My boyfriend (M24) won’t help himself, and it’s genuinely starting to irritate me (F20).

We’ve been together for about 3 years now. We met will I was a freshman in college. He is a local to the area I go to school at. It’s been alright. I will say that we went through the talking stage pretty fast. We talked for a week or two before we started talking romantically to each other (mostly with him initiating) . At first I was a bit wary of how fast things were moving. But later on I just sort of chalked it up to relationship anxiety. And as time has passed, I believed that it ended up being fine since we’ve already been together for this long.

We both have ADHD, which also created issues of anxiety and depression for both of us. I’ve always kind of struggled with mental health, BUT I’ve been out a lot more effort recently in to truly doing something about it. I’ve attended therapy for many years now, and I have been seeing great improvements. But my boyfriend is not so lucky. He is currently studying at a local community college, and the classes are hard on him. It’s been stressful. He also comes from a family with a lot of trauma/baggage. TLDR, his Dad is an abusive POS, and he was pretty much the only one the stand up to him and getting a restraining order for him and his close family.

He has a lot of low self esteem caused by a lot of different things. He is Asian and comes from a culture in which you are expected to save face no matter what. He has family members that have berated him in the past and present for his weight/mental abilities/“not being a good enough son”. He has told me that this is a normal for his family (which is a whole separate issue for our relationship lol)

I tell him that he needs therapy. I reassure him that I “don’t think he’s a failure”. I constantly check up on him to see if he’s okay, because I fear that if I don’t, I’ll find him trying to drown himself in the ocean. Everyday he tells me that he’s “feeling anxious” and talks about himself as if he is worth nothing. I keep reassuring and reassuring. But I am growing tired. Even annoyed. I’m saddened. It feels like watching someone behind a glass where you can see them but they can’t see you. They are walking right into a hole but no matter how much you tell them to go the other way, they don’t listen. They can’t hear you.

This particular night, he wakes me up at 2 am about feeling anxious. He learned yesterday that he a has failed one of his exams. He goes on and on about how “r*tarted he is” and that he’s incapable of doing anything right. He tells me that he hit himself the other night in what I think was an attempt to self harm. He then asks me if I still “love him even though I’m a failure”. I sigh and say yes (for what seems like the 100th time). I also tell him plainly that he is too hard on himself, and expects absolute perfection which isn’t necessarily fair. I tell him something along the lines of “you expect so much out of yourself, something something self hatred”. Then, after waking ME up to tell me this, he says that we should “stop talking about this now” and tries to act cuddly.

What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to say?