I spent about 2-3 months overdosing every day on Tylenol, ibuprofen, and aspirin. I was miserable. Yeah, I felt like I deserved it (still do even though I haven't taken any in about a month), but it's truly awful. I was exhausted, I was constantly nauseous, I am normally a very active person and I could hardly stand 5 minutes of walking. I would frequently spend hours so nauseous but unable to throw up, and when I finally did it was just green bile. The nausea would wake me up out of my sleep. My bowel habits were fucked and my poop looked off. The worst was the severe anxiety that bordered on paranoia and hallucinations. I've been fucked in the head my whole life and the rock bottom I experienced, most likely from the aspirin (a secret side effect of aspirin and Tylenol overdoses can be anxiety/paranoia) was hell beyond works. I felt like I was going to implode mentally. I have been through hell and back my whole life but that day was by far the worst I've ever had. I was honestly probably only about 9 months away from death if I kept it up. To be fair, I was doing this in conjunction with severe food restriction and severe dehydration, but I know some of the symptoms were related to the medications alone. If I'm honest, I'll probably start doing it again at some point because my feelings of self worth are beyond abysmal, but I'm warning you it is awful.
It's not like cutting. When you cut you receive instant release and when you are done you stop and clean up and for the most part it's over. Overdosing is slow, you get angry if you don't see the results fast enough because it isn't an intense pain like cutting, it's like a slow boil. It's aches and exhaustion, not stinging and warm blood. And when the intensity hits after hours, days, weeks, you may not even be in the mindset to self harm anymore, but the damage has already been done. There is no stopping when it starts to feel too much, because by that point it's already reached peak serum levels in the blood. If you regret it, you're shit out of luck and have to wait. And when you are anxious to all hell and need immediate release, this is not going to give it to you. Slow self harm does not have the same effect that you're used to. Even in the midst of it I would still crave cutting when I needed immediate release.
Eventually you won't be able to hide it, especially if your liver gets damaged. Once your liver is bad enough, you'll turn yellow (jaundice), your stomach may bloat severely due to fluid buildup in the abdominal cavity, you'll have horrible smelling yellow poop. You'll be in severe abdominal pain. Eventually, end stage liver failure can cause delirium and hallucinations before you slip into a coma, you may not be in control of yourself anymore. If you end up in kidney failure, you will not be producing adequate urine and may begin to swell from fluid retention, I've heard kidney failure can be painful. You may get kidney stones, which are notoriously worse than child birth on the pain scale. This may also cause toxins to build up in the body and lead to neurological symptoms. You may get both liver and kidney damage, then it's double to fun. It's not pretty in the end stages. And even as a self harmer, the pain may be more than you can bear. And because these two organs are what process pain medications, they may not be able to give you adequate pain killers to relieve the symptoms while you die because it wouldn't be safe.
As far as using it as a slow method of CTB to bypass SI, you're in it for the long haul. Severely dehydrated, hardly eating, abusing OTC painkillers, laxatives, and prescription heart meds, and my blood work still came back near normal for all things related to it. The human body is incredibly resilient. By slow CTB, we're talking months to years and it fucking hurts. I had/have the same thought process, so I get it, but don't expect a few weeks and it's over.
I wouldn't recommend this.
