> Recognize your brain lies to you
Thank you for re-emphasizing this. I believe it is the single most important bit of knowledge we can have about depression.
My wife has been struggling with depression on and off for years, and it always frustrates me how she in the depressed periods seemingly belittles and obliterates all the good things that happen around her, while all inconveniences and imperfections, big or small, are considered capital P Problems.
I didn't know much about depression to start with, but it was pretty apparent that this imbalanced outlook was keeping her depression going and making it worse.
If we overslept one day and one of the kids missed the first class at school (for the first time in over a year), she conceives this a significant failure, the teacher will be giving her Looks from now on, and if it happens just fifteen more times this year we are in risk of the child being kicked out of school. While in my view, I think the teacher doesn't care if it happens once, but rather is very happy with us for generally sending a happy and well-dressed child to school, who generally has her homework in order and has been taught that both reading and learning are fun.
So I try to point out the positive things whenever I can, and explain how the negative things won't cause and real damage to us. It does help, but obviously she resists the "fake obnoxious rose-tinted world view" because she can clearly see how everything is wrong. The problem with this is that this endless list of lengthy explanations of everything that is wrong and how wrong it is, and the constant trivialization of the happy moments of the day, is slowly rubbing off on me.
For a long time I was oblivious to how this affected me, until last year after she had gotten better, I suddenly crashed. At nights, I would lie awake for hours - heart pounding - thinking about how I have not done anything useful or significant ever, and how everyone I loved would in the best case be dying painfully of liver failure in old age or something like that. I could barely watch the news, because every distant little tragedy would affect me personally and making me useless for the rest of the day. When my children were running out of bed because they forgot to give me good-night hugs I would sometimes feel absolutely nothing.
Fortunately, my wife is pretty sharp and noticed the problem even though I myself didn't even notice that anything was wrong. She told me that I showed signs of depression, and we decided to keep pressure down for a few months - less travelling, less ski trips, forget about redecorating the hallway, etc.
That helped, and the knowledge that my brain lies to me helped, even though it ran much deeper than I had imagined: my brain constructs both my thoughts, my reasoning, and my impressions. Having to use this same lying bastard brain to "fix" the brain is pretty damn tricky.
We're both pretty much recovered now, but I have two pieces of advice to give:
1. Depression is contagious. If a close loved one is suffering, be sure to constantly keep an eye on yourself.
2. While the brain lies, memory is pretty reliable. When you have difficulties dealing with something, try to remember how you used to react to this before.