Question
If you are attending a school, you can approach the school counsellor for help. You can also approach a family physician for help. The doctor will then assess your condition and then treat you at the clinic or refer you to the appropriate facility.
You can also seek treatment at the polyclinic. There are social workers at various hospitals in Singapore and they will assess your financial status and assist you in whatever way that is possible.
Sorry to hear about your predicament. You should definitely seek help in Singapore, and there are various avenues of support and resources, as previously detailed in these posts:
Where should I go to seek help in Singapore if I'm unsure whether I have mental issues?
Where can I get counselling and help for my mental state problems if I am unemployed?
Taking your age and situation into consideration, the best avenues would be:
1. Go to CHAT hub at *Scape, which is a one-stop centre for mental health help and resources.This service is provided for by IMH, and is targeted at youths aged between 16-30 years old. Their mental health checks are done in two private rooms. Many young people come here to pick up information about mental health, ask us any mental health questions they may have.
2. Get a referral from a polyclinic to see a psychiatrist in a restructured hospital. They'll make the necessary referrals for you to see a counsellor/psychologist.
Thanks for your question, and I’m very sorry to hear that you are going through such a horrible time. I can only imagine how tough it must be. Before I answer further, I’m going to give the caveat that it’s next to impossible to offer advice about any psychiatric problem without seeing you face to face, or at the very least, having all the salient information about mood, sleep, suicidal ideation etc. I’m going to assume off the bat that the diagnosis of depression has been established by the doctors you’ve seen.
In Singapore, psychiatric conditions are diagnosed using a face to face interview and an assessment of the mental condition (what doctors called mental state examination). Many of the doctors here use the DSM 5 diagnostic criteria. For patients thought to have anxiety or depression, the psychiatrist may also order a blood test to exclude abnormalities in the thyroid hormone level. Given your problem of going to new places and fears of social situations, the first diagnosis that comes to my mind is that of social anxiety disorder (also called social phobia).
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