New Year’s. A friend asked all of us what we hoped for in the year to come.

“I want to not fuck up,” I said. Felt tears pricking at the corners of my eyes, realized these people had never seen me cry, which feels so weird, because I have always been used to absolutely everyone who comes into contact with me at all seeing me cry at one point or another. But although the people present were close friends of mine, they have only been so for less than a year and a half. During most of that time, I have been the New, Improved Polly on medication that actually works for me.

Did not want them to see me cry now. Had to explain that I wasn’t really being upset and maudlin, that I was actually trying to be positive.

“It’s just that I went all through 2007 without fucking up,” I said. “I was sick for so long, and the past year was the first year that I’ve been well. I just want things to stay that way.”

I then almost immediately proceeded to come dangerously close to fucking up.

I spent the next few weeks hypomanic in a bad way. Yelled at people for no reason. Obsessed endlessly about certain things. You don’t even want to hear about my sex drive during those weeks (hint: really, really high). Drank way too much, alone. Spent too much money.

With little warning and absolutely no fanfare, I slipped into a mild depression and stayed there for a few more weeks. Believed I would never be happy again. Wondered what was the point of anything. Continued to occasionally drink too much, alone. Had to try very hard to keep from cutting myself. Sent disturbing emails to friends about wanting to cut myself. Only managed not to cut myself because I knew my two-year anniversary of not cutting would be coming up soon, and I really wanted to make it to two years without screwing up.

Then woke up one morning and felt better, just like that. Not caused by anything. Nothing had changed except for my mood. The weather was still utter wintery crap, but it suddenly wasn’t bringing me down anymore. (Seriously, if you are not in Canada right now, stay away from this country until at least May. I am not joking.) I still had the same slight personal problems I’d had for a while, but I was suddenly able to look at them rationally and not blow things out of proportion. It’s so weird when you wake up and all of a sudden you are well. It’s also weird when you wake up and all of a sudden you are unwell, but I don’t like that one quite as much. I can’t help but think of it as some cosmic dude or dudette mucking about with a remote that controls my emotions.

I had been seriously considering asking my doctor about increasing my medication when I saw her, but ultimately I didn’t, since I wasn’t having problems functioning and my mood swings were quite tame compared to the way they used to be a year and a half ago. I figured I could deal with it without more drugs, but afterward I worried that maybe it was stupid and pigheaded of me.

Now that I feel better, though, I’m pleased to see that this was indeed the best decision for me at this time. I’m glad I got through that rough patch while remaining on only a minimal amount of medication.

One in six teens inflict self-harm (TRIGGER WARNING: if you don’t want to see a photo of cuts on someone’s forearm, then don’t click this link), the Globe and Mail tells us today, and the sub-headline of that article is “Abusing yourself isn’t a suicidal or attention-seeking action, research suggests, but a coping mechanism.”

Well, duh. We’ve been trying to tell people that for years and years¹, but who bothers listening to self-injurers? Especially to teen self-injurers. We are not doing it to get attention.

The research, published in today’s edition of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, shows that 17.6 per cent of teenagers self-harm - a number that includes 21 per cent of girls and 8.7 per cent of boys.

This being the media, though, they have to warp the contents of the actual study, Nonsuicidal self-harm in youth: a population-based survey, so that “Ninety-six of 568 (16.9%) youth indicated that they had ever harmed themselves” from the original journal article, somehow becomes “17.6 per cent of teenagers self-harm” — present tense, plus an inexplicable 0.7 bonus. (Admittedly, I haven’t read the whole study yet because I was having computer problems earlier today and I am lazy, but I shall get around to it, and if there is an explanation that I missed for that extra 0.7, then sorry, my bad.) I suppose it’s mainly a case of people wanting shocking headlines, as the Globe and Mail article does continue as follows:

A total of 568 young people aged 14 to 21 were interviewed. Ninety-six of them said they had, at some point in their young lives, harmed themselves deliberately.

About one-third of the teenagers had done so only once, another third on two to three occasions and the other third had self-harmed repeatedly. On average, their mutilating actions began at age 15.

