Suicidal

@Pulsing Ear,

I'm actually really thankful for COVID-19 right now, as screwed up as it sounds. Before I got tinnitus & hyperacusis I was enjoying the lockdown. I'm kind of a homebody by nature anyway. But I still would go out for drives and stuff and enjoy the emptiness of the world.

Now I can't even do that. Going outside at all is a risk. When the world returns to normal I still won't be able to do anything. Having hyperacusis is kind of my lockdown by default.

My friends will get back to traveling and hanging out but I'll be stuck in hospice care. In fact, I extra won't because too many people will be out and about. Even during COVID-19 I'd have surprise noise insults in low populated areas with not many people around. I have very bad luck.

 

He just posted last month. He doesn’t post often, but if you message him he is likely to respond. I know I get email notifications when I receive a message.

 

I messaged him weeks ago and have yet to get a response.

 

He may not be active, but I talk to him from time to time. I use the message or conversation feature. I hope you start to see improvement soon.

It's not easy, especially if they are loud and you have hyperacusis.

 

Same. I developed hyperacusis pretty soon after being laid off early this year. If the virus hadn’t happened I would have had to quit and therefore be ineligible for unemployment benefits. My parents are supportive but they aren’t getting any younger.

 

Well I will answer for myself, yes it's like in my face 24/7. When I'm outside I hear it as if I'm indoors - a screechy sound, drill, saw, whatever you want to call it. But indoors in a quiet setting I hear a very loud whine as well, which I developed since last year's noise trauma.

I might also add that my old high pitch tinnitus was always heard outside but more mellowy kind of not as intrusive and I had my life back 85%... I am in living hell right now, having also gotten hyperacusis again, my life is now at zero.

Tinnitus can get worse, that's for sure.

 

Sorry I keep posting but does anyone else have people in their lives that wronged them, and they get to live happily ever after and you're stuck like this? It seems like life kicks my ass constantly and rewards everyone else. And I hate it.

 

My place of employment had JUST opened back up before I got hyperacusis. After my accident I had breathing issues and it was affecting my work. A guest (I worked at a hotel) reported my breathing issues and was afraid I had COVID-19 so I essentially got laid off. I had been planning to put my 2 weeks to figure out what was up but they hadn't even gone by.

Not a peep from my boss 6 months later about being eligible for anything. Now I have to have a friend take care of me and I'm just living off my savings. My parents were supporting me but same deal, not getting any younger. It sucks. But I am thankful we have an excuse to stay indoors.

 

I know people that live an unhealthy lifestyle and yet they are much more healthy than me. I've got a close friend that smoke 3 packs a day and is healthy as a horse. It's frustrating.

 

Sorry to say, but this kind of thing is one of the reasons why I'm not religious (among other reasons).

 

Same. I absolutely do not believe in karma either.

 

I always imagined idiots skipping through a minefield and coming out unscathed.. Then the careful ones who plan, overthink, and make all the right moves, take one careful step and get blown up instantly.

 

I’m so sick of this guys. How can this be this bad?

 

The problem of evil is indeed the greatest difficulty for Christianity. The usual answer, based on the problematic notion of free will, does not work given children or good people getting horrible illnesses or being killed or maimed by natural events. The notion that we are fallen creatures in a fallen world does not help much either. Suffering remains at least partly unexplained in the bible. The book of Job basically says "you are a human, you are too limited to understand the working of God". It has God playing a game with Satan with the poor Job becoming the object of a sort of test between God and Satan. Some parts of the gospels, especially where Satan tempts Jesus, seem to imply that Satan is the real king of this world. But then why does God allow Satan to make us suffer like this? Some mystics claim it's God's will anyway and we cannot understand it from this side and need to have faith as it's all for the best in the end. How can this work in the face of the horrible suffering we see and saw through history and even experience ourselves? It requires blind acceptance of such horrors to lose all meaning. The bible does acknowledge this suffering, as there is a whole book of lamentations. Some key prophets have been suicidal at times. Christianity does not provide an answer, suffering remains a mystery in the end, although God sent his son/himself as Jesus Christ to suffer with us, but this raises more questions and problems. One is naturally perplexed, to say the least.

