My daughter is depressed & anxious & I don't know how to help her

In My Humble Opinion
41

“You shouldn’t be feeling this way, you’re a smart girl.”

God, I hate those words. I hate them because there’s not an ounce of malice behind them, and I feel bad that they don’t help. I hate them because hearing them is like asking for help and having a door shut in your face.

I told my father, at the height of my academic success, that I felt like I couldn’t bear the anxiety that plagued me day to day. That I was falling apart. He told me the above. I realized that, hard as it was for me to tell him that, it wasn’t enough. He wasn’t going to help. Maybe he couldn’t deal with my problems on top of his already stressful life. Maybe he just didn’t understand why people can’t feel the way they should.

I found other ways to cope. Deeply unhealthy ways, some of them dangerous. Now I have other problems. I’ve learned not to talk about them. If your daughter, who is not prone to histronics, tells you that something is hurting her, please listen. Find out what she feels she needs, then help her aquire it. You could be saving her.

42

BTW, seeing a doctor doesn’t automatically mean medication. Just take things one step at a time. And even if she does need them, it’s not an automatic death sentence. Depression, however, can be.
(I believe Craig Ferguson had a monologue about people who bash anti-depressants and those who need them.)

43

If your daughter is really suffering from depression, no amount of lecturing about “wallowing in negativity” and “self-indulgent pity parties” will help. Depression means she isn’t in control of her feelings - she is literally incapable of being happy. Insisting that she should be positive or upbeat will only make her feel worse.

You can think of depression as a condition that takes over one’s emotions and makes everything seem sad or pointless. Assuming your daughter really is clinically depressed, both of you need to understand that it’s the condition that is making her feel this way. For her, she should know that, with treatment, she can start feeling better. You should know that lecturing her won’t help, any more than it would help someone with a broken leg to tell him he should get up and walk because it shouldn’t be broken.

44

For someone with genuine clinical depression, SSRIs absolutely can be lifesaving.
That being said, I am definitely not a fan of labeling every negative mood someone has as “depression” and putting everyone on SSRIs at the drop of a hat (which is something I think happens a lot with family doctors, who often don’t have the time, interest, or training to thoroughly evaluate patients who come in with a mood disorder).
Anti-depressants lift clinically depressed people to a normal baseline. SSRIs don’t make people who aren’t truly depressed any happier, and like all other medications they do have side effects that could make someone who doesn’t need them feel worse instead of better. For depression caused by the situation the person is in or issues like body image/poor self confidence, counseling may very well be the better answer.

For that reason, if I were facing this situation, my first step would be to encourage her to be evaluated by a psychologist or psychiatrist who has the training to be able to ferret out if these emotions she are having are due to a true mental illness like depression or anxiety d/o, or if instead she would benefit from counseling about how to cope with situations she finds stressful/anxiety-inducing and how to think about herself in a more positive way.
Hope things get better soon.

45

I just wanted to say that I think astro is a good dad for being concerned about his daughter and wanting to help her any way he can. So many daughters and fathers don’t have relationships like this.

Kudos to you astro, here’s hoping she feels better soon and gets the help she needs.

46

You’re daughter is having typical problems but you didn’t tell her this. You should’ve pointed out what she’s going through is really what everyone else is going through too.

First of all does she have generalized anxiety disorder? Perhaps, there are meds that help with that. But meds are not an end all treatment. They only help you cope.

For instance, I was TERRIFIED to fly. I took Paxil and I was able to do so. Now Paxil didn’t change me in anyway, but it got rid of enough panic so I could get on the plane. The point is I still had to face my fears and suck it up. Paxil helped. Now I don’t need any meds at all to fly. It’s not my favourite thing, but I can do it.

I can’t tell you how much in life I missed out on because I was terrified to fly.

So meds aren’t bad, but you still need to learn to cope.

Your daughter has a nice life and there is a thing called self actualization. And the fact the stuff she fretts over point out she is self-actualized.

She may need a break, drop out of school for a semester, or better yet, take one semester and take only ONE class. (Some fear if they drop out of school even for one semester they won’t go back).

The have volunteer. This is great for young people. When you see people much worse off than you it puts a new light on your problems. For example if I told anyone about my life they’d be like “Wow Mark you have it really tough.” And I do, but you know what, there are a lot of people even worse off than me. That’s the thing about life, it can *always *get worse.

