Are you feeling severely depressed or suicidal?

This bulletin board is not a crisis intervention center. With a few exceptions, we do not have formal training in counselling people who are on the brink of suicide. Thus, if you are depressed to the point of feeling suicidal, we strongly suggest that you ask your family doctor or dystonia specialist to refer you for professional counselling. Spasmodic Dysphonia (SD) is a difficult condition to deal with and you should not be embarassed to admit that you need help in coping. You should also be aware that some of the medications used to treat SD can induce severe depression.

If you feel that you can not wait to see your doctor, we urge you to contact a local crisis center and talk to someone before doing something irreversible. The American Association of Suicidology (AAS) has published an on-line list of crisis centers (most of which have counsellors manning hotlines 24 hours a day, 7 days a week) in the U.S., Canada and some other countries. To obtain the phone number of a crisis center in your area, click on the link below:

http://www.suicidology.org/

If there is not a crisis center near you in this list, look up the detailed listing for a local hospital in your phone book. Often, there will be a Crisis Intervention number listed.

Alternatively, call 1-800-SUICIDE, a national crisis hotline which links callers to local crisis centers.

While no one can "know" or completely understand another person's mental or physical pain, the Spasmodic Dysphonia Bulletin Board group is made up of people who, collectively, have experienced pretty well everything that spasmodic dysphonia can throw at a person. Some of our members have attempted to take their lives or have been very close to that point. The fact that they are still here today is proof that they were able to overcome the depression and come to the conclusion that life was worth living despite severe disability. If you are depressed but not suicidal or have gotten beyond seriously considering suicide, there are a couple of ways that you can draw on the resources of the group (note we are not suggesting you do this instead of obtaining professional help):

  1. If you have been following the bulletin board for a while, you will have some sense of the personalities of the different persons in the group. If there is someone whom you feel you would like to discuss your problems with, find one of their recent posts (use the search link at the top of the main page to help if necessary), click on their name and send him/her an e-mail.

  2. You can post a message describing what you are having difficulty dealing with and ask how others have coped with these problems.
The one thing we require is that if you post a message that it relate to the board's function of support. You can post to share, to ask for advice, to ask for support, or even to ask for a virtual hug. A message which simply states that the writer is going to kill him/herself without requesting help, does not meet that requirement. Such postings only serve to upset people and create friction within the group. They will be deleted immediately.
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