Helping friends with depression

In the last Wellbeing section, I wrote about my experience with recovering from depression. Maybe it’s because I don’t make a habit of talking about my mental illness but I was genuinely surprised at the positive reception it received from friends, acquaintances and even complete strangers. As a follow-up, I wanted to give some advice around how to help a friend with depression as, especially at such a stressful time of year, I hope this will prove useful.

I actually found this article more difficult to write than my last one and I think it’s because life doesn’t neatly split into ‘depressed people’ and ‘friends of depressed people’. At times you may be one or the other or both together and they are both difficult roles to navigate. In terms of my own experience, I was depressed at the same time I was trying to care for a mentally ill parent and that inevitably tainted how I saw and experienced my own illness. Equally, writing down a list of stuff that helped me when I was sick highlighted pretty starkly when I failed to follow my own advice for my depressed friends and relatives. It is really easy to get defensive, but please don’t – the past is the past.

On that note, I’ll start off by saying it is not easy caring about someone who is depressed and I am speaking as someone who’s been on both sides of the fence. When you’re ill, it’s really difficult to communicate what is happening to you and if you’ve always been well, it’s very difficult to understand. When my mother first started getting sick, I took this lack of understanding to be due to a lack of knowledge and diligently researched everything I could about bipolar disorder: living with bipolar disorder, treatments for bipolar disorder and so on. Although this was fascinating research, and I say that non-ironically, ultimately it was useless as it didn’t help me understand what I was really struggling to cope with – namely being unable to help someone I loved who was in pain and the effect the illness was having on our relationship. My first piece of advice is that it is okay to acknowledge this stuff is hard on you. It is normal to feel upset, afraid, frustrated or anything else by a friend being mentally ill. You are in no way weak or selfish for feeling how you do.

In a similar vein, you have to recognise you are entitled to protect your own mental health. Although it may not be appropriate to talk to your friend about your feelings, it is appropriate to talk to someone. I took the rather bold step in the course of writing this article to ask my friends what it was like to hang out with me during that time of my life, and this cropped up fairly often. In retrospect, I said and did a lot of scary stuff when I was unwell and I don’t think I truly appreciated how it had affected them. Not because I didn’t care about them but because I didn’t understand how they could possibly care about me. It is more than okay to drop in and visit a counsellor if you are finding it difficult to cope and College has its own free counselling service if you are so inclined. Don’t fall into the trap of playing the suffering Olympics, where only the friend who is suffering the most deserves help – do what you need to do to stay healthy.

My next piece of advice comes directly from one of my friends and it is simply to accept what you cannot change. Depression can last for a long time and, even on an effective treatment program, it can take weeks to see signs of recovery. This can be frustrating when you are putting effort into helping and caring about your friend, but as you don’t cause their depression, it isn’t something you can fix. One of the things I was acutely aware of was how frustrating and frankly boring my illness was to my friends. I know they wanted to help me and they wanted me to get better, but my twisted thought patterns morphed that concern into a feeling of failure that I couldn’t get better for them. It’s easy for well-meaning comments like ‘How can you be depressed when so many people care about you?’ to slightly more obviously inappropriate comments like ‘Oh my God, Marissa, pull yourself together!’ to feed into these feelings of failure. Instead, just reassure your friend you are there for them and accept however long they need to recover.

Despite saying you can’t cure someone with depression by caring, you can make someone’s life a hell of a lot easier so focus on practical solutions to practical problems. Have you ever checked your phone and realised you received a text from someone weeks ago but kept putting off replying so now it would be too awkward to respond? Depression is like this on a colossal scale - it is really, really easy to drop off the radar and you can adopt that mentality towards everything. I felt if I hadn’t seen my friends for a couple of weeks, they wouldn’t want to hear from me anymore. If I missed loads of classes, that entire module or subject was lost. If I already spent the week not eating or sleeping or any other unhealthy habit, there was no point trying to rectify those habits. As a friend, this is probably the easiest way to step in and offer help. If someone isn’t attending classes, offer to pick up course materials for them or give them your notes. If someone is withdrawing from the world, try and set up a regular time to do something together, like have a cup of tea or go for a walk and make it clear you don’t mind if they cancel, you’ll keep the time open for them regardless. These are all little things but they helped me find the world a little less impossible and, when I was recovering, it helped me realise I hadn’t burned all of my bridges.

