Depression Days

If you know someone with depression, they may need your help! Although they will probably never ask for help, they may need it.

For someone who has never suffered from depression it can be very difficult to understand. Many people still look at someone with depression as a whiner and often wonder ‘what have they got to be depressed about’.

Whether a person actually seems to have something to be depressed about or not is completely irrelevant. For someone suffering from chronic or endogenous depression, the illness is part of their lives even though they may not appear to have anything overly stressful going on in their life at the particular time.

This is really hard to understand if you have never suffered from depression. It may feel like this person is always down and you don’t really want to be around them anymore. However, this is when they need you around the most.

For someone suffering from depression, they often lose interest in social activities and just want to stay home and ‘mope’. This feeling is very hard to overcome. When you have a chemical imbalance in your brain caused by chronic depression, it is very hard to reverse that imbalance. Due to this imbalance there is a lot of negative energy in the body and the more negative energy there is, the stronger the negative energy becomes.

It’s like a vicious circle. Negativity breeds negativity. This is why when you are in a depression that deep it is very hard to get out of. You tend to think negative thoughts all day and find it very hard to get those thoughts out of your head.

So although a person with depression may not want to be social, it is important to keep encouraging them to be social. Invite them out with you to a movie or dinner or just drop around for coffee.

Be there to listen to them if they need someone to talk to. At the same time try to remain happy yourself to give that happy or positive vibe that may just lift their spirits that little bit.

Encourage them to be positive and to try and think positively. Listen to what they need to say and then try to show them how to maybe look at that situation in a different way. Every situation can be looked at in different ways and the way you look at things can make a huge difference to the outcome of how you feel about it.

People with depression always tend to look at things in the most negative way so if they can be shown another way to look at a situation this can be a huge help in making them feel more positive.

The worst thing you can do for a friend that suffers from depression is to walk away and ‘leave them to it’, to decide not to be their friend because they are always so negative.

Try to remember this is when they need you the most. By walking away, their depression could become worse.

Remember – a friend in need is a friend indeed.

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