Are Depressed People Capable of Love?

Can you love another person before you've learned to love yourself? For a lot of people living with clinical depression, that question turns into a fear: if I can't manage to like who I am, maybe no one else ever will either, and maybe I'll go through life without ever being in a relationship. Some depressed teenagers carry this worry into their picture of adulthood. They're convinced the door is already closed. What's reassuring is how often they turn out to be wrong. You can dislike yourself intensely and still have someone fall hard for you.

The film "Prozac Nation" gives a version of this. Christina Ricci plays a teenage girl diagnosed with clinical depression who keeps sabotaging her own relationship, pushing her boyfriend away and insisting it could never work between them. That instinct to declare something doomed before it has a chance is familiar to anyone who has felt trapped in despair. The feeling of being terrified does not actually cancel out the ability to love.

People who have lived with depression a long time tend to describe it as always having been there. They've cycled through medications, started and stopped, sat with a string of therapists, and the thing itself stays lodged somewhere deep. It's a small persistent signal that can swell into real emotional pain at the worst possible moments, with no polite sense of timing.

Being loved intensely can be frightening under those conditions. There's a daily dread that one more episode, one more bad night, will finally be the thing that drives a partner off. Depression doesn't take into account that the partner makes you laugh, tells you several times a day that you're attractive, and cares for you more deeply than anyone has before. The fear runs on its own logic. You know a morning is coming when you'll roll over in bed with tears in your eyes for no reason you can name, and you brace for that to be the moment they decide they've had enough.

So it becomes a constant balancing act between the love and the fear. People with depression are aware that their moods sometimes hurt the person beside them, and through blurred, stinging vision they try to say it isn't anyone's fault. Guilt piles up. They hate that their feelings about themselves spill over and cause their partner pain. On the good nights, when they're held while they cry for hours over nothing in particular, or when the partner just rides out a stretch of irritability, that guilt softens into gratitude. The rest of the time it's a back and forth between caring too much and not caring at all, always half-waiting for the other person to leave.

Picture depression as a dark tunnel. Nothing is visible because the darkness covers everything. Sounds get louder, fears get bigger. All the person wants is a way out, but they can't see where to go and don't know what to do. And often they don't even want to be led out, because the fear is enormous and the dark is total. If a partner tries to haul them out by force, the likelier result is that they curl up and hide. Being afraid is simply part of the illness.

What helps is presence. When the depressed person is talking, let them talk. Hold off on advice and opinions and really listen, however hard or startling the things they say turn out to be. Sit there with them. When they're done, hug them and tell them they're loved, and tell them that however long recovery takes, you'll stay with them until they find the strength to get better.

A partner probably can't drag anyone out of that tunnel. What they can do is stay inside it until the person feels strong enough to walk out on their own. That's hard. It's thankless, and there are stretches where the partner feels rejected outright. Still, the thing not to do is give up. Keep supporting, keep loving, keep showing up.

If you're the one who's depressed, don't let anyone convince you that you're not worth loving because you can't love yourself. Don't let them tell you your mental illness is the reason you're single. Don't let them say you'd be fine if you smiled more, changed your hair, dressed differently. Don't let anyone shame you over things you can't always govern. Someone out there will love you in your least composed state, and if that state is curled up on your bedroom floor crying along to your saddest songs, then you've found love anyway, and that's fine. And for the partners: when they talk, sit back and listen.

Jeff Stein, drawing on Holly Everett, "What It's Like To Be In Love When You Have Depression" (Thought Catalog, June 16, 2014).