Much of the article is an interview with the study’s lead author, Dr. Mary Nixon, and it’s pretty good except for one comment that directly contradicts other things in the article:

“We’re trying to raise awareness that it’s not uncommon in young people and not related to mental health problems,” she said.

“It” being self-injury, of course. It’s such a weird quote that I’ve got to wonder if it’s a typo or a misunderstanding or something. I don’t think SI is always related to mental health problems, but I think it is the majority of the time.

The research shows a clear link between self-harm and mental health problems. Those who hurt themselves are more than twice as likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and impulse disorders.

It is not entirely clear why girls are more likely to self-harm than boys, but Dr. Nixon believes it is related to the fact that rates of depression soar at puberty and that girls not only mature earlier but react differently to stress.

See? Does not compute. SI is indeed related to mental health, although it’s very rarely suicidal or attention-seeking. (Never say never. All generalizations are bad. Tee hee.)

Dr. Nixon, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, said when teenagers harm themselves, it is often assumed they are doing so to get attention, but the behaviour is far more complex.

“A lot of these kids hide their cuts and burns. It’s not attention-seeking, it’s something else,” she said.

THANK YOU. I really appreciate somebody saying this and it being national news.

¹Although we don’t phrase it that way, because then it would sound like we were talking about masturbation.

Yesterday somebody asked me, “What happened to your arm?”

It is both sad and funny that I had to ask him to clarify. “Which arm?”

“The left one,” he said.

I felt slightly relieved. The right arm is the one with the four-inch-long scar on the forearm. No one has ever asked me about it, probably because 1) it’s not as noticeable as the scars on my left arm, 2) it hasn’t been there as long, and 3) uh, it’s kind of obvious that I slashed my wrist a bit. The right-arm question isn’t one I feel like answering.

Neither was the left-arm question, apparently, because I just said, “Oh, that’s from years ago.” Which is true, but doesn’t answer anything. The last time someone actually asked me, which was in 2002, I said, “I cut myself with a razor blade.” No one has asked since then. The actual scars are from 1999. There are about twenty of them, on my upper arm. They’re short and not extremely noticeable, especially since they’re high enough up that I have to be wearing very short sleeves for them to even be visible.

I don’t think I was actually ashamed to answer truthfully. I think I just didn’t feel obligated. It’s hard for me to remember that not wanting to tell everybody doesn’t necessarily mean I’m ashamed of myself. The person who asked was a coworker I’ve never even had a conversation with before.

Is it just me, or is it kind of rude for a person you have never exchanged any words with other than “Hi” to ask what happened to your arm, when they’re not even doing so to express some sort of sympathy for a recent injury, as the scars have clearly been there a long time?

It’s been a year since I was in the hospital. Although there were nearly five years between my second and third hospitalization, last year, in the space of six months, I had two brief inpatient stays and spent seven weeks in a partial hospitalization programme, which I completed last June. I’ve also gone exactly sixteen months without cutting myself, which doesn’t really seem like a big deal because I pretty much quit and have only cut myself three times in the past six years, anyway.

My mood has been fairly stable lately, and, for a change, it is holding steady at “Very Well, Thank You” rather than “Rock Bottom.” So of course I’m being dogged by insomnia again. You know that saying, “It’s like putting an octopus to bed?” As soon as you’ve got one thing under control, another tentacle pops out from under the covers. It’s always something, isn’t it?

I have an appointment with a new psychiatrist tomorrow. I’m nervous about this. The last time I saw a psychiatrist was about eight months ago. He was a complete asshole who pronounced me borderline, histrionic, and narcissistic after watching through a two-way mirror as a medical student interviewed me for about forty minutes and only speaking briefly with me himself. (By the way, the last mental health professionals who had dealt with me, who saw me nearly every day for seven weeks, had said that I definitely do not have any personality disorders.)

