"No Safe Defense, Not Even Science" is close enough for the purpose I was using it for. Thank you!

I have trouble anticipating what will make someone feel better.

In this kind of situation, I usually just ask, outright, "What can I do to help you?" Then I can file away the answer for the next time the same thing happens.

However, this assumes that, like me, you are in a strongly Ask culture. If the people you know are strongly Guess, you might get answers such as "Oh, it's all right, don't inconvenience yourself on my account", in which case the next best thing is probably to ask 1) people around them, or 2) the Internet.

You also need to keep your eyes out for both Ask cues and Guess cues of consent and nonconsent - some people don't want help, some people don't want your help, and some people won't tell you if you're giving them the wrong help because they don't want to hurt your feelings. This is the part I get hung up on.

Given OP's complaint, I assumed OP would be unusually sensitive to even small amounts of discouragement (as magnifying small negatives is a frequent habit of people with depression/anxiety problems). As such, when I saw a -1 in the comment thread where I was directly conversing with the OP, I voted them back up to zero. This is because I do not want to discourage someone reaching out for psychological help, even if they are probably asking for help from a community that might not be focused on providing appropriate help.

That doesn't mean that we should encourage it (signal-to-noise ratio is a thing), but someone with depression may well see -1 as evidence that they should shut up and leave the world alone, because several other people may have read through the thread, decided that granting -1 karma for that post was appropriate, and didn't vote back up to zero. (For the record, I do not think that is what actually happened. Random downvotes from anon trolls are fairly common on the Internet.)

Sadly, a significant fraction of people working in public health are in the late stages of burnout, where they simply don't have any altruism left to spare and are only working in their jobs because of money/inertia/fear of unemployment/extrinsic rewards. People who are burnt out that profoundly will express suspicion of malingering as, I think, sort of a protective mechanism: "there cannot possibly have been this many people that need this much of my energy, so most of the people dropping by with sob stories are just trying to pull one over on me because I've proved myself to be an easy target". (This is a just-so story that has no citation. Salt as necessary.)

If you're worried about this, you can also try, for example, therapists-in-training-programs at colleges or universities, which are cheaper (because the people doing the therapy are paying tuition, so you don't really have to pay much to make it worth everyone's while) and have younger/fresher people that are much less likely to reject you because of burnout.

At least some social services agencies have a position called "case manager", which is a person who is specifically hired to help other people get through the bureaucracy and to services if they cannot get these services themselves (due to lack of resources whether physical or mental). It may be worth your time to inquire as to how you could be assigned one of those, and then you only need to approach one person and ask.

The problem with textbooks is that they are the "pink slime" of publishing. College textbooks are slightly better than grade school textbooks, in that they have slightly greater than zero market forces acting on them (not many, but some) and can assume an adult level of comprehension.

See also this paper about common misrepresentations of evolution in textbooks and science literature.

Mental process like waking up without an alarm clock at a specific time aren't easy. I know a bunch of people who have that skill but it's not like there a step by step manual that you can easily follow that gives you that ability.

I do not have "wake up at a specific time" ability, but I have trained myself to have "wake up within ~1.5 hours of the specific time" ability. I did this over a summer break in elementary school because I learned about how sleep worked and thought it would be cool. Note that you will need to have basically no sleep debt (you consistently wake up without an alarm) for this to work correctly.

The central point of this method is this: a sleep cycle (the time it takes to go from a light stage of sleep to the deeper stages of sleep and back again) is about 1.5 hours long. If I am not under stress or sleep debt, I can estimate my sleeping time to the nearest sleep cycle. Using the sleep cycle as a unit of measurement lets me partition out sleep without being especially reliant on my (in)ability to perceive time.

The way I did it is this (each step was done until I could do it reliably, which took up to a week each for me [but I was a preteen then, so it may be different for adults]):

1. Block off approximately 2 hours (depending on how long it takes you to fall asleep), right after lunch so it has the least danger of merging with your consolidated/night sleep, and take a nap. Note how this makes you feel.

2. Do that again, but instead of blocking off the 2 hours with an alarm clock, try doing it naturally, and awakening when it feels natural, around the 1.5h mark (repeating this because it is very important: you will need to have very little to no accumulated sleep debt for this to work). Note how this makes you feel.

3. Do that again, but with a ~3.5-hour block. Take two 1.5 hour sleep cycle naps one after another (wake up in between).

4. During a night's sleep, try waking up between every sleep cycle. Check this against [your sleep time in hours / 1.5h per sleep cycle] to make sure that you caught all of them.

5. Block off a ~3.5 hour nap and try taking it as two sleep cycles without waking up in between them. (Not sure about the order with this point and the previous one. Did I do them in the opposite order? I'm reconstructing from memory here. It's probably possible to make this work in either order.)

6. You probably know from step 4 how many sleep cycles you have in a night. Now you should be able to do things like consciously split up your sleep biphasically, or waking up a sleep cycle earlier than you usually do.

I then spent the rest of summer break with a biphasic "first/second sleep" rhythm, which disappeared once I was in school and had to wake up at specific times again.

To this day, I sleep especially lightly, must take my naps in 1.5 hour intervals, and will frequently wake up between sleep cycles (I've had to keep a clock on my nightstand since then so I can orient myself if I get woken unexpectedly by noises, because a 3:30AM waking is different from a 5AM waking, but they're at the same point on the cycle so they feel similar). I also almost always wake up 10-45 minutes before any set alarms, which would be more useful if the spread was smaller (45 minutes before I actually need to wake up seems like a waste). It's a cool skill to have, but it has its downsides.