I don't know if this post has any point...but I just feel like I need to tell someone this.

I started TFP/TFT recently and am going through the first "evaluation" sessions. While going through my history, my therapist asked me about a suicide attempt (my last suicide attempt) that happened 8 years ago. When I recounted it, he told me that I don't seem to understand the seriousness of what I had done because of my lack of emotion when describing the incident. This made me angry because I heard that from a lot of therapists and doctors at the time of the overdose. I also assumed that they (my current therapist and people at the hospital) didn't believe that I had taken the pills when they asked me if I realized that my dose was lethal. Back then, I assumed that they thought that I was an idiot who did not know how to calculate a lethal dose and that my suicide attempt was for attention. I really meant to die and knew I'd taken enough pills to get the job done. 

I took 350+ of 300mg lithium pills (back then I was prescribed lithium but stopped taking it for 3 months without telling anyone). I basically threw up all night and had tremors, blurry vision, and slurred speech that I worked really hard to hide from my family. I did not go to the hospital until 3 days later because I was thinking of doing it again with Tylenol and realized that this was stupid (because the same thing would happen again). By that time, I actually needed no medical intervention and I ended up going inpatient for 10 days. So I didn't die, and I "just threw everything up" which is what my therapist at the time said would happen if I took an overdose. My therapist at the time told me that an overdose wasn't serious because I would just throw up anyway.

After this conversation with my current therapist (who is a psychiatrist), I started reading a lot about cases of lithium overdose and realize that people have gone into comas, died, or ended up with permanent brain damage at half the dose I took. I didn't even need medical intervention. I feel really guilty for surviving and I think that my current therapist was right that I didn't know what I'd done. My current therapist and all the people at the hospital may have actually been expressing their concern and not actually calling me an "attention-seeker." I'm not sure that I'm happy with the fact that I'm not dead...but I do think the fact that I did not even need medical intervention was miraculous.  