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Speaking to  Someone with Clinical Depression: Dos & Don’ts

All of us know someone who has dealt with some form of depressive episodes if not depression/moods disorder as a general condition. A few dos and donts when youspeak to a friend or family member going through depressive phases -

Do -

1. Be open to listening without providing readymade/off-the-shelf solutions. A lot of people who experience depression have heard platitudes and general recommendations thrown their way on a regular basis. What helps a lot more is someone who is willing to listen without reacting or negating the experience.

2. Ask if they need something that can help with day-to-day functioning. Something as simple as a good morning call or a shared meal can make a huge difference to someone's mood.

3. Support them if they need someone to accompany them to a therapy appointment or the ER without questioning too much. It is often hard to articulate even basic information when someone is going through severe depression. Being in the presence of trained and supportive medical/psychiatric/mental health professionals can ease people into communicating their challenges. However, getting there might be a task because a part of feeling depressed is a generalized sense of negativity and hopelessness. Having another person to lean on and find anchoring can enable in a positive way.

4. Check in and recommend speaking to a therapist or a mental health specialist especially if someone is repeatedly referring to suicidal ideation or a compulsion towards self-harm. You can help research available practitioners, hospitals, facilities that can be useful in such a situation.

5. Hold space with empathetic care. Instead of judgment, engage from a place of attention & care. Let them know that what they are experiencing is not a personal flaw or insignificant but a medical condition and they don't need to feel that they have to feel ashamed or stigmatized about it. Intervene when someone else tries to make them feel small or insignificant. Shut down negative conversations others might have around them.

Dont

1. Offer medical or mental health "solutions" if you are not a qualified professional. Irrespective of your intentions, your desire to play an activist et al, at the end of the day, unless you are trained in the field of mental health/behavioural medicine/psychiatry/counseling/psychotherapy, it is extremely dangerous to offer cobbled-up remedies that might worsen the situation.

2. Minimize their experience and struggle by generalizing it. Avoid such demeaning statements as "Why are you unhappy when everything seems to be working well for you?", "Stop being sad. Cheer up!", "It is all in your head only!" - These are incredibly hurtful for someone who has little to no control about how severe their depressive phases might get. The person then might recede further instead of actively seeking help or speaking to someone about their challenges.

3. Compare your struggles with theirs in such a way that puts them down. It is demoralizing for a person going through depression to constantly hear how "everyone" is "unhappy". This is not a universal fact and highly exaggerated, moreover while it is true that we all deal with our own struggles individually, certain illnesses including depression are highly specific and affect those who experience it deeply.

4. Make jokes that are truly in poor taste. Be cautious when you start using rough and punch-down humor to speak about serious topics like suicide or abuse that could be triggers and stressors for someone who is depressed. Humor when used with mindful intent can help lift us up but when we use someone who is suffering as a punching bag, it can have a disastrous impact.

5. Ask intrusive questions or make their condition a subject of gossip. Do not share any information that they release to you without their consent. Certainly don't put it up on social media in a fit of self promotion. It is incredibly unethical to speak about someone else's trauma publicly. It is not your place and it reduces the arc of their personal narrative, struggles and survival.

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Empathy Lessons : Apologies

Visit The Talking Compass for more information on therapy & counseling

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This Is Where Your Childhood Memories When : Your brain needs to forget in order to grow.

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Parents need to recognize the thresholds that are not only cognitively discernible but also necessary for a compatible and two-way relationship between their kids and them. Every time you sneak in a pejorative and demean a child’s intelligence, body, social skills, you are dropping an invisible but incredibly poisonous seed for future self-sabotage and destruction. From lisps to self-harm, a lot of what strikes long-term indentations can be traced back to feeling reduced and dismissed in parental and early caregiving relationships.

Scherezade Siobhan, Unwanted Inheritance : On Familial Gaslighting (Published at Medium)

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The more we react by trying to get rid of boredom, the less equipped we are to deal with it.

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Self-care often is not easy or even tangible in an instant grasp. A lot of it involves wrangling with the hard-wired conditioning of our own psyche : to authentically believe yourself capable of caring about yourself, as much as you care about everything else around you. Self-care is boundary setting, creating and maintaining support circles and networks, differentiating between self-reliance and social alienation. It is the idea of slowly making hope into a sombre discipline and a practice despite the possibility of failure. It is not exerting force on oneself to do or be something legible and well-defined at all points in time.