When I asked him why he thought I probably had these three personality disorders, he said it was because I showed no emotion whatsoever and denied the fact that I even had emotions. This is patently untrue, as I am pretty much the exact opposite. (And although I also don’t have histrionic personality disorder, I’d still like to point out that “shows no emotions” certainly doesn’t describe a histrionic, either.) He said that he could tell I had personality disorders because I didn’t talk about my feelings, just about things like the dates that certain things happened to me, and about every medications I had ever taken and at what dosages. Um, the reason I was talking about those things was that I was answering the questions the med student asked me. I thought a lot of them were tedious myself and I would have preferred to talk about other things, so why the hell was he basing my diagnosis on his dislike of the student’s interviewing style?

He didn’t have access to my previous files, in which my diagnosis of bipolar disorder is confirmed by multiple doctors, but I’m sure it would have made no difference to him if he had.

He also said some other bizarre things, like that I should tell my mother that I hate her. I don’t hate her, so I don’t know what purpose that would serve, but when I asked him why I should tell her I hate her, all he would say was that I should tell her I hate her and he wouldn’t give me any actual reason. He said that it wouldn’t kill her or anything if I told her I hated her, and I said, “Yeah, I know that. I’ve gotten angry at my mother plenty of times and it didn’t kill her, but I don’t see why I should tell her I hate her when I don’t.”

Who died and made him Freud?

He said that the best thing for me would be “fairness focused therapy” or something like that. I don’t remember the exact term, but it involved the words “fairness” and “therapy.” I haven’t really done extensive searching on the topic, but I have tried doing some Google searches and some journal searches, and as of yet, I have seen nothing that would indicate that this particular type of therapy even exists, let alone that it would be the best treatment for me. He told me I should go to some “fairness” program at the hospital three times a week, and when I asked if it were possible for a person to attend that program and still hold down a job, he seemed to think this was a completely unimportant consideration, despite the fact that I was stable at the time and there was nothing else that would prevent me from working.

So I figured he could fuck off and die. I didn’t say that to him, though. I was polite and decided never to go back to that hospital again because whatever crazy shit he must have written about me in my chart would totally bias anybody there against me.

I am seeing a shrink elsewhere tomorrow, not at the hospital, but you can see why I’m nervous. At least I think I’m seeing a shrink. My GP referred me to a shrink and I’ve got an appointment at a mental health centre, but I don’t know if I actually get to see the shrink tomorrow or if I see a social worker first or what.

In addition to being mega-nervous about this appointment in general, I’m also worried about my recent eating-disordered behaviour. To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never been officially diagnosed with an eating disorder. This is mainly because I am — okay, I want to say “a big fat liar,” but that is so not appropriate here. Let’s just say that I’m a liar, okay? And a really good, sneaky, convincing one, as far as eating disorders are concerned. The other reason is that whenever I do come clean about my eating-disordered behaviour, it’s always about things I’ve done in the past and never anything I’m currently doing.

“Officially” diagnosed or not, however, in the past I have met full criteria for anorexia nervosa. This would have been in 2001, when I lost over 20% of my body weight, had a BMI of 15.2, and still managed to convince most people that I wasn’t doing it on purpose. I didn’t fool my mom, but I fooled everyone else. I started losing weight when I was in the hospital in December 2000, following my suicide attempt, because I was physically weak after the overdose and hospital food sucked, and after that I just kept losing weight on purpose, because starving yourself is a more socially acceptable form of self-injury than cutting, I was manic so it was easy to lose weight, and I think I had developed a weird addiction to it.

I’ve never been overweight. I’ve always been thin. I have the extreme good luck to not even gain any weight when on anticonvulsants and atypical antipsychotics. I do not think my appearance would be improved if I lost weight. I know it actually makes me look worse. Eating-disordered behaviour is purely a form of self-injury for me. Well, eating disorders have all sorts of complex causes, but I can assure you, mine has nothing to do with me wanting to look pretty. (I know a lot of other people’s don’t, either, but I know it is a factor in some people’s EDs.)

