Holy cats, Mrrzy, was your Dad killed in the barracks bombing in Beirut? I've been dropping in and out of this thread, and I haven't put in my two cents before now because ... well, because I was too preoccupied with work, and family, and the weather, and the usual quotidian crap. But until today I did not realize that you're a military brat.

Military life is so hard on families, especially little kids, and the lip service so glibly poured out these days by the great and the good -- "Our families are our strength!" -- brings me out in a rash. If the families are so important, why is so little done to make their lives even a little less stressful and chaotic? And what the adults experience as stress often comes through to their children as unnameable terror. Some military parents manage to buffer the effects of their careers on their kids, but many just shrug off the problem in the belief that it can't be that bad if the kids have a roof over their heads and enough to eat. In fact, military people usually have so little control over their own lives that they convince themselves that they can do nothing for their children. Or they get out of the service, but that is usually a last resort, undertaken only when the family is in dire distress.

I know the black despair you describe; I lived with it for many years. But I am one of the lucky people for whom Prozac actually works, and I live in Canada where being sick is not necessarily a sentence of bankruptcy. I am also blessed with the love, support and respect of both my brothers; without their help, I could easily have wound up under the wheels of a bus. (That thing you mentioned, looking at a random object and imagining how you could use it to kill yourself -- yup. Done that.)

I sincerely hope you find a safe place, or find someone who will help you find a safe place, to continue your recovery. From what you have written here, I'm guessing that you're at that point in the disease where the coping skills you learned in youth don't work any more and you have to build a new set for your current stage of life. The trouble is that, at the same time, you also have to deal with all the unresolved pain and misery that the coping skills held at bay. It's not a program to be undertaken on a tight schedule. I reckon it took me about ten years.

Keep writing. We'll keep reading.