Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
When Someone
You Love Is
Depressed
When someone you love is depressed …
… you feel lost, afraid, confused.
… you long for the person who was.
… you don’t recognize who he or she has become.
… you feel shut out.
… you feel angry and frustrated.
… you feel drained.
… you are desperate for a way to connect.
… you feel guilty and alone.
… you will do anything to help.
When someone you love is depressed, you may experience a wide range of emotions such as these, and more. You may feel shock. You might wish to push away the whole situation and deny reality. You could be angry. “How could this happen?” you may thunder. “Why is this happening to us, to our family, to my friend?” You might withdraw or feel hopeless and depressed yourself. You might even try negotiating with God or with your loved one: “If only you would try harder … If only you would get up in the morning, I’ll be more responsive to you.”
Your loved one may have become depressed because of having just lost a job or experienced a financial setback, or may be dejected because of a recent death in the family or the breakup of a relationship. There is a continuum between simply having the blues to suffering from a full-blown clinical depression. My family’s story falls toward the more difficult end of the spectrum. I share it now as a way to convey how deeply felt is the caregiver’s struggle to help a depressed loved one and the genuine pain that the depressed individual suffers.
When I was fourteen years old, my mom became depressed. My mother’s depression, precipitated by my older brother’s departure to England for graduate studies at Oxford University, felt as if a blackout shade had dropped first over her room and then the entire house. There had been episodes of depression before, like partial eclipses of the sun, which had thrown us off balance for a few moments. But in the past, after the shadow had receded, we were all able to get back on track.
This was different. For days and then weeks, my mom would not leave her room. Her every breath was a moan of pain. She wore only black nightclothes. She rarely dressed. Somehow dinner would appear—but she didn’t. The aloneness was deafening.
I remember trying to help. I’d go into her room after school and sit at the edge of her bed, hoping to cheer her with stories about my friends’ schoolyard antics. I’d leave tests that I was proud of on the nightstand. She didn’t respond. Sometimes I found myself just talking to her, pretending that she was listening … and acting lighthearted. In truth, I was terrified—it was all I could do to keep from bursting.
At other times she would rant. It would start rather quietly, and at first I was thankful she was speaking. But soon her tone would turn surly and hard as she went on about some person or event that had ruined her life. She threatened suicide. Sometimes I was the “cause” of her problems.
No amount of protestation or reasoning would penetrate that drawn shade of despair.
My father sought help. Our family doctor would make timely home visits. On occasion my mother responded positively to this show of concern. But sometimes after the doctor left she would rail at us for embarrassing her and aggravating the situation. My mom was ashamed that our doctor would think she was “crazy,” and as a result she refused any treatment except pain pills. She would use various prescribed medications for the many physical complaints that became the focus of her problems. After several months of this roller coaster of silence, ranting, physical complaints, and outright rejection, my dad retreated and my grades and achievement started to suffer.
My mother was never quite the same.
Many years later, while in graduate school, studying educational psychology, I decided to test the waters of psychotherapy and train as a hot-line counselor for the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center. During the interview, one of the directors asked, “Why do you have an interest in suicide prevention?” I hemmed and hawed, cleared my throat, started talking about “helping others” and always having been “interested in psychology.” I mentioned in passing that my mother had been depressed at times.
At the end of the interview, the director said, “I think the best reason you offered for doing this training is that it might help you understand your mother. Her depression is a good reason for your engaging in this work. In fact, it makes you highly qualified. That’s excellent training!”
With that surprising introduction began a long road to understanding my mother’s depression and, in the process, helping myself become a better son, a more sensitive caregiver, and a more empathetic psychologist. What I didn’t know then—but what the director had seen so clearly during the interview—was that my interest in psychology was motivated by my need to find ways to help my mom, my family, and myself.
What motivates me now is to share with you what I’ve learned about how to cope when someone you love is depressed. What I have discovered from years of training and from having counseled hundreds of families who have shared their sorrows and their joys is that there are ways you can help someone you love who is depressed. And in that process, you will grow closer.
THE MYTHS SURROUNDING DEPRESSION
Unlike chronic illnesses such as heart disease or arthritis, depression carries with it a stigma of shame that adds to its intensity. This stigma can prevent the 17 million Americans who suffer from depression—and who desperately need treatment—from seeking help. Indeed, according to a recent report in The New York Times, two thirds of those requiring treatment for depression never receive it.
