I honestly don't know what the deal is with my mom. She is in her 50s, and for as long as I can remember (and apparently even her family says my mom has been the way she is since a small child), my mom is extremely tempramental. She can be mean, manipulative, and miserable to herself and everyone around her.
I don't know if she is just plain depressed, bi-polar, manic depressive, minorly schitzophrenic, or what. But there's something painfully wrong with her, and everyone knows it (I'm sure even she does, but refuses to do anything).
Basically, she can be content, laid-back, loving, affectionate, nurturing, etc., but literally at the drop of a hat for even the simplest thing, she is angry, hostile, irritable, sometimes conniving, resentful, and just plain miserable to be around.
She has alienated herself from her family (except to make appearances at get-togethers), she's sometimes emotionally abusive to my 12 y.o. sister, and she has no really close friends that I can think of. She literally distances herself from everyone, and she's overly dependant on me (I'm 22 and have just moved out of her house, and now I feel like she won't let me go, even though she wanted me gone). She always "needs" me for something or expects me to do something for her, and if I don't, she holds things over my head and puts a guilt trip on me.
I love my mom with all my heart; she's done so much for me and has helped get me where I am today. But I am fed up with her negitive and pessimistic attitude, her depending on me for things that should be entirely her responsibility, feeling like I'm walking on egg shells when she's in a good mood so as not to ruin it, and her treating my sister and me like **** (especially my sister--the way my mom treats the poor kid sometimes makes me physically nauseated).
Trouble is, no one can tell my mom what she doesn't want to hear. She does not like the idea of getting psychological help, because of some issue (and I'll try to portray this accurately from her perspective) along the lines of she thinks that psychological help is not private medical records if the gov't wants to look into it. Then if they see that you have "problems," you can get singled out and not have decent job opportunities (maybe this is because she's worked jobs where she's needed security clearances?). At any rate, her frame of mind is that she is never at complete fault for anything; someone else is always to blame because...
And my mom is so intelligent that she thinks she's never wrong most of the time. She has a reason or justification for everything.
She gets so offended and defensive if anyone argues a point with her, and especially if someone tells her she should she a therapist. She completely loses it and becomes irate and gripes about how so-and-so could have the nerve to say something like that to her.
How can I get through to her and convince her that she needs help? She's getting more pessimistic, cynical, and mean as time goes on. I'm afraid she might get so stressed she'll give herself a stroke or heart attack or something in the very near future (she's not suicidal, physically self destructive, or physically abusive), or that she'll just go off the deep end and literally go crazy because of the way she alienates herself from her family and has no close friends.
What do depressed people like this need to hear to be convinced that help is a good thing? Is there ANYTHING I can do or say?