My (26m) brother is a 23 y.o. male and was diagnosed with friedrich’s ataxia around age 15 and has been wheelchair bound since a spinal fusion surgery accelerated his condition. He has steadily gotten less and less mobile and relies on family to get in and out of bed & toilet. He has seen many doctors about his physical condition and takes Baclofen daily. It has recently become apparent he is severely depressed, because he has nothing to do or can do other than stay home with our mom and play video games all day every day. He is painfully shy and didn’t get any socialization in high school because he was homeschooled after being wheelchair bound. Just yesterday he admitted to my parents that he was at the lowest of the low and “didn’t want to exist anymore”, which is huge for him to even say. Today they took him in for a psych evaluation at a psychiatric hospital, prepared for him to potentially be kept there, but he was not. He is still very down & depressed, but opened up to me last night over text, saying he had made a friend online a year or so ago but she had stopped responding lately, and he just feels depressed mostly because he doesn’t have a purpose and says he feels “socially inept” (verbatim) and because he “doesn’t know how to communicate properly.” He has problems with speech, but can still hold a conversation if he is passionate about the topic (movies, games, etc.) although that is becoming increasingly rare. How can we help him? He is 100% cognitively intact; but stuck in this terrible body and can’t be independent. They tried antidepressants but they counteracted with the Baclofen and made him feel way worse and he didn’t get out of bed. They are going to ask his Neuro doctor for an alt to Baclofen so that he could get on antidepressants, but does anyone have any similar experiences? How can we help him gain a sense of purpose, or help him get friends, or just deal with his depression better? Is there a job he could do that would get him out of the house and give him responsibility, that he is ABLE to do? (Fine motor skills are not good). Is there a network of people with disabilities that don’t effect cognition that he could get involved with? He also hates feeling like people view him as mentally handicapped bc he is in a wheelchair, but there is no way around it. But he was resistant to using a motorized wheelchair for YEARS bc of this, it made him look more handicapped. Please any advice or resources would be appreciated, I feel so helpless as a brother, and he doesn’t really want to do anything I suggest (go see a movie/watch a movie, play games, etc.). I also don’t permanently live at home anymore so it is mostly him and my parents and our other brother all of the time, which I feel he gets sick of.