Carrie,

Those are excellent questions, and I am very interested in everybody's responses.

I have been suicidal. I know there isn't necessarily a connection, and most of the time for me there isn't, but the first time I cut I believed it was a suicide attempt, and felt like such a wimp because all I managed were some little scratches. I was a self-injurer a long time before then, but my methods had less resemblance to anything potentially fatal - mostly biting, head-banging, and not eating. So, when I started using blades at first, it did represent feeling suicidal. Scratching was for me an automatic response to being more frustrated or mad than I could handle, and I eventually just found that using a blade was easier. Another time I was suicidal, and was planning on swallowing a whole bunch of pills, but instead I got worked up into a rage and scratched up my face and any other exposed skin I could get to. Once I had done that, I started feeling better and was ready to abandon the other plan. So that time, SI was a way to get over feeling suicidal. Still another time, I was hit suddenly by powerful suicidal urges - I wanted to cut veins and knew that I could - and I was so scared that I didn't SI for about 3 months.

I'm trying to look for patterns here, and these incidents are all so different. Typically, if I am suicidal, I get very quiet and do nothing to draw attention to myself. I'm pretty skilled at acting normal, except that I have no energy and just drag myself around. I guess that being quiet and lethargic but acting normal, and usually not cutting, would be the warning signs for me.

Wendy

<font color=orange>"If a light beckons to you, follow it. If it leads you into the quagmire, you'll probably find your way out of it again; but if you don't follow it, you'll be plagued for the rest of your life by the thought that perhaps it was your star." Friedrich Hebbet</font color=orange>