Anyway, I’ve been restricting my food intake way too much lately (and since I’m naturally thin, any time that I restrict my food intake at all instead of eating whatever I damn well please is a sign of disordered eating for me) and worrying about my weight. For about the past two months, I hadn’t been feeling as hungry as usual… so a few weeks ago, I just sort of took that fact and ran with it. The less I ate, the less I decided I should eat. Now I’m purposely restricting instead of just eating less because I haven’t been hungry. I know I’ve lost a bit of weight. I’ve been eating one meal a day, but now I’ve even started worrying about exactly what that one meal contains, counting calories and all of that.

It was in 2002 that I may have met full criteria for bulimia nervosa. Maybe not, though. I’m not sure I binged enough for that, but I sure as hell threw up a lot. Binged and threw up, ate normally and threw up, restricted and threw up. Most of the weight that I had lost previously, I gained back in late 2001, and then lost it again in 2002. Purged once or twice a day, got nosebleeds from throwing up so much. If your eating disorder is mainly a means of self-injury, then you love the immediacy of bulimia. Binge right now, then purge a few minutes later! Relief right now, or self-torture right now, or both, whichever you want, but right now! No waiting like there is when you’re starving yourself, instant results! It’s mercurial and intense and appeals to short attention spans.

I’m managing to stay away from it now, though. It might have even been years since I’ve purged. I’m tempted lately, but I’m not vomiting and I’m not taking laxatives (yeah, I did that, too, although mostly back in 1999). Maybe my self-control has gotten better. Heck, maybe it’s gotten a little bit too good, what with the restricting.

I have had food issues, mostly in an ED-NOS sort of way, on and off for at least eight years, probably longer. It never lasts very long. Never more than six months at a really serious level, anyway. It always goes away, but then it always comes back. Socially sanctioned self-destruction. Eating-disordered behaviour is always the last card I have up my sleeve when everything else is gone, and I keep playing it again and again and again.

And I’m getting fucking sick of it. I’d thought I was better, because it had been away for so long this time. I thought it wasn’t coming back. I thought it could just go away on its own without me working to fix it, because I thought it wasn’t really serious, you know, not like eating disorders that other people have. That other people have real problems and deserve real help and I don’t.

This time, I would kind of like to tell somebody about it so I can start working on this for the first time in my life and make some real progress on it. But I’m scared that people will think I’m just making a big deal out of nothing. So I’ve been on an unnecessary diet for a few weeks, so what? Haven’t most people been at one time or another? Don’t I have enough real issues to deal with, without getting all bent out of shape over this? I really am scared that no one will take me seriously if I ask for help with this.

Also, at the same time, I kind of don’t want to get better.

Just out of curiosity, I recently looked up information online about the nearest eating disorders clinic. It’s not really near at all and I know my problem isn’t severe enough that I’d need the programme there, but having been in a partial hospitalization programme last year, I just had an idle curiosity about such things. I noticed when I read the referral criteria that even if I wanted to participate in the programme, I couldn’t, because my current BMI is lower than the minimum allowed (they want participants to be at a healthy weight before they work on their psychological issues). This pleased me.

I am seriously sick in the head.

Ruth at Off-Label wrote a post titled A stigma wrapped in a history inside another stigma - that will probably never make it onto a t-shirt, about the stigma of the borderline personality disorder label within the c/s/x movement, and since my worrying about being an attention whore helped trigger it, I thought I’d talk about it. On and on and on about it. My post might not make much sense if you don’t read hers first, so you should read hers first. Some of this I first posted as a comment on her blog, but when I realized how long it was getting, I decided I’d take it over here:

Oh, don’t worry. It’s already made it onto a T-shirt. If I believed I had BPD, I would be perfectly willing to wear that shirt to any place that I would be willing to wear my “BIPOLAR PRINCESS” shirt.

I don’t think I have BPD, but I am well aware that I have some BPD traits, namely that I have mood swings, I used to cut myself, I am sometimes impulsive, and occasionally psychotic and dissociative. Although I think these are better explained by my diagnoses of bipolar disorder and PTSD, I’m open to the idea that maybe I could have BPD, or am possibly a recovered borderline still exhibiting some traits, or that DBT skills might help me regardless of diagnosis. I’ve got two volumes of Linehan and a copy of Get Me Out of Here by Rachel Reiland sitting in a pile of books on my floor, that’s how seriously I take these ideas.