There are great scientists who are atheists (many) and great scientists who are Christian believers (few). When I was still functioning I used to read Aron Wall's blog "undivided looking". He is a top physicist, astrophysicist and cosmologist. As a mathematician you may have heard of the apologist John Lennox. I always wondered (with Wigner) at the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics and see it as one of the evidences against strict materialism. Mathematical objects, numbers, geometries, topologies, function spaces and other structures exist in a platonic world we tap into. I find this to be true. What does this mean for strict materialism?
Then there are the problems with consciousness...

Other monotheistic religions suffer from the same problems of Christianity and there is no incarnated God suffering with us.

Buddhism says the soul does not exist and suffering is born from attachment and ignorance. You can accept the Dharma, follow the eightfold path to free yourself, God may or may not exist, this is not important to most Buddhists. However, after you watch seriously ill children or your parents slowly dying of Alzheimer's, this becomes abstract and completely insufficient, at least to me. Is this really ignorance? I love Buddha's life and teachings but it is not enough and leaves us with many problems, even in the expanded Mahayana traditions.

I think religions offer some belief matrices that may help us frame reality beyond strict materialism. None of them fully answer the problem of suffering, although a few promise things will be clear after death. I tend to like Buddhism and Christianity, I'm a christian but I have to confess that my faith has been more than shaken by the horrible suffering I see in the world and I'm experiencing myself. Life has become a cross to carry for me and it is crushing me.

It goes without saying that I respect people who cannot believe in the face of all the horrors we see and experience. I struggle a lot to keep my beliefs alive. Suffering remains a mystery in the end, at least to me. The fact that it might be meaningless further adds to it.

We need to stay strong for ourselves and our families but it's a desperate fight I feel I'm losing.

 

Is it still getting worse? How loud is it now?

 

Yep. I'm not putting a number or trying to fight it anymore. There's just nothing I can do to stop it so...

 

So sorry Pitseleh,

You are not sure what is causing your tinnitus, correct? That is so awful and torturous on top of your tinnitus.

Some people, a lot smarter than me (I am an idiot), have a kind of check list that they can run through with their Doctor or medical practitioner to get to the bottom of it e.g. TMJ, issues related to blood flow, hidden hearing loss or hearing loss, autoimmune issues... and such. -- If you have done this, please forgive me.

When I was suicidal and just simply couldn't sleep and was a complete mess, I took Valium and it did take the edge off. Is it possible you could take a Benzo? I hate to push this drug, but they did help me and do help a good number of tinnitus sufferers here on this forum. Dr. Shulman had a drug protocol that may help you while you try and find out what is going on.

Wish I could be of some help... and sorry for the lame advice. Just reaching out.

 

An interesting topic is the concept of "limits at infinity." I use this concept probably dozens of times per day when trying to prove something. A related topic is "countability." It's hard for me to believe that the human construction of a god and the set of axioms used to work with infinity are independent. Honestly, seeing the novel inventions of mathematicians also makes it easier for me to see why a god doesn't need to exist. I don't do super abstract math so I don't follow the work of John Lennox closely -- he specializes in group theory, which I knew well enough to pass some necessary exams in, but I definitely do not consider myself at research level in this field. My favorite subject is probably differential equations. One of my dreams, if I am ever healthy enough to think straight, is to come up with a model for hyperacusis.

Hey, no judgement. I think that intense suffering is really polarizing. People either run to faith or run away from it. I'm sad to say that my tendency is clearly to run away from it, as I feel anger towards a god (that I don't even believe in) often.

 

For us failing to repent!

 

I love differential equations. Do you study just ODEs or also PDEs, stochastic differential equations, rough differential equations? Coming up with a model for tinnitus was a similar idea I had, but at this level of noise my brain is fried and can't think.

You are absolutely right about the polarisation, and I'm very angry too when I'm not desperate, often I'm both. Today I woke up at 3am and can't go back to sleep. I really hope we all get cured at some point.