I am a child of a broken home and my Achilles heel has always been the lingering absence of parenting. Shuttled between multiple homes, I didn’t even fully recognize what my “self” was, let alone how to care for it. I don’t think I have a singular or a precise self which means my ways to care for my “selves” will be as cobbled & “inexact” as my multitudes. The question I ask frequently is : what kindnesses do I bring to my selves without haggling with my flaws? In these instances, self-care is “kintsugi” : a form of repair that appreciates the schisms as opposed to denying them.

Scherezade Siobhan, “Care is Made” (Via Medium)

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“I thought happiness was the whole point of this “mental health” thing. So I became something of an emotional hypochondriac — if I wasn’t happy, something was wrong.

Suddenly my very human experiences like sadness, anger, and anxiety were all “problems” that needed to be “fixed.” I had this unreasonable expectation that, if I worked hard enough, I could minimize the presence of every other emotion to become capital-h “Happy.”

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“Logotherapy posits that meaning is based on enduring values that emanate from three main sources: engaging in creative work or deeds of kindness; appreciating love, goodness, truth or beauty; and taking a courageous stance toward life's difficulties. In his work with clients, Frankl used techniques such as de­reflection (helping clients focus less on themselves and more on higher-level goals such as helping others) and Socratic dialogue (asking open-ended questions to help people uncover meaning-related aspirations). If a client is passionate about saving the environment, for example, a therapist might help him or her explore concrete ways to realize that vision, such as participating in a river cleanup or starting a work-based recycling program.”

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"Confidence could thus be understood as an orientation toward the future even if it is experienced in the present: to be confident in something is to be confident of something: that what you wish to bring about can be brought about."

Sara Ahmed's important essay on how we parse what confidence means to us in this social and political climate.

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We cannot disregard the social character of emotional abuse. Powers are vested in an abusive person or group on account of socio-cultural privileges. Deference is encouraged in patriarchal hierarchies that function entirely on subjugation and marginalisation of certain segments of our society in order to establish supremacy for others. Workplace harassment and abuse are often constructed on a Machiavellian interpretation of the pecking order. Aggression is considered synonymous with leadership and is not only supported but also encouraged and awarded."

Emotional Abuse: Move Past Commentary To Compassion

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When I think of A remembering her father as an “emptied wine bottle”, I wonder if the grief of his depressive lows, his persistent concavity, had swallowed his own tears to a point where nothing was left to pour out. Crying can be a connection, a flickering bridge that reminds us how we are secured to one another not just in gathered joys but also in the possibility of sharing our griefs.

Scherezade Siobhan, from “The Smallest Tear” (Published in Queenmobs)

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“The secret to satiation, to satisfaction, was not to meet or even acknowledge your needs, but to curtail them. We learn the same lesson about our emotional hunger: Want less, and you will always have enough."

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Loving and Being Loved.

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The way we were first loved and the ways we have been loved ever since form our definition of what love means to us. Some people really feel loved when someone gives them a gift. Others experience it when people stand up for them. Still others feel loved when someone goes the extra mile to help them. If our mother showed love by holding us in our pain or joy, without engulfing or controlling us, that will be the behavior that always feels like love to us. We feel love now as we first received it; we give love the way others gave it to us. Thus, since love is unique to each person, we read and write love, receive and give it, in the style designed by our past experience. Yet, like good handwriting, our unique signature can be read by others.”

David Richo, How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly (via thewriterscaravan)

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Affording therapy and counseling is not always easy. If you are a student or not financially privileged, accessing help can be challenging. Some of us are introverts who might not be comfortable with standards means of in-person or online counseling. Keeping these factors in mind, The Talking Compass is now actively providing email based counselling for those who need it. 

Apart from this, we also provide online and telephonic counseling. 

Write to us : thetalkingcompass@gmail.com

Visit us here.

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How to support friends through their mental health struggles.

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Ask your therapist/clinician if their practice is informed by an intersectional and inclusive approach to mental health. Conditioning about sexual assault is often an outcome of sundry factors tied together by systemic oppression that emerges from misogyny, casteism, racism, classism and gender stereotyping among other inequalities that frame our daily social stratification. If you are seeking help, your therapist needs to have a distinctly broad-spectrum approach to mental health so that you can participate in a safe, assuring conversation without being shamed or challenged in negative ways.

Scherezade Siobhan, 4 things you need to know when talking to your therapist about assault/abuse (Published at Smashboard)