General
If a close person suffers from depression, this is also a difficult situation for the environment, especially for close family members and best friends. It is often a tightrope walk between help for the loved one and self-abandonment. Only if you yourself have a “healthy soul” can you be a stable support for your partner.
It is also important that it is not the relatives’ task to treat the depressed person. There are always people who very often unintentionally and unconsciously have the feeling that they have to heal the depressive person. This is not possible and also makes little sense.
Dealing with the diseased
It is important not to underestimate the disease. This is sometimes a very serious illness that must be taken seriously and treated professionally. One should show understanding for the mood and situation in which the person affected finds himself, even if healthy people can never fully comprehend it.
Advice such as: “Pull yourself together” and “Why don’t you go on holiday”, or “Don’t be so ungrateful”, or even that “everyone gets sick” and one should be grateful that things are going well, completely ignore the situation and give the patient the feeling of not being understood and helpless. On the other hand, the depressive person is put under even more pressure and feels even worse. Depression is a disease of the psyche, just as asthma is a disease of the lungs.
Therefore it is important to take the suffering and the illness as seriously as any other physical illness. For many of those affected, it is all the more difficult to talk about mental illness, as acceptance in society is not necessarily as widespread as with physical illness. Ideally, relatives show that they do not dismiss the feelings and do not consider the affected persons to be “crazy people” who “just need to pull themselves together”.
Sometimes it helps if you offer to be there to talk and listen, even if you cannot understand how it feels. Since people often withdraw during a depression, it doesn’t hurt to check up on them from time to time and do small activities like going for a walk. Because of the listlessness that comes with the disease, even the smallest activities are too much and cost more energy than usual.
Therefore one should not set too big goals. However, society can help you feel less alone. Depending on the severity of the illness, it can also be useful to seek professional help and support for those affected.
Depressive people unconsciously turn every or many thoughts into the negative and often have hardly any feeling for positive things and thoughts. On the contrary, one should try to motivate the patient and be there for him. It is enough to accompany him in his everyday life and support him in all his tasks.
And just listening, even if you are at a loss for words, often works wonders. The sick person should have the feeling that all his or her behaviour is understood and not rejected. As much as one should motivate the depressed person, one should take care not to overtax him.
There are some things that the affected person cannot do or accomplish in this way and to demand them would only make both sides even more unhappy. Above all this concerns the point proximity! This is especially difficult for a person affected to give when one cannot love oneself and all thoughts are negative.
Relatives should therefore not put people suffering from depression under pressure or overtax them unnecessarily. Relatives of people with depression find help in various institutions. Often they are the ones who notice a possible depression or mental illness even before the person affected.
Advice can also be found in this situation. In addition to numerous websites and books, one can of course find help from a therapist or psychiatrist, as well as psychologists. In the beginning you should get an overview and acknowledge depression for what it is – a sometimes very serious illness.
For a healthy person, it is often not easy to interpret the patient’s behaviour and feelings correctly or even to put oneself in the situation. Misunderstandings often arise. This is one of the main reasons why one should inform oneself sufficiently.
Once you know what you are doing, you may react less irritably to some behaviour. You can get this first overview very well through books and websites. Of course there will be further questions, or you may want to talk to someone about your own condition.
A therapist or a self-help group where you can exchange experiences with other affected people and get advice is a good option. In addition, there is the possibility of taking advantage of free therapy in every city. But often you have to wait a little longer for an appointment.
In addition to understanding the disease of depression, it does many relatives good to talk about their own condition, their fears and worries with a therapist. If you have the feeling that you need this, you should definitely seek help. Finally, one should not ignore the most important help: friends and family.
It is important to have people around you who will listen to you, comfort you and, especially if your partner is depressed, take your wife, husband, girlfriend or boyfriend along to leisure activities and thus help him/her to get something out of everyday life with the patient. There are countless helpful support organisations, all of which offer various services such as a pastoral care telephone or seminars on how to deal with depressives. Self-help groups can also be useful for dealing with the illness and talking about your own difficulties in dealing with depression. At NAKOS (National Contact and Information Point for the Stimulation and Support of Self-Help Groups) you can find self-help groups of relatives near your own place of residence.
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