17 year old daughter stuck with no purpose and not open to any help - help!

There is a thing called the 'Double Empathy Problem', where due to a lack of emotional feedback from other other like minded autistic people ~ we mature emotionally at a proportionally slower rate than the greater proportion of society, and this is so regardless of how mature we actually may seem intellectually ~ with the basic rule of thumb being that we can be half our age emotionally, and twice our age intellectually ~ remembering of course that once you have met one autistic person; you’ve met one autistic person!

There is also another thing called 'Executive Planning Disorder', which means that the fight or flight reflex can engage when we are not familiar with the territory we may need or even want to get involved in ~ so any suggestion of engaging with the neurologically typical ‘whirled’ of excessive competition and regressive collaboration . . . can be somewhat off-putting, particularly if 'social camouflaging and personal masking' has been or is starting to become too problematic to maintain any longer.

So these things may be something to consider perhaps, baring in mind you have stated next to nothing about your daughter’s historical aptitudes or attitudes.

For instance, I gave a final year end of year psychological lecture on recognising cognitive dissonance in invisible conditions with a colleague of mine, and after which a student was brought up to me who told me if it not been for my contextualised person-centred explanations of things ~ as was very technical for the geeks, with my colleague explaining them very simply for the jocks ~ she would have given up on the degree entirely and dropped out despite having completed it!

Might this be the sort of problem your daughter is having in terms of perhaps not being stimulated or challenged enough by her teachers, or else the subject matter or matters she has chosen? And when did this educational lethargy first become apparent?

There is a thing called the 'Double Empathy Problem', where due to a lack of emotional feedback from other other like minded autistic people ~ we mature emotionally at a proportionally slower rate than the greater proportion of society, and this is so regardless of how mature we actually may seem intellectually ~ with the basic rule of thumb being that we can be half our age emotionally, and twice our age intellectually ~ remembering of course that once you have met one autistic person; you’ve met one autistic person!

There is also another thing called 'Executive Planning Disorder', which means that the fight or flight reflex can engage when we are not familiar with the territory we may need or even want to get involved in ~ so any suggestion of engaging with the neurologically typical ‘whirled’ of excessive competition and regressive collaboration . . . can be somewhat off-putting, particularly if 'social camouflaging and personal masking' has been or is starting to become too problematic to maintain any longer.

So these things may be something to consider perhaps, baring in mind you have stated next to nothing about your daughter’s historical aptitudes or attitudes.

For instance, I gave a final year end of year psychological lecture on recognising cognitive dissonance in invisible conditions with a colleague of mine, and after which a student was brought up to me who told me if it not been for my contextualised person-centred explanations of things ~ as was very technical for the geeks, with my colleague explaining them very simply for the jocks ~ she would have given up on the degree entirely and dropped out despite having completed it!

Might this be the sort of problem your daughter is having in terms of perhaps not being stimulated or challenged enough by her teachers, or else the subject matter or matters she has chosen? And when did this educational lethargy first become apparent?