Anyway. Does childhood depression manifest as anger like this? Sound familiar to anyone? I feel pretty despairing about her.
It sounds depression-ish. Anger/homicidal ideation is certainly a symptom of depression. Bipolar II is the overdiagnosed fake bipolar in my BIL's psych opinion, but that's generally tied into limited education more than anything else.
Diagnoses aren't that useful, because the DSM changes all the time for random reasons. I haven't checked out the DSM-V yet.
Isn't depression supposed to occur in all domains, home, school, social, etc., rather than just one?
The threatening self-harm is pretty much unacceptable behavior, but my clients do it all the time.
An nice explanation to them that if they are actually threatening to harm themselves, I have no qualms about getting them committed to a nice psych vacation usually works to make them admit that they aren't serious. If they're cutting or branding themselves with a hot iron, I generally don't care (cutters are just annoying), but if they are actually expressing an interest in killing themselves (or others), that's different.
It sounds like she needs some life coping skills.
As one of our local neuropsychs says, depression *is* biological, but unlike traumatic brain injury, you can recover from it with treatment. He apparently thinks of it as temporary TBI.
A Neuropsych eval might be helpful, too.
