Posted 11/3/2013 1:24 AM (GMT 0)
Hi. I'm a divorced mother of a 17 year old girl who has been in therapy for 18 months and was diagnosed via psychiatrist as suffering from depression and anxiety, for which he prescribed Zoloft. She has been previously diagnosed as ADD by her pediatrician and continues to take Adderall. She has also had issues with cutting herself during this time. She continues to see her therapist weekly. Recently she has become significantly more depressed and has gotten in trouble for skipping classes. Though no one treating her believes she is a danger to herself, I do believe she is devolving, and though she has days when she is "fine" her bad days are increasing. My intuition is that she is attached to her depression, both afraid of it and afraid of who she is without it. Whatever the reason, she is getting worse by the week. I'm really scared.
As background: she is in her senior year at the public school she has attended since kindergarten, and has been very interested in college, but worried that her grades from last year's depressive semester will affect her chances at her favorite. Within the last 4 weeks she has been skipping class after class, sending her grades into a spiral, suffering from heavy anxiety and depression. She has had one relapse in cutting that I know of. I've let her know that we can accommodate whatever she might feel she needs - not applying to college right now, taking some time off from school, taking a gap year, exploring additional therapy and DBT group therapy. She has insisted that she wants to stay on track. So at her request I had a meeting with her school administration and teachers, let them know of her diagnosis, and that her class skipping and missing assignments were owing to it. I asked them to help us help her make up as much missing work as possible, and they were accommodating. I also asked that they provide her an alternative to cutting a class (for which you receive detention) when she is feeling panicked or overwhelmed, and again they offered to let her go to the nurse's office to lie down, or to the school counselor's office. Just two days after this system was put into place, she left school to walk home for lunch, and felt she was too tired to go back. She did not call the school or me. The school did not know where she was. When she attempted to skip gym the next day by going to the nurse, she was given a hard time and told to "suck it up" and she became very upset, weeping, and was sent to a school psychologist I have never heard of, and who had never met E before. I received a call from the administrator informing me that it was their collective opinion she needed to be hospitalized immediately, and that she could not function any longer in school. I immediately met with her therapist who said they were absolutely wrong, that E would not even qualify for admission for in-patient as she would not meet the criteria, and that the school had badly overstepped in suggesting that to me and saying it to my daughter. The therapist will speak to the school on Monday but it now seems we have gone from cooperating to becoming adversarial. I am very afraid for my daughter who is a very smart, sweet, delightful girl. She's a straight arrow - no drugs or drinking and she's not yet had a boyfriend. We have a very close relationship. But I don't know how to help her now, and I don't know how to parent her. When she is depressed and digging her heels in about not going to school she can be very combative. I want to support her and be understanding. But I don't want to implicitly encourage her to keep testing the limits at school and ignoring the protocol we put in place for just those times. I'm afraid she's going to continue to get worse and withdraw. Four weeks ago I would have said she was fully functioning at school and home far more days than not. Now it is the opposite. I'm afraid that the stress of caring for her and the dread of each phone call from the school and the fear each morning of who I will find in her bed - okay E or depressed E. It seems to me this is a crucial time for many reasons. I think she is two different people right now and I can't help them both, but they seem bent on destroying each other. I am afraid being exhausted and filled with fear for her all the time will send me into my own depression. I would appreciate any advice you can give. Thank you so much.