I often wonder if BPD is a useful diagnosis at all… but I’ve met people both in real life and online who were diagnosed with BPD, who agreed with this diagnosis, and who are wonderful people. Because they feel that BPD is a useful construct for explaining some of their feelings and behaviours, and because some of them have received treatment for BPD that they feel has been effective, I don’t feel qualified in saying it must be purely complex PTSD, or it must be purely a different form of bipolar disorder, or it must be ONLY a label docs slap on women they don’t like. Since I don’t identify myself as having BPD, who am I to invalidate the experiences of people who do identify as such?

I couldn’t say whether the stigma of being an attention whore is greater than the stigma of being bipolar in the general population, but there’s definitely a stigma in the c/s/x community against borderline personality disorder. I don’t think, however, that this is usually because those of us in the c/s/x community actually look down upon people who have been diagnosed with BPD or who we perceive to be attention whores (note the “or” there: I’m not saying that these people are one and the same). In some cases, I’d say this is true, but honestly, I think most of us, including myself, are terrified of ourselves being misdiagnosed, or even correctly diagnosed, with BPD because we know that most mental health “professionals” will see it as a license to treat us like crap.

Last year I had the particular misfortune of being seen by doctors who didn’t seem to think it was possible to suffer from personality disorders and Axis I disorders at the same time. I’ve got no problem with someone dx’ing me borderline as long as they also are willing to treat my other issues, because there are some things that are big problems for me, mainly bipolar disorder and PTSD. The first half of 2006 was so traumatic for me that so far in this blog, I’ve just skirted around every mention of it. Well, it’s partly how traumatic it was, and partly because I know I’ll have to write some long, detailed posts about it, and I’ll have to set aside time for that.

Really, I don’t think most of us who are mentally interesting are prejudiced against people with BPD, we just desperately want to avoid the diagnosis ourselves, and with good reason, since the diagnosis virtually guarantees we’ll be insulted and mistreated by some of the “professionals” who are supposed to help us. This has the unfortunate side effect of making people with BPD feel like pariahs, since we so badly want to avoid either having BPD or being told that we do. I guess we should stop crowing about how glad we are that we haven’t been diagnosed with BPD if we don’t want to make other people feel like crap. Although I don’t really mean “we” there — I’m young, female, and a former self-injurer; of course there were some speculations that I have BPD.

And okay, if I ever decide that I agree with that suggestion and I am borderline, I will wear one of those T-shirts. No, I’m not kidding.

I might be less tolerant than I should of people whom I believe to be willfully manipulative, but I have thought that about very few people I know, and none of them carried a borderline diagnosis. I guess there are some borderlines who do fit the stereotype of being purposely manipulative, but I think most are just coping in the best ways they know how and other people misinterpret their actions. People who do have contempt for anybody with a BPD diagnosis — well, they shouldn’t. It’s disgusting to look down upon people with a different psychiatric label from yours, and it doesn’t help anybody.

Honestly, the part of my shirt I was so worried about? “PRINCESS.” Because if you’re going to go to the trouble of making a shirt that says you’re mentally ill, is it right to be so damn frivolous about it? It would be nice to make a shirt with a slogan that is serious and stigma-busting and actually wear it in public and actually teach people something. But I haven’t thought of one yet, and “BIPOLAR PRINCESS” amused me. (I couldn’t afford to buy enough packages of letters for “MANIC DEPRESSION HAS ITS UPS AND DOWNS.” That has six s’s and there were only two to a package.) The word “PRINCESS” just by itself could seem snobby and spoiled, which I’m not. Don’t get me wrong — I still don’t know if I’d ever wear a shirt that says “BIPOLAR” in public, but my “attention whore” comment referred more to the “PRINCESS” part. I don’t think it’s attention-whore-y when people make LJ icons that say “BIPOLAR PRINCESS,” so I don’t know if I worried about this because it was something I did offline, or just because it was me.