Untreated depression costs the nation between $30 billion and $44 billion a year in medical expenses, work absenteeism, and lost productivity.
The myths and half-truths that abound concerning this condition may make it even harder for you and your loved one to cope with an illness that in itself can be terribly debilitating. Let’s look at some of these myths right now, and dispel them.
MYTH 1:
WITH ENOUGH WILLPOWER, ANYONE CAN OVERCOME DEPRESSION.
Statements such as “If only he would try harder …” or “If only she would be reasonable …” or “If only he would snap out of it!” can exacerbate an already difficult situation.
Expressing such sentiments to a person who is depressed is as futile as telling a kidney-disease patient, “With enough willpower you can control your renal functioning.”
The belief that he lacks the fortitude and character to overcome his problem can reinforce the negative thoughts a depressed person already has about himself, and can cause him to label himself weak, lazy, stupid, or a failure. This is counterproductive, for it potentially deepens the downward spiral of self-criticism and despair that is already at work.
Even those of us who are not depressed are familiar with self-critical thoughts. We all have them. But we know they come and go, and usually we can manage them. Unfortunately, a depressed person is unable to do so; controlling his negative thoughts is not within the realm of what he feels is possible. The words repeat endlessly like a mournful refrain on a broken record: “I’m lazy,” “I’m stupid,” “I’m a failure,” “I’m worthless,” “Life is hopeless.”
Often a depressed person, as if in a free fall, goes where his emotions take him. Those of us who are not depressed know that the rides our emotions take us on eventually end, but the depressed individual experiences the ups and downs, twists and turns of his feelings as if on a runaway train without a clear sense of how or when—or even if—he can ever get off. Unfortunately, he can’t will himself off, either.
Depression is an illness that has biological, social, psychological, and genetic components. It must be treated. It may often be a chronic condition that comes and goes, with flare-ups and moments of remission. Willpower has little to do with it.
MYTH 2:
IT’S ALL IN HIS HEAD.
Recently I watched the movie The Madness of King George. I remember thinking as I sat in the theater, “Oh, King George is depressed. It must be because he lost the Colonies. The doctor is using his eighteenth-century version of positive reinforcement … and it’s working.”
Even I was taken aback during the final credits when I learned of the medical condition—porphyria, a physical illness of the nervous system—that might have triggered the king’s madness. I wondered, was King George’s problem only physical or was the loss of the Colonies a significant stressor that triggered the illness? Who knows?
But the movie’s lesson is crucial for all of us. What looks like madness may in reality be the consequences of some biological condition. Depression is not always in the head. It can, in fact, occur as a symptom of a seemingly unrelated medical ailment.
MYTH 3:
DEPRESSION IS SOMETHING TO BE ASHAMED OF.
Some people, like my mother, believe that depression is a form of craziness, and this belief evokes shame. This hearkens back to the state of affairs a mere century ago and calls up images that still tenaciously resonate within us today, of individuals experiencing emotional illness who were shunned in society and thrown into inhumane lunatic asylums.
Shame is a symptom that often accompanies depression. However, it simply isn’t true that depression is something to be ashamed of. Depression is not a moral stand one takes by choice, a choice for which one should blame oneself.
As a symptom, however, the depressed person’s feelings of shame can be a valuable part of understanding some of the psychological roots of the illness. Once these feelings are explored in therapy, it often relieves some of the depression. But labeling depression as a shameful state makes it even worse—like heaping shame upon shame.
Unfortunately, someone who is depressed may at times also think, feel, and even believe that he is going crazy. When you add to the shame the stigma of craziness, the situation becomes dizzying. The association with craziness conjures up images straight out of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in which institutionalization is followed, horribly, by electroconvulsive therapy administered without anesthesia and lobotomy. These may be unrealistic and outmoded fears, but for the person who is depressed, they are quite real.
As a caregiver, your role is to be a supportive and strengthened ally, reassuring your loved one that his worst fears won’t be realized, and that you will be there through all the treatments.
We all must be careful not to label, stereotype, or pigeonhole anyone suffering from depression.
