overdose of pills.  Overdose?  Pills?  Oh my God!  Was she alive, I asked?  Yes, she was but I needed to come to Stamford.  Thank God she was alive, was all I could think.

Fortunately, Poughkeepsie was an hour and a half closer to Stamford than Schenectady so after I made some calls and pulled myself together, I got there probably by 6:00 pm.  What I wasn't to know was that the person in that hospital bed was not really my daughter. That was some angry, belligerent, incoherent facsimile of her who lashed out at me as if I were the devil incarnate who had put her there.  I felt completely helpless and utterly guilty...a poor excuse for a mother whose daughter obviously didn't want her there.  At one point she came unglued and had to be sedated while I sat useless in another room.

They finally admitted her to the medical wing of the hospital after several hours for observation and further testing while a watcher sat by her bedside...suicide watch.  She was admitted to the psychiatric ward the next day...I am still not sure if they ever ruled out BPD.  But that's a story for another day...

Two-Minute Run

Borderline personality disorder is…

•A serious mental illness characterized by powerful and unstable emotional states, tumultuous interpersonal relationships, and impulsive behaviors

•More common than both bipolar disorder and schizophrenia

•Highly and unfairly stigmatized

People with BPD…

•Suffer from extreme and constantly shifting emotions

•Experience intense anger and despair

•Struggle to maintain close interpersonal relationships

•Are plagued by fears of abandonment

•Engage in what is known as “all or nothing” and “black and white” thinking

•Cope with painful emotions by engaging in self-damaging behaviors such as cutting, substance abuse, and binging and purging

Recent advances in research have…

•Uncovered a significant genetic predisposition for the disorder

•Led to the development of treatments specifically designed for patients with BPD such as dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) and mentalization based therapy (MBT)

BPD by the numbers*

•Studies have estimated that almost 6% of the population suffers from BPD.

•In the US, at least 14 million adults may have this disorder.

•Up to 10% of people with BPD will commit suicide and as many as 70% of borderline patients will attempt suicide.

•BPD patients account for 20% of inpatient psychiatric hospitalizations.

•At the conclusion of a 10-year study of a population of BPD patients, 85% of participants saw a remission of symptoms such that they no longer fulfilled the diagnostic criteria for the disorder. 

http://projectborderline.org/Official_Site/Two_Minute_Run.html