Are you feeling severely depressed or suicidal?

If you - or someone you know - are having thoughts about suicide, we urge you to contact a Crisis or Distress Center.
  • If you live in the US, call 1.800.SUICIDE (784-2433). Calls are connected to a certified crisis center nearest the caller's location. Services are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
  • If you are outside the U.S., look up Crisis Centers or Distress Centers in your phone book. In most aras, listings for such Centers can be found in the front pages of the book or as listings under a local hospital.
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. Dystonia 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 dystonia can induce severe depression.

If you feel that you can not wait to see your doctor, we urge you to contact a crisis center and talk to someone before doing something irreversible. If you are in the US, call 1-800-SUICIDE (800-784-2433). You will be connected to a certified crisis center near you. If you are outside the U.S., look up Crisis Centers or Distress Centers in your phone book. In most aras, listings for such Centers can be found in the front pages of the book or as listings under a local hospital.

While no one can "know" or completely understand another person's mental or physical pain, the Dystonia bulletin board group is made up of people who, collectively, have experienced pretty well everything that dystonia 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. An anonymous 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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