What this will do is give your daughter perspective

Now there is one thing about perspective that confuses people, they often think having perspective will solve their problems. You know it doesn’t.

Seeing paralyzed veterans, or children that are ill or elderly people that no one cares about anymore, doesn’t help me one bit to solving any of my problems. But it helps me cope.

In generalized anxiety one starts catastrophizing. For instance, you daughter may say “My nose isn’t right, the guy I like won’t like me, I’ll never fall in love, never find anyone…” Of course that’s not so, but it is what is happening.

I am a gay male, now I have a six pack. Would you believe one time a guy said to me, “You got a nice body, but I like washborad abs. If you can get washboard abs, then I’d like to go out with you.”

That’s the truth. I was like “Oh god, it’s not enough, not to be fat, it’s not enough to have a good body, it’s not even enough to have six pack abs, now you have to washboard abs?”

I had to actually laugh at this. But if I was younger without such life experience, I could see myself saying “Oh I better hit the gym even harder.”

What I would strongly recommend for your daughter is a mental health checkup. If she has insurance, make an appointment with a therapist. She’ll get a inital interview and they’ll be able to see if something’s wrong.

If she doesn’t contact your local county health department, they usually have sliding scale fees.

47

You had me at 5’ 11". Hubba hubba.

Sorry for the useless post. :frowning:

48

I thought you may be doing this. I couldn’t imagine posting that OP without getting the overwhelming response of ‘see a doctor or two’.

49

Please get her to see a licensed medical doctor. This is very important. The kind of depression you describe is very common and treatable. Look for a doctor that talks about a combination of anti-depressant drugs, exercise and talk therapy.

50

The short girls wish they had her height. My two best friends in HS were/are 5’11 and 6’. I’m 5’3. Their pants were always floods and I always had to hem my pants. They hated their height and were so self conscious about it and I could never understand this. They could see over the crowd and I could run like a terrier through the crowd. Make it work for you. Play to your strengths.

You cannot change your tallness so you might as well own it and wear it with confidence. Confidence is sexy.

Anyone who criticizes someone’s taste like that is a douche and is very insecure. If he is a mentor, I’d go find another mentor. A mentor should offer guidance and helpful commentments, not tear her down. However, life isn’t about rainbows and sunshine. She has to learn to deal with all personality types as well. You learn more from a bad boss than a good one.

[rant]

One more thing: EVERY WOMAN IS UNHAPPY WITH HER BODY IMAGE. If you were subjected to wafer-thin models in every magazine, wafer-thin actresses in every movie, wafer thin-singers singing in every video, wafer-thin TV news-barbiedolls ‘reading’ the news on every farking channel, Wafer-thin sport-twinkies reporting from the sidelines during halftime events and EVERYONE OF THEM LOOKS FANTASTIC IN THEIR CLOTHING YOU WOULD HAVE SELF ESTEEM ISSUES TOO.

The fashion industry feeds the dieting fad industry which feeds the cosmetic surgery industry which feeds the fashion industry. They message they all send is YOU ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH. The fashion mags/women’s mags ( 99% of them) HATE WOMEN and constantly reaffirm the negative shit ( fat thighes are BAD/ if you are not in a relationship you SUCK). I won’t even get into about Reality TV-whores. They reaffirm the absolute worst about our sex, men and humanity in general.
[/rant]

51

Good lord - what is it with people diagnosing clinical depression and recommending drugs on a message board? Seriously. It’s not just you, it’s a lot of people in this thread.

Yes, she might have clinical depression. She might have some other problem that doesn’t require drugs or mental therapy but rather than she make some changes in her life (a different mentor, a different job, something else).

Yes, it’s a bit hot button with me. Since I was laid off I’ve had any number of “helpful” people declare me depressed and recommend drugs. People, the problem isn’t me. Really, it’s not. The problem is I need a steady job that pays enough to live on. That’s it. That’s what I need, not drugs, not a therapist, not a “there, there, you poor dear” pat on the arm.

It really is true not every problem is solved by a pill.

We don’t know what’s really going on with the OP’s daughter other than that she is unhappy. She is unhappy enough that she should seek help, but deciding she needs medication is out of line for any of us here. Yes, it’s a possibility but it’s like telling someone with an upset tummy grumbling about it on a message board they need an appendectomy - you just don’t have enough information.

