Difficult situation: Mate with depression, and I'm moving away

[-thesolitaryone-]

My best mate has depression, and every couple of months something triggers it to get really severe. This time it was painful sunburn on the back of her legs, which to most is just a fact of life in Australia, but demonstrates the severity of the situation.

She has all the symptoms; always wanting to be alone, thinking all her mates except me hate her (she's living with two of our mates, Mel and Joe, but has it in her head they hate her, which is untrue; they just dont know how to help the situation), sporadic bouts of crying for no reason, believing her life is going nowhere, feeling overweight etc etc. I'm sure you are aware of the rest.

She has had a very rough upbringing; her father was involved in drugs and her parents got divorced when she was 10, and that's just the start of it.

Despite being an intelligent girl, she chose the soft option in high school but doing non-TEE, and therefore cutting off any chance of going to university.

She's been working at a cafe full time for years, and is in about $12,000 worth of debt.

She's also started to go down a bad road; doing marijuana almost every day, chain smoking, and becoming a recreational user of LSD/Ecstasy/whatever she can get her hands on at the time. This would just make the problem 100 times worse, but she wont stop as to her it alleviates the bad feelings for a time. SHe's gotten herself into a hideous cycle.

Worst of all: She realises she had depression, but she doesn't think she should do anything about it. She can't afford therapy, and believes it will eventually just go away.

The fact is, that in a few weeks I'm moving to the other side of the country to study and persue politics, and I don't know how she is going to cope.

I want to help her, but I'm not one who can understand; I've had the nuclear childhood; the hardest drug I've done is pot, and that's about half a dozen times in my life; and I have a very "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" ideology (hell, I'm a member of the Liberal Party). I find it hard to understand because, as bad as it sounds, I've had everything she's wanting in life.

We've been best mates for 9 years. I just want to be able to help her help herself.

-thesolitaryone-

[Concrete Angel]

Hi Ashleigh,

I'm really sorry about your friend. It's going to be really hard to get through to her that doing drugs and smoking isn't going to help her situation, now that she's addicted to it, and to top it all of, she's in debt.
But, as a friend, you should try doing anything in your power to help her. Do you think she could take some kind of loan from the bank, or something? You need to talk to her, and tell a trusted adult, to help you and her, since, after all, you're moving.
It's going to be really tough, but it's not impossible. If you're her best mate, she'll listen to you. It's seems like you're her real hope!
I'm really not sure what else I can say, sorry!
But I hope things get better!!!
x