I feel for your daughter
@LV426 . Most of my attempts at social interaction in my teen years were disasters. I never went to a dance or a prom and was only involved in stuff by being on the AV crew in school (the archetypal nerd/geek). Hell, I only had one date in high school which ended with the girl leaving with someone else. I blamed myself. I spent a good deal of my time alone, until I met a girl in college at which point I became completely dependent (looking back, it was probably codependency) until she dumped me ... for a professor.
If you watch The Big Bang Theory, I can relate to Rajesh and the Lucy character played by
Kate Micucci. The fear of screwing things up always screws things up. My father suffered from what today might have been diagnosed as bipolar disorder, but then it was just "mental illness". He had a strong flight instinct to the point when things got too stressful he'd just leave. Many times we had no idea where he was or when he'd be back ... if he'd come back. Sometimes it was just hiding ... sometimes it was worse.
I look in the mirror some mornings and I see my father. It scares the s$%^$t out of me.
Don't knock isolation. I crave it sometimes. Life is so much easier without people. On the other hand loneliness is all it's cracked up to be. It's a conundrum.
Telling someone to "get over" something like SAD is like telling the late Robin Williams to "feel better." The deeply depressed person can't even really process that kind of a thought. That's the root hopelessness of the depressive spiral: That things just won't get better, and the victim feels powerless to change that.
BTW, I'd like to think I always tried to be that kind of attorney
Robin Williams was a tragic genius. Often time you find those who excel in their fields ... particularly the creative ones ... suffer from some form of anxiety or depression. I've read the statements from the family and while it would provide some sort of closure to blame his condition on a rare, but diagnosable and clinical condition, I don't buy it. Suicide is one of those things that you never really will have any answers to. I've had far too much experience in that regard.
The question of what to do about it is duplicitous. From the perspective of the sufferer, if you look for relief from the medical community, the first thing they do is chemical. Frankly I've never had any relief from anxiety medications, and I've tried them all. Of course others do find effective drug therapy (maybe the placebo effect, but that's just my cynical nature). From the perspective of those around the sufferer who do want to help, what do you do? I know that to them, it appears that nothing they do helps. They try ... they don't try, lay it on thick or use kid gloves. Perhaps the "get over yourself" or "you need to ..." comments are born of frustration, but they don't really understand that those kinds of things, while easy for them to dismiss, ring in the ears of the people they are hurting long after they've forgotten it.
I wish I had an easy fix, but if I did, I'd use it on me first.
BTW, some of my best friends are attorney's.