So please, let’s keep it to happy anecdotes and recommendation that she seek some advice in real life on what to do to improve her situation.

Um… I’m not. I’m quite happy with my body.

Then again, I watch almost no TV, never read “fashion magazines”, and generally avoid all that “your not good enough” crap as much as possible.

Admittedly, I’m an oddity among women.

52

I am not recommending drugs. I am recommending seeing a doctor. Depression is a deadly disease. I have lost friends to it. I have it. It is treatable.

53

There was one thing the OP mentioned that reads as a red flag to me; between full time school, a retail job and a dj-ing gig, his daughter is probably a little overwhelmed. Is there some way she can quit the retail job and find something on campus? Whenever I have had to take a stint in retail, I found the management was often very disrespectful of a student’s schedule, and was constantly pressuring the more responsible employees to pick up others’ slack. It was not a conducive job for studying, budgeting extra time, or taking off a day when you needed the extra time. On campus employment was always more flexible. That may be an option, and I would consider recommending that.

I deal with some level of depression and anxiety, and it is usually linked in my experience with having too much to do and too little time in which to do it. That may be something that the OP would like to pass on to his daughter.

54

Criticizing her for ‘wallowing in self pity’ probably didn’t help.

If she can be set up with a group therapy situation, that would probably help her. Let her find other people her age who have problems with anxiety, inferiority, fear of being labeled/judged, low self worth, etc. She can probably get some decent community and support out of that. Just being around people who know how terrified, inferior and inadequate she feels and who feel the same way can probably give her some strength she lacks.

Does she have any deep seated traumas in her past, or anything that went really, really wrong that she hasn’t addressed yet? If so, that could be contributing to the generalized anxiety.

There is medication and therapy, but there are also other things she can try on top of that. Better nutrition (B vitamins, magnesium, selenium, omega 3, etc), meditation exercises (mindfulness or compassion meditation will probably help with anxiety), etc.

55

That is fine. And I know depression can be fatal, I lost a sister to it and this year nearly twice lost a nephew to it. However, we do not know she has depression in the medical sense of the term. She may, as Brunhilda suggests, be over scheduled and overwhelmed, putting too much on her plate. That doesn’t require medical treatment to fix. In fact, treating it medically is likely to make no improvement at all, because that case would not be a medical problem.

She needs to be evaluated by someone who won’t reach for a bottle of pills as the first reaction. And I say that as someone who, at one point in my life, was stressed enough to require medication for a month. Putting someone on an anti-depressant means a psychiatric diagnosis, which can be an obstacle to many things in life and will restrict a persons options for things such as employment. Certainly, if such a medication is medically required it must be done, but only where and when necessary.

56

You should learn a technique called ‘empathetic listening’, or if you aren’t comfortable with it find someone who you think could offer it to your daughter.

Basically it consists of devoting 100% of your attention to someone (not multitasking, or getting caught in daydream, or thinking of anything other than the other person) and repeating back to them what they said and the emotions behind it.

If she feels other people empathize with her and listen to her, that sense of community might help her deal with her problems better. One of the biggest problems with setbacks is you feel like you are an isolated, flawed person and everyone else is looking to look down on you. So if you can offer her empathy and your full attention when she listens, she may respond better.

57

Outside of the military, where is mental health counseling a barrier to employment?

58

Aviation (not just pilots but also many support personnel, such as mechanics and air traffic controllers), over the road transportation, security, police, and some government work just off the top of my head. All of the above are barred to people who take anti-depressants or other mind/mood affecting medications (such as for bipolar or ADD) on a chronic basis. If you have a brief episode of treatment - say, one of your parents died and you had counseling for a couple months to deal with it - you can usually get away with it, but an official diagnosis of clinical depression and you are permanently out the door. Although not based in legalities, you can largely forget running for any form of public office if you have an official psychiatric diagnosis as well.

59

Yeah, but the solution to that problem is to address the discrimination, not to live in fear of a diagnosis. However you are right, there are going to be certain employment doors that are closed. But some doors are closed based on gender, age, race, religion, etc. too.

I wrote an article in the school paper about my bout with mental illness once, and still found a job after I graduated in a scientific field.

I don’t totally agree with the politics part. Politicians have affairs, drug problems and mental illnesses and still get elected.

60

I guess my run for Supreme Court Justice just ended.