Well, did you ever?
What a swell party this is. 
(I love this song. It’s from the musical High Society, by Cole Porter I think.)
I agree. Even if she does it for attention, please give her some. Perhaps, she doesn’t know how to ask for it.
I am glad that people take their time to give nice answers on these threads. This is a very hard thing to see nowadays, I think.
When I was a kid back in the '50s, we used to have some food delivered weekly by a local farmer. Every single week he’d have a horrible story to tell us . . . about a deadly accident he saw, a person missing half his face, conjoined twins, a dead dog on the side of the road, etc., etc, etc. It was always something he just saw, on the way to our house. My mother tried her best to change the subject, to no avail. Finally the guy died. I remember my mother saying “If there’s an afterlife, I’m sure he’s got lots of stories for when he gets there.”
My mother-in-law was like that … except the problem was she would never finish. She’d go on… and on… and on… and on… and it just never ended.
And it had jack to do with dementia for her - according to her family she’d been like that all her life. I’d buy that maybe she was depressed all that time, but not senile.
I don’t know why some people are like this.
What happens when a Debbie Downer meets another Debbie Downer? Are they both then happy to share and listen to each others stories? Because, in that case, the cure is simple: introduce such people to each other.
I do have some experience of this working, to a degree.
My dad, Daddy Downer, I think suffers from depression but doesn’t realize that’s what his problem is. He’s also a Mormon, which is relevant, because I just spoke to him the other day and he’s all down, kicking cans, about his Boy Wonder losing the election. Thankfully, he chose not to spew his racist vitriol at me. Instead, he told me that he’d volunteered to work the polls on election day (and cracked a great joke about being a “pole worker.”). He said that, out of the thousand or so people who came through there, he pissed off two people. (Actually, it sounded like he pissed one off and made some poor woman cry with his ascerbic, biting sarcasm.) I let him tell me about the two incidents and then I pointed out that, if a thousand people came through there and he only pissed off two of them, then 998 people liked him. He has a very dry, sarcastic sense of humor and probably half the people he encounters gets it and finds him funny. Everyone else just thinks he’s a rude dick.
He’s really beating himself up about the lady he made cry; the woman’s daughter came in later and ripped into him and made him feel like shit about it. (Good on her, sounds like he had it coming.) But also apologized profusely and asked the woman how he could make the situation right for her mom, for which I give him credit. He doesn’t mean to hurt people’s feelings, but when he does, he’s genuinely contrite about it.
So I kept emphasizing to him that he’d done the right thing: he’d apologized, he’d attempted to make it right, and in the end, you can’t satisfy everyone, you can’t always get everyone’s forgiveness when you’re a dick to them, and not everyone is gonna like you or think you’re funny. I continued to focus on the 998 people who gave him a laugh. I think he might have felt a bit better after talking to me, but I will not allow him to drag me down there into his pit of self-loathing with him. I’ll make my best efforts to try to pull him up outta there, but I also know that I can’t fix him or save him (or anyone else). What he needs are some good drugs and therapy, but he thinks Jesus and Joseph Smith are the One and True Only Answer™, so after a while, I just give him a chirpy, cheerful “Good talkin’ to ya!” and wander off to let him wallow in his own misery.
My brother does this and not only that he repeats the same depressing story. I swear to God, I’ve been hearing about the same tragic events for 30 years now. He also has a habit of spoling movie plots and talking during movies. I’m convinced these are linked somehow, but haven’t figured out the connection.
I’ve found they can’t get along, we have a couple of temporary workers like this - each one thinks the other is a miserable cow and don’t get that they’re looking in the mirror. I confess we have coupled them up a few times just to give everyone else break.
Why not try to one-up her? Start telling equally depressing stories – in fact, see if you can’t find ones that are even worse!
My 15-year-old daughter suffers from clinical depression, which has given me a new perspective on these things…
She seems to be depressed. What she chooses to talk about is probably a reflection of her own negative thoughts, and simply being told to keep her thoughts to herself sounds harsh and unfeeling. You can’t talk her out of being depressed, but you can listen to her and offer sympathy, then try to guide the conversation in a more positive or neutral direction.