So, I have this friend whom I’ll call Bob for the sake of confidentiality. I truly believe Bob has various degrees of mental problems, from anxiety, to addictive behaviour, depression, and the list goes on. To add to the mental duress, Bob’s personal and home life isn’t that well either. Bob is a trans-man, which there’s nothing wrong with, but it is a major source of stress for him. His father is a druggie, and his mother is unfair and intolerant. Having said that, he does have a lot of amazing, understanding, caring, but very worried friends. And as my role as one of those friends, I feel it is my duty to protect him, even if it’s from himself. I’ve been friends with Bob since middle school, and I’ve always been a rock to him, I don’t know how many times I talked him out of doing drugs, self harming*, committing suicide. But since we graduated high school this past year, he kind of stopped taking to me, I’ve tried to talk to him, make sure he’s okay, but we never had a real conversation since May. Anyway, I just received a message from a mutual friend saying he tried to commit suicide last night and that he’s in the hospital. And I just don’t know what to do anymore. I’ve tried to tell him to go to a psychiatrist, or a therapist, just anything to help him get better, but he doesn’t listen. And that’s the main thing that’s so frustrating, is that he just doesn’t seem to listen. I try to tell him we’re all there for him and he’ll get past the rough times, and some day he’ll be happy, and I know that the depression makes it hard for him to believe me but it’s still so frustrating for me. It’s not like I’m ready to give up on him or anything, I just don’t know how to handle him anymore, I don’t know how to make him better, and I just don’t know what to do.

*Edited by youthspace to remove triggering content / identifying information.