Hi all,

I'm new to the community, and I joined primarily to help out my friend. She suffers from very powerful anxiety and I've been trying to help her through it. The problem is, it tends to come in episodes we call "spirals", where she has an anxious thought, suffers from more anxiety because of that anxious thought, gets more anxious because of the new anxiety, and it goes on until she's completely fallen apart. We're online friends, and it breaks my heart every time I see my talented, intelligent, kind friend call herself horrible things that I can tell simply aren't true. I've suggested therapy, but she lives with her parents and either they don't believe in mental health concerns, or she's operating under that assumption. She has difficulty even speaking about her concerns to people other than me (and her father sometimes, but he's rarely around and he works more than she thinks he needs to, which I think further taxes her emotional reserves). Her stepmother is of approximately zero help, because while she's not /mean/, Stepmom seems to be completely ignorant of my friend's very sensitive feelings. I try to help her any way I can, but when I let her spiral she completely breaks down and will beat herself up even /further/ for several days for breaking down, and she doesn't let me distract her when I'm trying to head it off. I need help to help to help my friend, especially since she's helped me out of a very bad spot a while ago. I tried to get her to sign on here, but her IP was permabanned (despite the fact that she was never a member of this community). Please, I'm at my wit's end and I have no tools for dealing with this situation anymore.