Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional And now...tell me about your kid with depression

I don't know how much is her venting frustration from not being challenged at school, or depression, or any other issues, but from a specific 'Transforming the Difficult Child' approach, you wouldn't expect to see a change in her until you can pull off getting in the habit of feeding her energy when things are going well. She needs to get energy from somewhere, so by not having a tantrum yourself you are making getting energy from acting out less appealing, but still it has to get replaced by the habit of feeding energy when things are going well. This is, for me, why 'The Explosive Child' just didn't help a lot. OK, I've stopped putting my finger in the electric socket, but what SHOULD I be doing instead? The answer is to work your butt off finding small but sincere, provable things to praise.
Weird thing is that you don't actually have to say the things aloud. Just by retraining your mind to notice when things are going well or at least neutral, you change on a subtle level that invites DD to change along with you.

((shrugs and more shrugs))
Grinity

I have noticed with my son that he seems more likely to get depressed when he doesn't get enough sleep and he seems to need more sleep when he is going through growth spurts. When he is sleep deprived the daily problems with our very slow internet really upset him. Not being able to get on message boards or do our online homeschooling when we want to is hard and the isolation he feels living in a small town where he does not fit in gets to him. Boys like him who are smart and do musical theater are looked at as possibly gay. People who are gay are shunned and kicked out of church and homeschool groups here. He also finds it harder to deal with wearing his painful brace for 14 hours a day and not being able to do fun things like other kids can. What I find interesting is that he is not depressed all the time because of what he is going through. I know I would have been at his age. I also find it interesting that when he is in public he can turn off his emotions. I think he learned this in acting classes. He can hold his emotions until he is at home and if he lets them out at home he apologizes and worries that I won't like him any more.

I know I get very depressed when I am sleep deprived and sometimes it doesn't have anything to do with the number of hours I am in bed. When I have a lot of things to worry about, I can't turn off my mind. My son is the same way. For example when I stayed up until 3 a.m. with my son to offer moral support while he wore his brace and then got up early for weeks to fix meals for my dad after he had knee replacement surgery wore me down and turned me into a depressed, emotionally drained mess--but I got through it and I will get through it when he has surgery on the other knee. I will watch my dad go through a lot of pain and then go home and make sure my son wears his brace so that he doesn't have to go through a surgery that is even worse than knee replacement surgery. Because I can't seem to learn the turning off the emotions thing that my son is able to do I will probably yell at him and then apologize and feel horrible and have even more difficulty sleeping.

Update: we had a 3-hour eval this morning. DD was seen by two different psychiatrists and filled out some forms; we were extensively interviewed and filled out some forms as well. She received a primary dx of anxiety, and they think there are some depression symptoms as well. Both doctors felt strongly that she is not on the spectrum, though they did not actually do a formal eval for that (they did ask a lot of questions related to it, however). They did not recommend medicating yet but did recommend cognitive-behavioral therapy for anxiety and OT (for sensory stuff). So that was interesting. Their feeling was that DD's explosive outbursts are a result of anxiety building up.

I feel sort of...blank? In a way I feel like we went and told them she was anxious and depressed, and they told us she was anxious and depressed. So, you know. When she spoke to them alone, she apparently talked a lot about her brother and about the girls at school who she says are bullying her.

Blank is a normal result from meeting with psychiatrists.

I think that's because anxiety and depression are generally diagnosed with self-reported symptoms.

You get some really odd symptoms in depression world such as pseudodementia and panic attacks in anxiety world, but for the most part, you're just looking at the DSM-IV-TR criteria, which are subjective.

Are her explosive outbursts the worst symptom that she's showing?

Well, they are the most dramatic and hard to deal with, but also she is very irritable and has a very short fuse and says a lot of negative and upsetting things.

That is sort of the way it works, but OTOH, there have been times when folks from this field have heard DH and I out, and said 'No Pathology here - just a normal cranky teen.'

I'm new to the boards and finding them very helpful. My DS, nine, was also recently diagnosed with depression and anxiety, which appears to have been triggered by bullying. It took us months to realize how bad the depression was because he acted angry and irritable, not sad. He was beating up his sisters and blew up any time we asked him to do something he didn't want to do. He was also self-harming by pinching, scratching, choking, etc. himself. It has been extremely difficult for our family but things are slowly getting better. Hang in there.

I recall that one of my girlfriends in college had a problem with depression when she was a kid.

I think her parents dealt with it by getting her really involved in an activity that she enjoyed. I think it hit her around 8 or 9.

My DD8 3rd grade has gotten crankier over the last couple of months and has been saying some things about school. I've tried talking to the teacher with mixed results (some over defensiveness, some dismissing) but DD is getting more verbal about some of the bullying issues and more insistant. She's gone from cranky to blaaaah and then acting scared to meet new kids. She got sick several days ago and has been home and talking more. I gave her a notebook to make a list of the stuff that's been happening and I'm sorry to say it's worse than I realized.

It's such a shame what "different" or more intense/emotional kids have to go through in school. There's always been bullying of some kind but there is a different twist to it these days and unfortunately sometime supported by the school through indifference or whatever the case.

Ultramarina,

Kudos to you for getting her in to see the psych. Too many people are in denial that kids can have very real psychological issues that need professional intervention. It's odd because if they have a physical problem, we are right there taking them to see a doctor, but psychological problems still have a stigma.

Cognitive behavioral therapy can be really helpful. The psych will usually teach some techniques to help her stay calm and stop the harmful self-talk that is probably going on inside her head. Sometimes if can be as simple as breathing exercises, meditating, tapping on pressure points or taking automatic negative thoughts (ANTS) and replacing them with positive statements. Sometimes those angry rages come from a very real fear that the world is out of control and one of the best antidotes for that is very calm parents who can reassure that they are there no matter what. (Not matter what she does, she can't drive you away.) It sounds like you have already figured that out, which I'm sure is helping a lot.

Lastly, I recommend the book "The Highly Sensitive Child." I saw some other posters recommended books, too. I haven't read those, but the HSC was very helpful to us when my younger DD went through some similar issues. She was younger, but the very scary rages happened daily to the point where I was afraid to leave the house with her because I never knew what was going to set her off. No matter what I said or did (comforting, punishing, ignoring, etc) helped. Fortunately, things are much better now and the start for us was exactly what your psych suggested- behavior therapy.

Here's a link:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Highly-Se...ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1337048606&sr=8-1

Good luck with your dd. It sounds like she has a great mom.