Hi debi, Welcome to Psych Central, I see you're new here. I'm actually BP but my cycles usually have me in the abyss for the most part. I feel myself rising to an 'almost' normal state right now but being BP with rapid cycling, I never know when that is going to change. It could be days from now, it could be 5 minutes from now. It happens with no warning whatsoever. Very hard to deal with the sudden change in the pendulum that dictates what mood I'm going to be in. But since suicide ideation happens when we're depressed, I thought this the best forum to post my question because you don't have to have a dx of BP to have depression. Some people suffer from depression alone. I had one cycle of extremely bad depression that last several months. I think it is only by the grace a God that I was saved from myself then and I'm able to sit here and post at all.

I also know of the thoughts of death that just pop into your head for no apparent reason. I've gone through periods where I was obsessed with them. Not the acting out of it but by the thoughts of death itself, and not even mine per se, just the subject. Scary stuff where the mind can take us.

You talk about suicide being drastic and that it is. There's no second chance if we are successful. I have sometimes been 'with it' enough to think rationally and look at it from that view point and then that stops me as well, but I've also had times when I've been so low that there is no lower you can get, my crying is uncontrollable and all I can see is the neverending emotional pain that I can't stop. What really scares the crap out of me is when I get that low I don't want saving, I don't want to phone a crisis line, a suicide hotline, 911, go to the ER, I want to die. I don't ever want to get that low again so that's why I'm here. I need coping mechanisms to stop myself from reaching that point ever again because I know if I ever get to that dark, scary place again, I won't make it out. I need some way of coping that will stop me waaaaaaaaay before that, to control the intensity of my depression. I can only speak from a BP point of view that the depressive cycle can have different degrees of intensity of the depths of depression it will take us. If you suffer from depression only, do you have that? Or is your depression always at the same level? As a BP, I can feel my moods lift or fall. When entering the depressive end of the spectrum, you can feel yourself falling, falling, falling. It's that falling that I need to find coping mechanisms for. I have to find a way to stop the fall in it's tracks that it haults before getting into dangerous territory. Do you feel a 'falling' phenomen to your depression. I'm assuming you're not BP.

You mention fighting. Do you ever get to the point where there is no fight left in you? How do you deal with that? When you're just too tired of it all and can't deal with it anymore. Or if something happens that triggers you? In BP, we have 'triggers'. If you suffer from straight depression, do you have triggers? I don't know how your depression may differ from mine but I do know there has to be a lot of commonality to it though.

Even though I previously stated that I am currently feeling myself 'rising' from my depression (at least for now), I still have the feelings of hopelessness. That's because I always end back in the same old spot again. And being BP, this is a life-long permanent thing for me, it's not something that drugs are gonna fix or therapy, although both will help. I'll need them for the rest of my life. I don't want to fight the depths of hell for the rest of my life. I want to find a way to conquer at least that part of my depression, to control the intensity. I don't know if that is possible but I'm clinging to 'some' kind of hope that I have 'some' control. PLEASE somebody tell me I can learn to control it.