I also have very different standards for myself than I do for other people. I am very shy and usually try to avoid being the centre of attention. In the past, I have been accused of attention-seeking behaviour when I was doing nothing of the sort, and it really upset me. I also hate asking for help from anyone, even though I know that my frequent refusal to do so is just another weakness.

The really odd thing is that as I am sitting here typing this, I am wearing a T-shirt that says “WHAT WOULD FREUD DO?” on it. (It was a gift from a friend. I swear I don’t have a whole stack of psych-related T-shirts, just these two. No, wait, three. I’ve got one from a university psych department pub crawl.) I can guarantee you that most things Sigmund Freud would do, I would not do… but I wore this T-shirt in public today with absolutely no qualms about it.

Some brief thoughts, most about the Virginia Tech shootings. Most are interrelated, but some kind of aren’t.

• Postmortem diagnosis of someone you’ve never met is stupid and pointless. This doesn’t mean that I’m entirely uninterested in it (hey, I have a copy of Touched with Fire, too), but I doubt its usefulness.
• I’m a good Canadian girl and I like gun control. I am not very interested in discussing this point any further in general, and I’m certainly not interested in doing so right now.
• I am shocked and appalled that Virginia Tech didn’t lock down campus and cancel classes after the first shooting incident at 7 a.m. I have a hard time imagining that a university wouldn’t do that. It’s terrible. I know the police thought they had apprehended the perpetrator, but shouldn’t the university have done something more just in case there was more than one shooter or the police had the wrong guy, which just so happened to be the case? I disagree with a lot of things that one of the universities I attended has done, but I’m positive they would have cancelled classes and done a better job of warning people.
• It is fucking hard to be mentally ill in university, but I think that might have had surprisingly little to do with the Virginia Tech shootings. I’m crazy, I was really ill in university, and most of the treatment I received only made me worse. But I’ve never killed anyone. My mom thinks that better mental health treatment for university students could prevent further mass murders; I don’t necessarily agree. I do think that mental health on campus is a very serious problem, though, and solutions like threatening to kick me out of residence for cutting myself superficially don’t help anyone.
• People have talked about how the people around Cho should have reached out to him. It seems, though, that some people did reach out to Cho while he was at university. He merely ignored and brushed off any attempt at friendliness. It was pretty nice of people to try to talk to him at all, since he scared the shit out of plenty of other people. I like to think I’m a generally nice person, but if there was some guy who followed girls around and repeatedly sent them emails or whatever after they’d asked him to stop, and surreptitiously took photos of girls and blamed it on other guys, and ignored people who spoke to him, well, I don’t see that there’s any problem with me being too scared of him to try to “reach out” to him. (As a side note, one of the guys who raped me, I later found out, had a previous history of stalking other girls when he took classes at the local university. This was not at the same university I have referred to previously, we were not on campus when he raped me, and he was not even a student when he raped me… but he did later get a part time job on that campus, despite the previous complaints that he was a stalker.)
• I do think, however, that Cho really could have used some compassion when he was younger. Maybe if his peers and other people had been kinder to him in high school, or junior high school, or elementary school, it would have helped him and he wouldn’t have become the twisted person he eventually did become.
• Since I’m very fond of freedom of speech and freedom of expression, it doesn’t bother me that Cho Seung-Hui’s plays were violent, profane, and bizarre. It bothers me that they were poorly-written and pointless as well as being violent, profane, and bizarre. This is not me poking fun at bad writing; this is me writing badly myself as I fail utterly in my explanation of why I do agree that they were somewhat disturbing. Mainly I guess, they seemed like the kind of thing that someone who’s 23 should have moved way beyond.
• In theory, I have absolutely nothing against the idea of briefly hospitalizing someone involuntarily if she is judged to be in imminent danger of harming herself or others. In theory, I am all for this. In practice, sometimes it even saves lives… but other times it’s extremely damaging. I could go on and on about this, but since it wouldn’t fit into point form, I’ll have to get back to it another day.
• People are responsible for their actions unless they are so completely psychotic that they honestly can’t tell right from wrong. You know, the legal definition of insanity. This doesn’t happen all that often. I have been that way only once, and this one time where I had zero chance of controlling myself lasted only for minutes. I had been psychotic nearly constantly for several months at that point, but the actual insanity lasted only minutes.
• At that point, I snapped back to being 99% out of control. And at 99% out of control rather than 100%, you are responsible for your actions. At that point, it’s extremely difficult to talk yourself out of things you’re about to do, but it’s not impossible. At that point, psychosis is an explanation for your actions, but it’s not an excuse.
• I am generally harder on myself than I am on anyone else. Additionally, not being in anyone else’s head, I don’t know how I’d judge whether they were 99% or 100% out of control. But if I did have a way to judge that, I’d hold other people to the same standards of responsibility to which I hold myself.

