My wife and I have raised an academically gifted son that has just graduated from High School. I've read countless posts about people who suffer from depression and fellow parents who have witnessed depressive demeanors of their child. My wife and I both understand that some children are simply not outward, or yearning for the acceptance of others and are content with being by themselves.
In order to get achieve a full understand of him, I think it would be appropriate to start from his 7th grade in middle school. As a lot of incidents begin, with a tragic accident in the family. His mum broke her back and a month later suffered a near fatal stroke, during this entire period I never saw him cry once, never show any sign of emotion. He was as emotionally uninvolved as anyone could be. I thought it was the simple answer that he wasn't fully understanding the situation, or was trying to block it out. So I tried speaking with him expecting to get nowhere, but it turns out that he was probably clearer with the entire thing than I was.
Due to only having myself around the house for about two years, he was unable to continue playing soccer due to the fact that we lived too far away from his only friend on the team. From this point on, I feel as though he became very secluded, he had always been quiet but this just made it deafening. He developed an interest in playing online games which lasted up until about 10th grade, which he voluntarily stopped after my wife and I continuously tried to make him stop playing. He never had many friends to begin with, well friends that came over to the house. He would speak of people at school that he was sociable with. They never came here, he never went there.
During his first years of high school, this trend continued with the exception of two people, a boy and a girl, who he would sparingly meet outside of school. I have a strong inkling that he was in fact 'in love' with the girl, though he will never admit it. My wife and I thought that it was alright to let him to continue to interact with her despite his clear infatuation, because having friends its healthy. He was constantly irritable, and is incredibly sarcastic. And in recent years has developed a knack for manipulation.
He is very aware of himself, and he knows he doesn't have many friends. He doesn't have a very high opinion of himself, but that doesn't seem to bother him. He has absolutely no interest in other people, yet he constantly has a girlfriend. Each one is absolutely polar of the previous one, they're all attractive girls and don't stand up to his level of intelligence. He wraps them around his finger, yet he feels no affection for them. He is much better now about opening up to my wife and I, and in these rare moments, we feel like we have a clear vision of what is going on in his brain. Within these moments, I am absolutely terrified of the person he is becoming and he feels the same way. Sometimes I feel like he is too smart for his own good. And I know every child feels as though their child is the smartest child in the world, but his grades aren't perfect, yet he exemplifies such perfect presentation in his conversation and his presentation of himself, it's scintillating, it's really not a wonder he tricks girls into loving him.
Hello Tartar and welcome to My Depression Connection
You have given us lots to respond to and I hope I can write a worthy response for you. Please know that I am not a therapist but I am a mother of two teen-age sons and I understand depression well because I suffer from it. I also worked in the mental health field for quite some time.
Now...you are writing on a depression site about your son but it is not yet known if in fact this is depression you are seeing. I am not a clinician but my instinct says that number one... if you are worried then there just may be something here to look at and...my gut also says this may be something beyond depression and possibly is an issue with your son's personality. But this is just my personal opinion based on what you write here. I have never met your son so an honest appraisal of what may be going on has to be done by a therapist or mental health clinician.
Being gifted seems important to both you and your family. Is this important to your son? I have seen many gifted people and including persons within my own family and one thing I can say is that everyone is different and that intelligence and giftedness only go so far. Sometimes it seems there is a price to pay with gaps in other areas and especially social and emotional skills.
What is your greatest worry for your son? What do you fear will happen when he goes to college? You have portrayed him as someone who appears on the surface to be detached from his feelings and aloof to others. You have used the terms "uncaring" and "manipulative." As far as depression symptoms...is he eating okay? sleeping okay? Does he complain of feeling sad or depressed? Is he agitated or showing signs of anger? Has any of this affected his grades?
You may want to write down the behaviors you are seeing and if they are generalized to all people or just some. Does he show care in other ways? Does he take care of a pet for example or...show care for a relative or sibling?
Do you have any autism spectrum disorders in your family including Asperger's Syndrome, personality disorders, or depression? Sometimes traits or even disorders are inherited.
My best recommendation is that if you are worried about your son to maybe take him to see a mental health professional for some guidance. But would your son go?
Always listen to your gut. If you feel something is not right...it probably isn't. Parents know their children very well.
What do you think is causing you to write here on this site for help? What worries you the most?
Thank you for the welcome Merely Me, we both understand and appreciate your contributions and thank you for asking questions that didn't come to mind.
