9 Ways to Help Someone with Depression

In her piece "9 Ways to Help a Friend or Family Member With Depression," Therese J. Borchard writes about what it feels like to stand next to someone in the middle of a depression and not know what to do. The person you remember as easygoing and quick to laugh now seems heavy, quiet, close to tears for no reason you can point to. A friend keeps canceling coffee or dinner with one excuse after another. Depression doesn't look identical on any two people, but Borchard lays out a handful of things that tend to help no matter who is struggling.

Learn what you're dealing with. Depression shows up in recognizable ways: ongoing sadness, crying spells, or shifts in mood; trouble making decisions; difficulty concentrating or holding attention; energy that stays low for weeks; heavy feelings of guilt, shame, worthlessness, or helplessness; losing interest in things that used to bring pleasure; and thoughts of suicide or actual attempts. Knowing the signs means you can respond to what you're actually seeing rather than guessing.

Ask a lot of questions, and keep asking. Getting someone to talk is half the work, and the questions themselves signal that you care. When did the sadness start to build? Was there anything that might have set it off? Have there been any suicidal thoughts? Does anything make it ease up, or make it worse? Has there been a recent physical check, something to rule out a vitamin deficiency, a thyroid problem, blood sugar, or hormones?

Share what you know. A plain conversation can do more than you'd expect. Psychiatrists and clinicians matter, but a person who is close sometimes catches the personal triggers a stranger would miss, or can explain the medical side of depression in words that actually land.

Talk about stress, because it's tied to depression in ways the research keeps confirming. Stress pushes up heart rate and blood pressure, strains the heart, shifts hormone levels, throws neurotransmitters out of balance, and sends cortisol into the body. Ask your friend where their stress is sitting right now, and float some healthier ways to let some of it out.

Give support, and don't underestimate how much the plain act of showing up counts. Borchard points to the evidence: support groups improve recovery from depression and lower the odds of relapse. She cites a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in December 2001, in which 158 women with metastatic breast cancer were placed in supportive-expressive therapy. Those women improved more on psychological symptoms and reported less pain than the women in the control group who got no such therapy. Time on the phone or across a table helps. So does a hug or a kiss; human touch reaches people when words can't.

Point to strengths. Depression narrows the view until a person can't see anything good around them or inside them. When you name the things they're actually good at, you hand them a different angle on their own situation.

Bring in laughter. Borchard notes, drawing on her post "10 Things I Do Every Day to Beat Depression", that research treats laughing as one of the better things we can do for our health, and that humor plays a part in recovering from all sorts of illness. Everyone feels a little lighter after a real laugh. Put on a comedy together, tell a terrible joke, do whatever gets a laugh out of them.

Hand them hope. Borchard remembers the single sentence that helped her most during a severe depression: "You won't always feel this way." It's a simple fact, and it carries the one thing that heals more than anything else, which is hope. The hardest part of your job, she says, is getting your friend or your brother or your father or your sister to believe again that this will lift. Once the heart gets there, the mind and body tend to follow.

Be there to listen. Having someone who will actually pay attention is a gift. When we're desperate to help, we often rush past the listening and jump to fixing. Sitting with someone and letting them talk can do real work on the symptoms, more than most advice does.

Kim B. adds a personal note on the value of learning as much as you can. She describes herself as someone who wants to understand whatever she's involved in, fully, not to perform expertise but to avoid being a fool who pretends to know more than they do. The same drive she brought to depression once showed up in an unlikely place: softball.

The way she tells it, when her oldest daughter started playing competitive fast pitch and she was asked to help coach, she figured she had it covered. She'd played baseball as a kid and through high school, so the game felt familiar. That assumption fell apart fast. Strip away the bat, the ball, and the glove and softball turns out to be its own sport. The tactics, the strategy, the way the players think and stay motivated, none of it matched baseball, and it had nothing to do with the players being girls.

She's a proud person, she admits, but able to concede when she's wrong, even if her husband might argue the point. Here her husband gave her credit for facing facts. Wanting to spend that time with her daughter in a sport the girl loved made humility easy to reach. Realizing she wasn't the smartest person in the room pushed her to study, and fast.

With the internet standing in for a library, she dug in. She picked up practice drills and techniques, game day strategy, and how to coach girls and young women specifically. She came to respect the coaches who'd gone before her, to treasure the small moments with her daughter and the rest of the team, and eventually to love the sport itself. Knowledge is power, she writes, and with everything available now there's no reason not to put it to use and pass it on to the people around you.