Depression is an extremely painful disease is something that all those who have suffered from it testify. Also those who, for reasons of their profession, accompany them in this painful process. Psychologists and therapists are experts in how to help a person with depression that the suffering of the depressive is terrible and not comparable to any other disease. To the extreme, they assert, that many of them would change their disease for any other ailment.

The unbearable torment they confess to suffer is highlighted when it is found that many of the depressives think of death as the least bad exit or, better yet, as a true liberation. Perhaps that is the greatest tragedy that the depressed must face: to verify that the sadness that paralyzes him is so profound that he has annihilated the last thing that, according to popular wisdom, is lost: hope. And, unfortunately, it is not something purely rhetorical. According to studies, up to 40% of suicides are associated with depressive illnesses.
Decalogue to help a person with depression

The family as a therapeutic factor. The importance that, in such circumstances, the family acquires as an element of containment and help deserves to be highlighted. In the midst of the experience of bewilderment, stress and, frequently, of impotence in the face of the suffering in which the beloved person is debating, it will become an invaluable instrument to help a person with depression if he knows how to maintain temper, control anxiety and act according to the guidelines that, according to what the experts recommend, are the most indicated in dealing with someone suffering from severe depression. I will underline some of them:

1.- Put it in the hands of professionals

Depression is a serious illness. The therapeutic intervention on the depressive can not be left in the hands of amateurs who, with innocuous advice and indications, sometimes counterproductive, believe they can get him out of the pit of desolation in which he feels sunken. The principle of healing goes through persuading him that it requires the intervention of specialists in psychiatry or psychology. Convincing him will not always be easy, but it is absolutely essential. The tact and the delicacy with which they perform this task will contribute to overcoming resistances and overcome misgivings. In any case, the family should be persistent in this regard, always ready to accompany the patient to the medical consultation and not oppose, if so advised by professionals, to internment.

2. - Help him accept depression

How to help a depressed person. Nobody is guilty of suffering from a disease. When it is installed in a house, both those who suffer it and those around it are deeply affected. It is difficult for the sick person to accept his condition as such. Nor is it easy for the rest of the family. However, the principle of any therapeutic process is to assume that situation. Recognize the fact, accept the limitations it implies for the patient and their environment, reevaluate the emotional relationship that is maintained with him, modify the expectations that may be had and help him to accept, after the natural period of denial, sadness or anger, what is not in your hands to avoid. If this is achieved and the purpose of collaborating with mental health experts is maintained, the path that will lead to lessening the consequences of depression will have been entered.

3 .- Be by your side

Those of us who have never experienced a depressive episode have difficulties in understanding the degree of suffering, helplessness and loss of meaning in which the depressive is sunk.

You do not need pious recommendations, nor constant invitations to raise your spirits or to do more of your part. As if that were something that depends on his will! ... He needs empathetic people who do not judge him, who show him understanding, who simply know how to be by his side.

4 .- Respect their silences

How to help a depressed To help a person with depression, you have to let them know that you are aware of their grief and are willing to respect them. Willingness to listen to you, if you want to talk, and understanding and respect, if you prefer to keep quiet. Without forgetting that the tendency to isolation and communicative difficulty are part of the depressive symptomatology.

It is absurd to pressure a person with depression to be sociable. As if that were something that was within reach! These attitudes stress him and make him feel more alone with the evidence that those around him do not seem to notice the limitations imposed by his depressive illness and the deep pain they cause him.

5.- Do not ask for explanations from the depressive

Simply, because you can not give them. Neither does he know what is wrong with him and why he has fallen into a depression. Requiring them is a clumsiness that will cause irritation. And that will reinforce his conviction of not being understood. Demanding rational explanations for something that has nothing to do with reason, is not, if I am allowed redundancy, nothing reasonable and reinforces the depressive in his experience of deep loneliness. Lope de Vega, who suffered severe depression, says: "If I asked myself how bad I am, I would not know how to respond, no matter how long I thought about it".

6.- Run away from the tips

Invitations to be encouraged, to do your part, to go out, to have fun, to participate in activities ... are indications doomed to failure. Simply because it is not in their hands to follow them. Referring to his therapeutic experience, Dr. Vallejo Nájera recalled that almost all those who have suffered a depression referred, after the time, the anguish produced by those slogans dictated by the good faith of their relatives. Without understanding that the blockade he suffers leads him to see any task, however routine or small it may seem, as an overwhelming burden.

7.- Do not press the depressive person

Hence the importance of avoiding slogans in that regard. Depression, as we said, is not something that is chosen. Nor something whose overcoming depends on free will. Insisting him to commit to activities that he does not feel comfortable with is counterproductive. He explains it graphically, again, Vallejo Nájera: "Depression makes it impossible to enjoy anything. If it takes him to a comic movie, 'I took him to see if he laughed a little', he will only perceive the enormous effort that costs him to leave home, that he is not able to follow the action of the film because his attention is fatigued, that others laugh and he remains indifferent and tends to be absorbed by turning his black thoughts around without paying attention to the projection. If this happens in something passive and pleasant like watching a comic movie, we can deduce how it is crushed if forced to go to work, to face a problem or an arduous task for which he feels incapacitated ".

8.- Transmit hope

The depressive experience is, we have been saying, hardly definable. The grief, despair, anguish, reluctance, the feeling of helplessness are amalgamated in the depths of the soul and makes those who experience such unsettling emotions, is perceived as in a dead end, as in a dark dungeon from which He can never be released. Those who are closest to you can always offer you a bit of hope. And to do it with legitimate coherence, persuading him that, even though at that moment he can not understand it, there is a way out of that prison and light at the end of his tunnel. Depression is a treatable disease and anyone who follows the guidelines set by professionals can embrace the legitimate hope that improvement will come.

9.- Positively reinforce the person with depression

The depressant's relevant trait is its self-esteem deficit. It tends to ignore its lights and to recreate its shadows, to remember its failures and to ignore the occasions on which success smiled, to highlight its shortcomings and highlight its weaknesses, ignoring its virtues and the merits contracted throughout its life . In such circumstances, the role of the family is key to helping a person with depression. How? Highlighting his qualities, putting in value the multiple capacities that he treasures and, above all, how much, despite the difficulties of the present moment, he or she means for those who love him so much.

10. - Take care of yourself

One last consideration: coexisting with the depressive is anything but easy. The moods are, to little that one is neglected, contagious. When they are negative, they tend to generate, in their environment, deeply painful experiences and contradictory emotions that are difficult to manage. Helping a person with depression is a no less challenge for which one must know how to prepare and before which one should protect oneself. It is not easy to coexist and take care of someone who has settled into sadness, who can have behaviors that are not easy to understand and with whom communication is always complicated.

In these circumstances, it will be necessary to take charge of the concerns and feelings of the different members of the family, to give each other mutual support and to try to control the situations that generate stress. Attending and helping a person with depression can not absorb all their emotional resources so that the "self-care" of the other members of the family is neglected.

It is a serious mistake to be trapped by the hard job of caregiver, eliminating spaces in which your own needs can be met. Those who do not know how to take care of themselves can hardly be a good help agent for a person with depression. It will end up blaming the patient, perpetuating the situation of which he intended to release him. To see, then, for oneself, far from being an expression of selfishness, is always a guarantee of efficacy in the treatment of sick relatives. As it is not too far from this decalogue that I propose to help someone with depression.