If your friend hasn’t done so already, encourage them to seek help and also recognise their first reaction may not be the end of the conversation. I get that it can be awkward or uncomfortable to drop words like ‘doctor’ or ‘counsellor’ into conversations with friends and you can worry that it will upset them further. You can get fixated on choosing the right words or the right time to bring this up to avoid a negative reaction. If it’s any comfort, from my experience a person’s reaction to these requests isn’t dependent on how kindly they are encouraged to seek help but instead is dependent on their attitudes to their own condition. Some people may react abruptly or rudely to the assertion they need help if they are in denial about their illness. Conversely and more commonly, some people are in dire need of that type of validation and need to hear that it wouldn’t be wasting anyone’s time to get it checked out. It is so easy to put off or avoid the rather mundane task of booking appointments if you’re left to your own devices so gentle nudges to do so are important. For me, it took a good year of increasingly unsubtle prompts to seek help and a friend accompanying me to the GP with the promise of a hot chocolate debrief to get me to sit before a doctor. Basically, be persistent but not overbearing and offer to accompany them if it’s appropriate.

Throughout everything, make sure you go at their pace. Listening non-judgementally to a person talk about their depression is probably the most supportive thing a friend can do. I felt talking about depression was venting an incredibly dark and scary part of my life – having friends willing to listen and not run in the other direction was a really powerful and subtle way of showing support. On the other hand, sometimes talking about your illness is the absolute last thing you want to do. ‘Depression’ can sometimes feel like an identity over a diagnosis and one of the things I was keen to avoid was being the dependent, needy friend. I went to great lengths to act normally and I was reluctant to talk about what I was going through and, although that must have been pretty weird for my friends to witness, my advice is to go with it. When I was sick, I absolutely wanted to hear about my friend’s boyfriend drama or to talk about the OC (this show was pretty big at my school) – I promise my friends bringing this stuff up did not come across as insensitive or trivial, it helped me feel normal. Also, friends coming to me with their problems made me feel our relationships were less one-sided when I went to them with mine.

My last piece of advice while I still have your attention is to talk to your friend. I get it: if mental illness was easy to talk about there probably wouldn’t be a national campaign about it. It is way too easy to get hung up about saying the wrong thing or coming across as insensitive and you might be tempted to give your friend some space as a way of protecting them. Please don’t do this. It’s worth saying that we know you are human and you are probably going to make mistakes or say the wrong thing. You definitely won’t have all the answers and you won’t be perfect, but that isn’t what we need when we’re depressed. We need friends and, last I checked, my friends are all human.

One of the best things you can do is to say to a friend that you are there for them and they can call/text/message/whatever if they need to talk and this isn’t a hassle for you. It is rare this offer will get taken up, speaking from experience, but it is appreciated. If you’re not good at deep, emotional talks, that’s fine too, we can work with that. If you don’t see your friend for a few days, maybe you could send them a text to check in and ask about something you know you both enjoy. For me, that could be ‘Hi Marissa, haven’t seen you in a while! Did you see the OC last night?’ (yes, I’m trying to make the OC happen). Because, seriously, I was rubbish at deep, emotional talks too. I would make really poor jokes about my situation or use deliberately poor analogies or do pretty much anything to make an awkward conversation more awkward. Being depressed doesn’t make you some kind of tragic poet or prone to eloquent monologues about how dire your situation is – I was much better at talking about inconsequential stuff and felt better for just talking to someone a lot of the time.

That being said, although you shouldn’t cease contact with a depressed friend because they are depressed, it is okay to say you can’t handle their problems at times if you are having a stressful time yourself. I know this is a tricky line to tread and in these relationships you can end up feeling you are the only thing keeping your friend afloat. This is why it is really important to encourage them to have a network of support, with a mix of friends and professionals, that they can turn to when they need it, rather than just one person. Trust me, this is a toxic situation and will only end up hurting both you and your friend.

After reading this through, I realise my advice about how to help your depressed friend essentially boils down to a lot of listening and talking and the odd home-cooked meal. It doesn’t seem like much and I can see how it would be really tempting to want to gallop in on a white horse and rescue your friend from the jaws of depression or something equally as dramatic. In this case, I reckon my friend explains it better than me: “It takes a while before you understand that actually just being there is enough.”