How do you cope with depression?

Everyone knows what it feels like to be depressed. It’s part of the human experience; you get laid off; you get rejected; someone you love dies. Lots of difficult things happen everyday around the world to bad and even good people. We don’t like pain, but eventually it passes or at least dulls with time and new experiences—until it doesn’t.

For some of us, the pain of heartbreak and disappointment remain no matter how good or easy life is. The physical and emotional agony is a daily constant, only ebbing and flowing in intensity. It not only sucks joy, but energy and interest in anything. If you have clinical depression, it’s hard to sleep right, eat right, do anything right. Getting out of bed everyday and putting one foot in front of another feels like pushing a boulder up a hill. Sometimes you’re just too tired to keep doing it and you keep asking yourself, what’s the point anyway.

Things that used to give you joy totally overwhelm you now. Everything overwhelms you. Then there’s the pain. The emotional pain is torturous, but it’s not the only pain you feel. Depression is physically painful too. It feels like you have the flu. My mom once told me that how bad she feels everyday would be a clear justification for most people to stay in bed for the day.

Probably the worst thing about depression though, is how it robs you of your happiness. You feel sad, frustrated and angry for no apparent reason, but it is real. It’s as real as any emotion anyone could experience. Because it doesn’t make sense, you obsessively look for the cause of your unhappiness, searching and searching until you find it. You fixate on something disproportionate to how bad you feel and blow it up into something bigger than it really is. Either that, or you become paranoid, reading things into everything anyone says to you and even how they look at you. You start trying to read people’s minds and since you feel so awful, you always read them negatively.

If you love someone suffering from depression, it’s painful to watch and incredibly frustrating. You want to do something to take the pain away for them. You want them to see how illogical they’re being because it’s just plain incomprehensible when you haven’t experienced clinical depression for yourself. Sometimes you have to stifle the desire to tell them to just snap out of it. Even more than that, it’s scary. It’s the most helpless feeling in the world to watch someone you know suffer and spiral down further and further into hell and wonder how far they can stand to go before they end it all. It’s happened three times in our family and there is nothing so dark and heartbreaking than to lose a loved one to suicide. It’s an oppressive cloud that settles on a family and lingers for years—maybe forever.

So how do you cope with depression? An interesting thing I’ve observed over the years is that most of the very best people I know suffer from it, many of them silently. Depression isn’t weakness, but seems to me to be a malady of the strong. Those who cope the best don’t give up trying to find the cure they need, whether that’s in a pill, an exercise program, a new diet, or a good counselor, but they keep fighting their way through it, one step at a time. If you have a day where all you can do is brush your teeth, then pat yourself on the back and try for more the next day. Depression is a horrible, hideous condition, but it also strengthens you. It makes you a better human being by making you more compassionate, more empathic, more merciful. If you love someone with depression, remember that and give them a hug. Remind them of all the reasons you love them. It will add another weapon to their arsenal to fight the deadly dragon.