My boss' very shy daughter [14F] has started to open up to me about her depression, I'm [25F] not sure how to appropriately respond.

My boss' daughter is a shy, socially awkward only child of workaholic parents. She's helping out at her parents' company (where I work) for the summer so I've been getting to know her, and she seems to have taken a liking to me. We have a lot of interests in common like anime, drawing and music, and we have a similar sense of humour. We exchanged phone numbers and we send each other music recommendations and memes. I personally think she's great and I'd like to be something of a friend to her. I don't really know any other teenagers so interacting with someone her age is pretty new to me, and I'm also very aware of our age difference and my responsibility as an adult in our interactions.

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Now, I have had depression pretty badly in the past and have some old self-harm scars on my arms from my late teenage years. I don't suffer from depression anymore and haven't taken anti-depressants for around three years (I was medicated ages 17-21), but I've been there. I guess she saw my scars and therefore as someone who she could relate to who has experienced some similar feelings to what she's going through. She opened up to me about the fact that she's got depression, goes to therapy and is prescribed anti-depressants. She also told me some issues she has about her body image and social problems at school. My issue here is that, first of all, I want to be someone that she can relate to and with whom I can share some of my own past experiences to help her feel less alone, as it seems to be that she has very few people (if any) to talk about this stuff with, BUT I don't want to normalise her negative feelings or indirectly encourage any negativity she's experiencing. I'm not entirely sure how, but I want to be of some support to her without overstepping my bounds or being a bad influence. This is whole new territory for me relationship-wise so I'm coming here for some advice as to what is an appropriate or constructive way for me to respond.

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The girl is smart and can definitely think for herself, but she's a child. She has been sending me some pretty dark songs with very depressing lyrics, and gorey creepypastas and other stuff that I would have been all over as a young teenager but have no interest in anymore. I don't really know how to respond when she sends me that stuff, because I don't want to alienate her by rejecting her nor do I want to encourage it by responding positively.

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TL;DR: Boss's shy and lonely 14-year-old daughter has started to open up to me about depression, I want to be supportive in an appropriate and tactful way without inadvertently encouraging depressive behaviour by being a bad influence.

Submitted June 19, 2019 at 02:40PM by persekaali http://bit.ly/2WOlENU