My daughter, age 14, has been literally collapsing in tears lately, sometimes for no reason, sometimes because of school "drama" [gossip], sometimes because of her appearance, sometimes because she "can't feel anything". She criticises herself constantly - I walked in on her annotating her face on the mirror with her lip pencil, pointing out everything wrong with it. She complains of nightmares about failing tests, although she's only failed one in the past six years (she resat it immediately the next day and got an A). She often doesn't get out of bed on weekends until around this time, and says that she isn't motivated to. She complains that she's lonely, but is "bored of talking to her friends". This morning, she asked me if it was normal to feel nothing but "extremes": "elation", "despair", and "nothing". She then went on a relievingly typical angsty rant about how she often doesn't feel anything, not even numbness.
I would put this down to mood swings, the fallout from all the behavioural tics she had before puberty, and an emotional personality. However, she has been acting like a textbook case of depression lately. It runs in both sides of the family - my husband, my sister, my father, and my father-in-law all had it, as did my grandmother, who committed suicide because of it - so I'm understandably a little panicked. Am I fretting too much, though?