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Are there jobs for people with avoidant personality disorder?

My child has avoidant personality disorder. She is highly intelligent but too anxious to continue going to college. Medications do very little to help. She needs to earn money somehow without interacting too much with people. Her father and his family (highly educated but also ignorant) consider her to be just lazy and can’t see “what’s her problem?!) Her worst fears (since she was 10) are doing something wrong, embarrassing herself, and being judged. No amount of therapy has helped so far. Does anyone else suffer with this disorder?
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Avatar universal
I'm not going to claim I know there is such as thing as avoidant personality disorder.  But all anxiety sufferers avoid.  That is how the illness gets worse.  Avoiding feels good, facing things we're phobic about doesn't.  But therapy that forces us to learn how our thinking is damaging our lives, teaches us some coping tools, and then forces us to start facing what we're phobic about is the treatment with the best results.  That being said, it never worked for me, and some of us just don't respond to therapy.  But as for medication, there is an awful lot of different meds out there, so unless she's tried every form of therapy and every combination of meds, there are still things to try.  The trick is to really really want to get better, and the disease makes us not want to get better, so that's the really tough hurdle to get over.  If she organizes her entire life around avoidance she will never get better and will likely get worse and more and more isolated as she ages.  The success rates of any particular treatment are not good, but because there are so many different ones available, I wouldn't give up.  But as for getting a job that doesn't require contact with others, is she doesn't finish college, it will be harder to find those.  I wish I could give you something that works, but again, I never found it, but medication did help some.  Didn't fix anything, but it did help some.  As for working from home, there are jobs that allow that, but first you have to interview and get them.  You have to have the credentials to get them.  You still have to go to meetings sometimes.  Even a writer has to meet with agents and do promotion, and that's about as isolated a profession as exists.  Keep trying to fix this, but in the meantime, she will need help to get a job.  On line education is a possibility as mentioned, but on-line schools are not the best and she sounds like she can do it with the best.  I wish there was a way to find something that works, but again, when all else fails, you might try meeting with a counselor at the school she topped attending and see if they can offer advice on how to get the training she needs for jobs that exist.  All the best.
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973741 tn?1342342773
What about jobs like accounting where you really just work with your numbers all day and interaction doesn't have to be as much?  Or anything computer related that can be done in your own home office?  
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Avatar universal
This sounds a lot like me. I’ve always done very well in school but my family history and poor decisions on my part have given me a lot of social anxiety. Even though I received a scholarship I tried dropping out of college to just start working instead but my parents were able to get me to enroll back in and just take my courses a little slower. I did graduate and have had several jobs since then but have left some of them because I felt I couldn’t deal with all the daily interactions with people. I think just about everyone in my family has received therapy except for me because I’ve been stubborn and told myself I don’t need someone else to help me through my problems. Now I’m wishing I had gone to therapy and worked through my mental issues as it’s caused more issues over the years.
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1 Comments
Hard to hear and feel your pain.  Have you been able to find any type of job situation that does make you feel comfortable?  
973741 tn?1342342773
Here's a thread started you may be interest in participating in:  https://www.medhelp.org/posts/Anxiety/Parenting-Teens-and-Kids-with-Social-Anxiety-/show/3038327
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973741 tn?1342342773
Oh gosh. Well, possibly to a degree my son suffers this.  He also has tremendous anxiety.  Failure is not an option for him.  High grades are his shield against the world.  I feel for your daughter.  She could . . . receive her degree online. Then she could work from home in her field. She would have to interact in some way though.  There are plenty of semi solitary fields of work.  Has she looked into that?  What was her field of study?

and sorry the family is hard on her.  

She has tried which medications and what type of therapy?
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