To not want my daughter to go out with a boy?

[Yowey]

This particular boy is on anti-depressant tablets. I honestly feel deeply sorry for him, but i dont want my daugter getting too involved with someone with so many problems. I want her to let him down gently, as his problems may eventually become hers.
Adivice would be greatly appreciated.
Yowey.

Yowey, my first relationship was with (to be incredibly blunt) a really fucked up boy. I had just turned 17 (May) when we started dating, all of mine and his friends told me to leave him be but I didn't. His mother was an alcoholic, his father had a degenerative disease and was an angry fuck, his uncle was a hardcore scientologist and his grandmother was in the late stages of a degen disease (all of these were very very relevant to our 'relationship' btw!). In my case it didn't end so well.

After a year I realised the effect he was having on me, bringing me down, making me lose all of my friends, refusing to let me study so I was therefore failing all of my subjects, refused to let me go home even really, went home for one night a week and even that was a hard deal. He was very depressed as well even though he at first said he wasn't, I was constantly comforting him, and he emotionally blackmailed me into having sex with him most of the time, though I didn't realise what exactly he was doing at the time I knew that I didn't want it.

I tried to break it off with him after Christmas but he threatened suicide that time. Second time was my 18th birthday, he turned up at my house at midnight and was a jerk to my entire family, tried to break it off with him then, threatened suicide again but I refused to go with it, then he refused to leave me alone, wating outside of my college for me, turning up at my house and sitting in his car outside for hours on end, pretty much stalking me. I got back with him just to shut him up and also because I had no friends left. I ended up finally leaving him after 18months of it, I was pretty much ready to kill myself just to be out of the relationship by that point.

He ruined my life, my confidence, my relationships with others, my chances to go to a decent university, my dreams and ideas for the future, etc.

Thing is, I never listened to my Mum. I refused too and she pushed me away somewhat by trying to intervene. I had to make my own mistake that time and I learnt a lot from it. This Christmas would be two years since I broke up with him and my life has changed completely. I still have relationship issues, I still have flashbacks of him forcing himself on me when I'm trying to get intimate with my OH and I'm still screwed over by it, but I've moved on with my life, am finally doing what I want to do and am with a really lovely guy who cares for me like he should. If I never made that mistake with my first boyfriend I never would be where I am today, and I just would have made that mistake later, and possibly with very different results. I dated a few times last year but I just couldn't stick with them, then in October I started seeing a guy and we had to go long distance due to work commitments and I feel ready to have a proper relationship with him come Christmas when we both will start working together

Your daughter has to make her own judgements on this and all you can do is stay by her side no matter what she says to you (because I know that I was quite horrible to my Mum during that time!) and let her make her own mistakes. If it weren't for my Mum I wouldn't be where I am now, she realy did stick by me in her annoying, Mum-like way ;)

Sorry for the rant, I just wanted to give you a bit of detail, it's still fresh in my mind obviously and sometimes I need to get it out

I think what barnsleybelle and maggievirgo said is right. Totally agree that it can drain any adult person to have to constantly support a depressed person, so for a teeenager even more so.

If she decides to, maybe let her see him with your 'blessing', then when it runs its natural course & comes to an end you & she are still friends.

If she doesn't really want to see him, i think better to let him down now, even though he may be hurt, than do it later when he may well have got himself much more emotionally attached to her.

Oh, I missed your point about her being unsure, tell her to give it a while before she decides, if she still wants to try having a relationship then she can go ahead obviously

My best friend is a guy and I 'met' (got to know him lol) him in college, I love him to bits and he's coming to visit me today actually! Nothing wrong with having a best friend who's a guy, I get along better with guys than I do girls actually

I speak as a mother of someone who was on ADs at a similar age. All I can say is that we were told by the therapist, that many teenage boys of this age are prescribed ADs and with the right therapy and support, are able to come off and don't look back. apparently it has something to do with the way boys brains and hormone levels change during puberty. Sometimes they become more susceptible to depression as a result. I can only speak from experience, but certainly for my DC, though there was a clear trigger for what happened, it is true to say that having ADs and therapy were a godsend. DC came off ADs after 10 months,therapy continued for a total of 15 months. DC has held down a responsible job for a year and has now earned a place at a top uni. I am not saying we don't or won't ever be concerned about DC suffering another depressive episode, but the further away we get from the original one, the less we worry. Certainly, during the last couple of years DC has matured and I would like to think that the depression is truly in the past and will remain there.

Sorry, not much help for your question, but I thought you might like to hear from the parent on the other side of the fence as it were.

