I’m needing advice on how I should handle situation with a long-time friend
They’ve been severely depressed for years, 7+, really kicked off at the beginning of college. They wouldn’t leave their house and skipped class/work to just sleep. Which is when I got involved, they got better for a while but ended up dropping out and moving back in with their parents.
My spouse and I checked in on them consistently, but for two years they did nothing but sleep and play videos games. Only left the house to come hang out with us, or go get food.
It took two years of convincing and LOTS of conversations, but my spouse and I got them to go back to school and finish their degree.
It was rough for them, with lots of skipped classed, sleeping in their car, late nights cramming homework. Video games were their main priority over school.
Recently graduated, 4-5 months ago, they have yet to do anything else other than play videos games and sleep.
I’m not even saying they need to go get a job, just getting help in general. They have no other friends, just my partner and I, their parents are fed up and uninvolved and to be frank, my spouse and I are at the end of our rope. They refuse to help themselves with anything, for a short time they were seeing a psychiatrist and taking medication, but they wouldn’t get a job to keep up the copays and costs so they just stopped everything.
We’ve spent actual years trying to help, trying to be supportive and meet them where they are at. Providing options for therapy, psychiatry, giving them the option to stay with us when things were bad. We’ve given them opportunities to watch our pets over a weekend so we can offer some money in exchange, they will choose not to eat the entire time and just use the money for video games.
They’ve become completely nihilistic, believing that life means nothing. They don’t want waste their life at a meaningless job, they want to travel and be in a relationship and experience the world, but there is zero push to do anything to get to that goal.
I’m asking for advice now because they have gotten extremely thin, only eating 1-2 times a day when their parents can buy them food, never leaving the house, hours and hours of video games until they crash for 12-19 hours and then they are back to playing video games.
My spouse and I have known them a lot time, they are a dear friend to us and we love them a lot, so much that is hurts to see them progressively get worse, but we have no idea what to do.
Any advice or tips or literally anything would help