What not to say when your friend has depression

What not to say when your friend has depression Male depression is more prevalent than ever. But are we better at talking about it rather than to our friends in need? Josh Burt offers up some advice

IT ALWAYS SOUNDS suspicious when you start a sentence with ‘so I have this friend, right…’ – the assumption often being that you’re that friend, and you’re concealing your true identity for fear of revealing too much about yourself. But I do, I have this friend, right, called Kish.

Kish is funny, successful, thoughtful, popular, and he’s got a very stylish wardrobe. On paper, life for Kish couldn’t be better. But, in reality, Kish is ill, he suffers from depression – an overwhelming, inexplicable, numbing depression that can make him feel hopeless for weeks or months at a time, a depression that can be saddening and brutal. A condition that, despite everything we know from earlier in this paragraph, often finds Kish feeling lonely, isolated, and convinced nobody cares.

Now, when you do care about someone, that can be hard to fathom. It doesn’t matter that reported cases of depression, anxiety and eating disorders have soared over 600% in the last decade, or that suicide is now the biggest killer of men under 45 in the UK. It doesn’t matter that we are now used to hearing guys in the public eye like Stormzy, Rio Ferdinand, Bruce Springsteen, Brad Pitt, Kanye West, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Kendrick Lamar and even Prince Harry discussing 

their mental health issues. When it affects someone close to you, someone who has always seemed to thrive at life, it can be discombobulating. You’re taken aback by it. Hence why people, on hearing of their friend’s plight, can get lost in a vast ocean of awkwardness, unsure of what to say.

‘I was buoyed by the literature about depression that suggested it was good to tell people,’ says Kish, ‘but, when I did, I was faced with mixed responses, and some people reacted by avoiding talking about it. Even people I thought I was close to didn’t react in the way I expected. But there are others who have really surprised me in a wonderful way by how generous and supportive they’ve been.’

See, that’s the thing with our newfound attitude towards mental health – refreshing, important, and hugely necessary though it is for the conversation to be happening, it’s equally important for those who aren’t suffering to understand how they can help too. How they can be good friends to those in need. How they can speak about it without feeling weird.

Often when people talk about this as a male issue, it’s tempting to put any communication struggles down to old clichés about men being bad at discussing their feelings, but the world has turned enough for that to not be the case any more. Any issues with reacting to depression aren’t just down to an inability to communicate, suggests Dr Barbara Mariposa, mental health lead at Work Well Being, an organisation focused on well-being in the workplace. It may simply be a case of not coming to the table with enough information.

‘We shouldn’t still be distinguishing between mental and physical illness,’ she says. ‘As soon as you place “mentally” before “ill”, it raises the stigma that is unnecessarily there because of our ignorance.’

And, make no mistake, when it comes to depression, for a large part we are ignorant. Often painted in broad brush strokes, it’s something people think they have some experience of, because we’ve all felt sad. But it’s so much more nuanced than that. Kish talks of feeling like he’s ‘looking through a massive prism and everything is distorted’. The Guardian writer Tim Lott wrote a fantastic piece a year or so ago, explaining how his depression makes him feel like a ‘half-living ghost’, and how ‘making the smallest decisions can be agonising’. JK Rowling describes it as the ‘absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again’. If you haven’t been depressed, the simple fact is that you don’t know how it feels.

Accepting that, though it sounds harsh, is the best thing you can do. As human beings we like to feel we are well-adjusted enough to empathise completely at any given time, and that we will always have a helpful answer. But if you accept that sometimes you won’t – that sometimes other people can simply be perplexing – then you no longer need to scramble around searching for your own viewpoint. You can embrace being at a place of ignorance, and from there you can start to learn without relying on your preconceived notions of how things should be, and how people should feel. Ironically, you’re then a step closer to being useful.

‘You will never know what it’s really like to be someone else,’ says Dr Mariposa, ‘so, if someone is depressed, why don’t you simply ask them how you can help? It’s very English to maintain silence and not to broach a difficult subject, but rather than worrying about feeling uncomfortable, listen to your natural human response to the situation, which is to care.’

‘Let them guide you,’ says Kish. ‘Be patient with them, and avoid platitudes like “there’s light at the end of the tunnel”, or “give me a call if you need to chat” – that, for me, is the worst, because in my distorted brain, it seems to transfer the burden to me to ask for help, when I might not be in the right frame of mind to do so. Instead, leave voicemails, check in with amusing anecdotes about your day, send silly texts. One friend of mine, a total legend, offered to cut a key for their flat with the rule that I just come over when I’m feeling awful. The theme with all of these things is to make your depressed friends feel like they matter, despite what’s going on in your own life.’

Stephen Fry once said, ‘It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do’. I have another friend who has suffered from depression who would totally agree with that. And yes, in this case, that friend is me.

n If you or someone you know is struggling with depression, call The Samaritans’ 24-hour helpline on 116 123 for free advice

LISTEN TO YOUR NATURAL HUMAN RESPONSE TO THE SITUATION, WHICH IS TO CARE