 

How are you doing? I have been trying to taper Clonazepam. I am down to 0.25 mg. I went down by 10% cuts but I keep worsening and the worsening has accelerated. Now even sleep is mostly gone, I sleep 3 hours per night. I don't know if I can go on with this taper. I'm also getting stomach cramps and various pains. Taking Magnesium but not very effective.

I'll try to hold on but even at stable 0.5 mg I was worsening. Updosing further is dangerous and may not work anyway unless we are lucky and stabilize at large doses. I really hope the trend stops and inverts for you.

 

What do the people here think would be reasonable terms or rules for assisted suicide? It’s a topic that seems to be becoming less taboo but at the moment you seem to have to meet some pretty specific criteria to qualify - certain age, certain diagnosis, and so on, and it’s very limited location wise.

I caught myself thinking about this and I honestly don’t know what seems reasonable if it was to be legalized for the general public.

 

Buddhism can be very tough. Some attachments are more natural to us because of evolution, such as caring a lot about sex or our children, and some we have honed our whole lives. But Buddhism is still right: We attach ourselves and pay the price through grief and hurt if something contrary to our expectations happens. With some attachments it's just a lot more difficult to stay detached.

Buddhism is to me like stoicism: Trying to cultivate a mindset where it's always an hour before your death and trying to make the best out of it. Just the way to get to this mindset is really tough and can be tougher for some who are under difficult circumstances.

For example I've tried to remember myself of this mindset of "hour before death", but I'm actually very aversed to accept my impermanence, which leads to suffering.

 

I doubt that ODE or PDE are the correct language to describe objects like a brain (at least I would be surprised to see such a model). If I had to bet, I would look in to Random Graph Theory.

Unfortunately it's not my field of expertise, otherwise I would have looked at least into the literature to see if somebody already came up with some idea.

 

It depends. There are two main philosophies when modeling the brain (and a mix of the two). The one is to say that the brain is so vast with so many synaptic interactions that we can ignore the timing of action potentials and focus on large-scale, average behavior over cortical tissue. This kind of thing is suitable for EEGs and eCoGs, where electrodes record average behavior.

The other is to say that the timing of action potentials is important (obviously, it is). However, it's intractable to study the whole brain in this way.

Really, you probably need a mixture of both philosophies, along with stochasticity to account for noise.

Fittingly, sum and integral convolutions (username checks out) are really helpful for modeling the space and time components of the interactions since neurons have long-range interactions and therefore, just standard ODEs and PDEs are not good enough, since they only consider local behavior (i.e. derivatives and numerical approximations are only useful if the medium being modeled on doesn't have long-range interactions).

The Hodgkin-Huxley model, for example, is a system of ODEs that works because the squid giant axon is a massive nerve bundle.

For hyperacusis, my estimation is that the modeling approach for the auditory pathways and for the brain's response are probably quite different.

Sorry to derail the thread, I will stop adding to this discussion here.

 

Holy shit, never have I wanted to die so badly. I can't live like this anymore. I'll be amazed if I can make it through today without killing myself. I'm not doing too well fighting the urges.

 

Exercise seems to make my pulsing ear syndrome go away. It's gone for about 4 or 5 hours and then comes back. Has anyone tried exercise? Even my ringing from tinnitus diminishes a bit from exercise. Maybe it's the increased blood flow?

I hang upside down on an inversion table after exercise to treat my sore back. I noticed yesterday that it brought back the pulsing in my ear but it went away a few minutes later. Hanging upside down should increase blood flow perhaps, or maybe it's causing pooling of blood there which is bad.

 

Holidays are hard for suicidal people. In one regard, you know your loved ones don't want you to hurt yourself. But in another regard, it feels so awful to try to throw those thoughts at loved ones.

I wish everyone a happy holiday. If you are able to enjoy it, please do. There's so much fucking suffering in this world, you shouldn't have to feel guilty. Just appreciate it, please.

 

I am at my wits' end no matter how depressed I was in the past I would always have music to turn back to but I no longer have that and I fear I'm developing noxacusis.

 

Holidays have always been hard for me but this year is by far the worse. I was slapped with some personal stuff this week on top of everything else. I'm just sitting here questioning my mortality, my future, and honestly not wanting to find out what happens in 2021...