As far as we can tell his intelligence is one of his top priorities, though it doesn't exemplify directly in school work and in grades (Not that they are bad by any standard). He has his own interests and when he thinks something is interesting, he finds out everything he can about it to the point where if there was any mystery in how it worked, he could tell you everything about it and how to make it better. In a lot of areas he has absolutely no interest in learning about them more than a superficial grasp. With that said though, due to his argumentative nature, as with anything there is more than one side and he researches how and why his way is better, and why the other way may be wrong. Being right is more important to him, so with that all said, he values it considerably. It is one of his defining characteristics.
Our greatest worry for him is that in University he will struggle to have a stable connection with anyone. Though he rarely communicates with any of his peers, at home here he has my wife and I and his brother for when he actually feels like he does need some human connection. His nature will only to try to use people for things he wants. Despite him having a phenomenal amount of patience in most regards, he has instant reactions to some things that set him off, especially after being 'bothered' too much (Bothered meaning being around other people, a typical phrase by him). He says that he is passive aggressive and on several occasions completely over-reacts and is actually quite frightening.
Depression symptom wise, his eating habits are very good, and eats quite healthy. He thoroughly enjoys working out and has read up on diet and takes vitamins and the works. Although on occasion he doesn't eat much, but it doesn't appear to link when he has a bad phase. He has since middle school, slept for incredibly amounts of time, and always wakes up still tired. If he isn't awoken by something he can sleep for 16+ hours. Then other days, he looks as if he got about 2 hours of sleep, yet he still has the same amount of fatigue, not worse, not better. He has not spoken with us about feeling depressed, though we have had several discussions about it. He says he might of been depressed years ago, but thinks it also just might of been the teenage hormones. As previously touched on, he can have a fierce anger. For people around him, he suppresses his agitation and either subtly insults them with his sarcasm or he annoys them until they break. Though all of this he does with a smile on his face. He has spoken about sometimes getting so mad he feels blood rush around his body and feeling instant sweat and having feelings of maliciousness. He says that in his mind he plays out how he would feel better by putting them down verbally, rarely is it ever physical. His grades only suffer when he has a problem with not understanding the purpose of why he is learning something. That is the difference between making an A or making a B/C. He never used to study, this was his first year studying really. For his I.B. exams he actually got one of the best girls in his class to tutor him for something in calculus.
We have both a dog and a cat, and he says the worst things to our dog. Though he never yells at her, if she were actually a human, the things he has said to her would completely shatter her emotionally and would of developed a mental condition without a hesitance in my mind. But she is old now, and forgets things, and is rather annoying, and everyone of us does get annoyed with her but he takes it to the next level. He does show care for her though and lets her out in the mornings and gives her treats. However, our cat, he absolutely adores. Our old cat used to sleep with him at nighttime, and he used to let the old cat drink out of his cup. He would let our new cat do the same, but she hasn't quite warmed up to anyone yet to that point. He would do anything for his older brother, he feels bad due to his brothers lake of ambition in life and fears a burden that he may be responsible for him financially. Though this fear doesn't seem to bother him, it's just an issue he has realized.
Every single girl he every has ever dated, he has shown the most amount of compassion and care that anyone could ever do. But he secretly despised doing it, he only did it in order to make them happy, which in the short term makes him happy. He slowly reveals himself a little bit for being the person he is, and some girls still stick around thinking it's an exaggeration and some split at that point. He shows my wife the most amount of patience that anyone could ever have, especially during her recovery. Considering what can happen when he is pushed too far, what he has held back is worth mentioning. She has been slow to re-learn things, and has just gone back to college and he helped her learn the classes shes taking. Parts of her logic aren't as pristine as the rest of us and she tells me that she can tell hes getting annoyed but it never affects him around her. As for myself, I tend to have an explosive attitude towards things also I hate to admit. Part of this entire ordeal is that I fear he may have developed who hes is because of my example.
His older brother was in fact diagnosed with a bipolar disorder, and I'm fairly certain my mother would of been diagnosed with bipolar also. Although I have never gotten myself checked out, my wife tells me that I very well could be bipolar also, although she says I control it well. Which I don't have an opinion on really, this isn't about me, it's my son.
I don't know if him going would be the problem. He would go with the idea that someone can't tell him anything about him that he already doesn't know.
What's causing us to write here is because it seems to us that his 'phases' aren't just a phase in his life it is appearing to be. I'm afraid that I might of been a cause of this, and that we didn't do something about it earlier. We're afraid that he's going to turn into someone that nobody wants to be around. Nobody wants to watch their child turn into someone that is detrimental to his own emotional health, if that's what the case is.