Loving Someone with Depression

I have a relative, who, every three or four years, decided that this time her bipolar disorder really was cured! And so she’d stop taking her medication and feel really, really good for a few months. And then the inevitable crash happened and she spent a few months in hospital.

The last time was different though. In her seventies, her body couldn’t take the strain again. And now she’s in a long term care facility for dementia, probably for the rest of her life — fortunately close for her husband. Moral of the story: if you want to go off your meds, make sure a doctor is keeping an eye on you. No matter how good the good times feel.

To affirm you experience, the meds can most certainly have the effects you are witnessing. There’s a few gems of the stories told in Dopamine Nation including of the author that touch on this topic about antidepressants and the side effects. It’s worth having her dose and medication examined much closer by the right professional in your country (I’m in the US and know the system best here). If you need any help navigating, I’m pretty easy to get in touch with and happy to help point you and/or your partner in the right direction along with any supplemental information that may help.

I was a very outspoken atheist myself for many years, an officer in my college's chapter of the secular student alliance back in the early 2010's. I was raised going to a mainline church sometimes, but it didn't do anything for me. I never had a grudge against Christianity or anything, but I grouped Jesus and God in with Santa at some point as a teenager and never really thought further about it.

So I didn't think I could be converted either. I thought "Good without God" was how I could live, and things would eventually work out if I could just tune my environment or my brain chemistry accordingly. But I eventually found myself backed into a corner when I realized I had no way to reconcile meaning, joy, or goodness with myself or life as I could understand it. I wasn't good at all, if I was honest with myself. I felt exactly as you described, without value in a world that had no value.

There's a lot to be said to tell the whole story, but to be anticlimactic, my solution was indeed Jesus. Considering his words, his claims, his promises, and daring to believe they applied to me, that's how I found hope, and a reason to live life as though I do have some value. How I got to that point from atheist, that required a long process of addressing a number of assumptions and biases before choosing to believe. The whole "church" part came after, and was more of the icing on the cake.

BTW, if you're curious at all, here's what I was reading tonight that actually got me thinking on the topic of "poverty of spirit" and what it means to Christianity in particular (starts at section I.1 - https://www.ccel.org/ccel/wesley/sermons.v.xxi.html )

I gotta go to bed, but if you wanna chat more or hear the whole story sometime let me know. I can email that address you posted in the other comment. Wishing you the best.

At the beginning, I thought this was written by someone like me - i.e. the not clinically depressed person in a relationship. I'm impressed this person had the insight and compassion to understand what the people around him went through, and thought, and the strategies they composed, while trying to rescue him from it. For me, ten years of watching the love of my life struggle with severe manic/depressive episodes, there are a few more bits of advice I could add for the partner of someone with depression, but everything he says here is accurate. Specifically: * You can't just entertain them with novelty; it doesn't last * You can't drag them out of bed, or of the darkness * You can't argue or reason it out - you'll end up depressed yourself if you try.

What you can do is internalize their reasoning and find that you don't accept the ultimate, inescapable negativity that they see everywhere. You can be unreasonably kind and forgiving. You can never lose your temper. You can see the things you know they would love to see in the world, if they got out of their hole, and you can gently try to put them in the orbit of those things and point those things out to them every day, to get their internal excitement and curiosity about the world spinning up again a little bit.

There are so many things you shouldn't do, the list would be too long to write here. But the number one thing is not to try to out-depress the depressed. It's good to hug them and to be there and to go into the darkness with them. But if you take this on, you can never let it infect you. If you're in love with a clinically depressed person:

* You can never have a bad day. * You can never tell them that you, too, question the reason we're alive or the meaning of the universe. * You can never respond the way you would with a normal, self-regulating person, when you shoot the shit about how fucked up everything is. Or even some specific thing. Like how fucked up some twitter thread is. You can never let something visibly get to you, because your depressed person will take that as a cue that it should really get to them. They aren't just depressed; they take cues from what's around them and they will be more depressed the more depressed other people are.

For this reason, it's urgent that you pretend like everything is fine. You have to understand that clinically depressed people take more than they give. This is okay because they aren't doing it to gain power or to hurt anyone. Being able to give and adapt to them makes you a stronger person; it forces you to be a superhero, no matter how much you don't want to be. No matter how much you want to get depressed too, you know you just can't because someone's relying on you. It makes you better at coping with all the hard parts of life because, if she can't cope, someone has to cope, and the only someone is you. But it's hard. And you'll rarely or never hear a heartfelt moment of understanding / apology like the one in this post. You have to know that you're doing good, without anyone else ever telling you that you did a good job, or that it's going to be okay. And with most of your friends and family telling you to get away from the crazy person who you love more than anything.

You'll be alright, person who loves and supports depressed person. It'll make you stronger in the end.

There are programs, non-profits, and alternative treatments depending on the country/region/state/city. If you are able to send US text messages for free to/from the US, you can use X2AI’s chatbot for free by texting “YC” to (650) 825-9634. It will at least get you access to CBT coaching, which has shown to help. Medication (once one finds the right one for themselves) helps many, but here is a good TED talk on approaches without medication: https://youtu.be/drv3BP0Fdi8

Disclosure: I know the founder.