Why Learn How to Help Someone with Depression?

Clinical depression is one of the largest health issues in the world today.  It has the capacity to kill (through suicide), to break apart marriages and families, to lead teens and young adults to street drugs, and a whole host of other negative impacts on individuals and communities.  In light of this, it is of crucial importance that as many people as possible know something about how to help someone with depression.

But there are some people in the world who are sitting next to vein of gold and don’t know it.  That vein of gold is a mother, father, son, daughter, friend, teacher, or coworker who dares to care enough to help them with depression.  These are not mental health professionals.  These are simply people who care enough about another human being that they are willing to endure  a relationship in which they are doing all the giving–for a season.

One Tip for How to Help Someone with Depression

An important tip for how to  help someone with depression is to manage your own frustration by enlisting the support of others.  It’s important that you monitor your frustration level and get your needs met as best you can.  It’s best to bring in other friends and family so that no one person will be overwhelmed.  Why is this necessary?  Because depression messes things up.  You have to recognize that your relationship will be strained and you will be become frustrated with the person you are trying to help.  When you think about how to help someone with depression, know that the “someone” is going to withdrawn and unresponsive at best and irritable and angry at his or her worst.  This is not fun.   It requires you to get your hands dirty with the relationship engine grease of a medical condition.

Hope:  This Might Be the Most Delicate Mechanism of the Mind

One of the most delicate psychological mechanisms in the depressed mind is that of hope vs hopelessness.  This always has something to do with brain chemistry, no matter how the depression originated.  If someone is stuck in a clinical depression, then the mood centers of the brain are not working as they could or should.

But it goes far beyond biochemistry.  Our sense of hope is woven into the intricate tapestry that holds us up from the black hole of despair.  It forms the underpinnings of our daily functioning as well as our long term aspirations.  It connects what is psychological with what is spiritual in us.  Our sense of hope is our assumption that our efforts to engage in some effort, activity, or relationship will result in something worthwhile.  It’s the part of us that knows, “My efforts matter.”   That’s why we can go to work, hang out with friends, make plans for the weekend, etc.  Hopelessness seeks to unwind all that so that life becomes so miserable that we are willing to be deceived into thinking that death is a better alternative.

Example:  “Don’t Get My Hopes Up and Then Flake!”

When a friend comes along side a depressed person to help, there can be an enormous opportunity for the bitter cold hopelessness to begin to melt.  This is why it is worth it to learn how to help someone with depression.  Consider this hypothetical example.  If I am depressed and can count on you to contact me regularly each week, I will likely begin looking forward to this time with you.  Something as simple as that can begin to thaw the hope mechanism so that hope can return to other areas of life.

On the other hand, if you create an expectation in me that you care and then pull away, then it will likely cause damage to that delicate hope vs. hopeless mechanism.  I may become even more reluctant to believe that something good can happen.  In fact, I have known people who will deliberately lash out at a friend trying to help them because they cannot bear the pain of having their hopes raised … only to be crushed when that same friend leaves out of frustration.

Have you ever taken a depressed person to lunch?  It can be really difficult to keep a conversation going.  But your presence in regular intervals communicates a powerful, quiet message:  “you matter to me.”

Simple, Informed Caring

So then there is tremendous benefit that can come from you knowing how to help someone with depression in simple ways.  But you have to manage your frustration so that you have others to whom you can vent and rely on.  You have to be careful to limit what you do so that you don’t feel compelled to pull away.  The best way to do that is to be the orchestrator of building a supportive team of friends and family around them.  How can they help?  It may be that one person can help by encouraging you to not give up.  Or, together you may encourage the depressed person to seek out professional help.  Perhaps someone else on the “team” is calm enough to keep an eye out for suicidal tendencies without shaking like a leaf.

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