This afternoon, I was talking to my mother. She’s been talking to an acquaintance who was recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and she’s been thinking about the Virginia Tech shootings, and she’s also getting worked up about the college mental health crisis. Specifically, she was talking about how irresponsible the psychiatrist at the student health centre at one of the universities I attended was, but since I don’t feel like getting into that right now, here’s something that’s at least tangentially related.

This is the non-story of how I could have gotten kicked out of my university residence merely for cutting myself. The residence life manager gave me the following letter on December 8, 1999:

Dear Polly,

Since January 1999 the residence staff, particularly [name of residence assistant], RA, have been working with you in trying to help you cope with the stresses that have been present in your life. I am aware that you have been seeking help from both Psychiatrists and Counsellors and I am very pleased to see you take the initiative in helping yourself through these difficult situations. However, I am also aware that there are still certain behaviours that you have engaged in both last semester and currently this semester that have me concerned. Firstly, I am concerned for your well being and safety, and secondly I am concerned for the well being of the community of [name of residence]. Examples of behaviours which are unacceptable in the residence community and have to stop immediately are:
• cutting yourself using razor blades or other means
• lying in the elevator or other common areas in a state of depression
• taking an overdose of medication

Polly, the intent of this letter is to put forth a contract that I feel must be adhered to for the well being of not only yourself, but the [name of residence] community as well. I encourage you to continue to obtain help from your Doctor and Counselling Services in order to be able to live by the guidelines as stated here in this contract and remain a resident of [name of residence].

Sincerely,
[name]
Residence Life Manager

Behavioural Contract
I understand the behaviours as set forth in this letter will not be tolerated in the residence community. I agree to abide by these terms and conditions and I am aware that any breach of the contract above will result in the termination of my Residence Agreement.

________________
(signature)

________________
(date)

I signed the contract because it seemed less humiliating than fighting against it would have been. I know I should have stood up for my rights, but I didn’t.

Did this contract help me? No, it did not. I don’t even think it helped the university. My very first thought upon reading the contract was how much I wanted to die. It made me realize that the residence life manager, who I used to confide in, did not actually care if I got better, she just wanted to keep me from disrupting everyone else’s lives. I never did lie on the floor of the elevator again, but I only did that once in the first place and I never would have done that again anyway because I realized how phenomenally stupid it was. I kept cutting, but I made sure to always wear long sleeves whenever I left my room. I stopped talking to the residence life manager and my RA about my problems.

I made it through the rest of the school year without being kicked out of residence. When I returned in the fall, I was told that I was expected to abide by the same contract. No, wait — they actually sent a letter to my home address telling me this. Luckily, I checked the mail that day and found the letter before anyone else in my family did. I don’t think my parents would have been mad at me, but I still would have been embarrassed to have them read it.

I still cut, and I still hid my self-injury from The Powers That Be in residence. TPTB found out about my near-fatal overdose in December of 2000, of course — you can’t really hide the near-fatal ones that land you in the hospital for three weeks — but they didn’t have to kick me out of residence because by that point, I had already told them that I planned to transfer to another university in January. And I did.

You can’t fire me, because I quit.