Bye mumsnet
and thankyou sayithowitis for the varying view.

yowey YANBU to not won't you DD to go out with his boy. But as they are both 17 YABU to try and stop her. She is old enough to make her own decision.

This OP and subsequent posts has made me feel extremely sad. I am on anti-depressants so you probably wouldn't want to associate with me either in case i dragged you down with me .

I do understand, she is your DD and you don't want her getting hurt. You say that she feels she should stay with him because she doesn't want to hurt him - not a good idea - but all you can do is advise. My DD has had some awful boyfriends, but thankfully she worked this out for herself and is now with a lovely guy, she lives with him and he is good for her (she is 19).

You can be prescribed anti-depressants for pain, i know someone who was given them for chronic headache. I also was going to be put on them once for heart palpitations but they cleared up by themselves and i didn't need them. I am on ADs for anxiety and PND(I have a DD2 who is four - i haven't had PND for 19years thank God )

I think Imaynotbeperfect that the use of ADs in the case of a teenage boy would be more worrying than the same treatment for a grown woman. Let's face it, not many adults get through their lives without ADs at some point. The amount of stress you're placed under as an adult is more severe than you realise when you're young.

It may not be ideal, but as the mother of a girl, I'd be worried if dd's new beau was on ADs because of the potential for him being depressed and possibly dragging her down or using her as a crutch. The thought of emotional blackmail would also spring into my head, though that would be the result of my fervent imagination. I think that we all want a perfect start for our girls (and boys) relationship wise, even though we know there's little chance of the first relationship being their main relationship.

I don't think the OP is intending to judge the poor lad, she's just worried for her own girl and I think anyone would be in the same circumstances.

Unfortuately people have to learn by their own experiences and mistakes-it is very hard as a mother.

squilly, do you really think that? That most adults take ADs? Heavens, id not thought of it that way really, but i guess you are right, i know of several women and men who have taken them and the only people who have "come clean" to me about it are people i have spoken to about taking them myself. I'm not sure what that says really - i wonder if they are prescribed too much?

I wonder what ADs this boy is on though, most adults i guess with depression/anxiety issues are given prozac type drugs, these are so not recommended for teenagers as it is known to increase the risk of suicide in this age group. Quite scary when you think about it.

I do think that ADs are widely prescribed these days. I had a couple of weeks on them when dd was around 12 months. They were prescribed for bad PMT, according to my doc, but they were also for late PND.

They actually scared me, so I wasn't on them long. I lost all sense of panic, which sounds great, but when you're late for work and you're thinking, ah, what the hell? It's not so good.

I know a good section of my friends have been prescribed them at various times.

Women are particularly vulnerable to huge anxiety, when you think about what we go through with conception, childbirth and then parenting. I'm often surprised we get through it at all the amount of worrying we tend to do as involved parents these days.

I think that mental illness covers such a wide spectrum that anyone who has no empathy with sufferers is foolish and short-sighted. The fact is that during our lives most of us will suffer some form of depression or mental illness. Things like bereavement, money worries, lack of job security, they can all push us over the edge at times.

I am not ashamed to admit that I had a degree of mental illness when dd was younger, but as you say, perhaps that's cos I'm at the other end of the tunnel now.

It is a scary thought, but the world we live in is full of anxiety and our increased education and access to media makes it more perplexing and worrying than ever.

Thank God they no longer judge women as feeble minded for suffering from PND and that depression in general is addressed rather than ignored.

Squilly, if you read my earlier post, you will see that we were told that a large percentage of teenage boys go through similar experiences. Apparently it is to do with the various chemical levels in their bodies during adolescence. When our DC was going through it, we discovered that a number of friends and acquaintances also had Dcs that had been through similar. Without exception, all the young people concerned are now off ADs, out of therapy and moving on with their lives in a very positive way. Several of them have been/are about to go to uni, most of them have been in employment, either part time whilst studying, or during gap years, or having finished uni.

You might be interested to know that when my DC went for the interview at uni, they were told the same thing by the interviewer as we were by the psychiatrist re adolescent boys and depression. And given the high numbers of applications for places Dcs honesty about recent (at the time)depression was not a barrier to being offered a place at every university Dc had applied to.

I am not saying that sometimes, a teenager on ADs won't 'drag their girlfriend down', but it is certainly not my experience or that of many others I know whose sons have been in the same, sad situation.

Hi Sayit.

I'm sorry to hear that you've been through this with your dc. I appreciate that ignorance breeds fear with this illness.

Not knowing much about teen depression means that you tend to put up the barriers.

I think, as well, that we tend to be over-protective of our girls when it comes to relationships because the cost of a bad one can be so major.

Your message has informed me, so hopefully I wouldn't be so quick to put up the barriers in future.