Guidelines for caring for a family member with depression
One of the most frequent feelings that people have depression is misunderstanding, they feel that their environment, their friends, their families do not understand how they feel and end up seeing it as a vague or lazy person.
Understanding how a depressed person feels helps us to connect better with her, to feel closer to her, in addition, our help is more effective understanding how it feels than trying to stop feeling like this.
What is depression?
The depression It is an emotional disorder that involves important changes in our way of thinking, feeling and acting. The main symptoms are sadness and hopelessness, but symptoms may also appear such as loss of appetite, insomnia, guilt, loss of interest in activities ...
We must know that no one is depressed for no reason, a person begins to become depressed when changes appear, it can be the loss of a loved one, work, illness, etc ..., and aspects of our life that previously made us feel good disappear or they no longer make us feel so good, which produces an imbalance between the balance of the positive and the negative that we perceive, paying more attention to negative events.
People who become depressed react to pain by not doing their normal life, stop doing satisfactory activities such as reading, walking, going out with friends, sports, etc and even stop doing obligatory tasks such as going to work, housework. All this makes them feel more lost and consequently more pain.
In addition to stop doing things, the person begins to change the way of thinking and negative thoughts appear that may be about oneself, about others or about the future. These thoughts that are automatic and involuntary make us feel intense negative emotions that can affect the organism like the desire to cry, loss of appetite and weight, loss of sleep ...
Any loss causes pain in people, which affects us more or less will depend on our experiences and learning models, so not all people who go through complicated situations are depressed.
How to care for a person with depression?
Many times the relatives get angry with the depressed person because they do not respond to their attempts to improve, because they see that they do nothing to feel better, however, these attempts increase the discomfort of the depressed person. And it is that taking care of a depressed person is complicated.
Some guidelines to help the depressed person:
- Understand how depression works and that the reactions and changes that occur are not by the will of the person, but effects of depression.
- Do not reinforce your complaints or your negative thoughtsDo not pay too much attention to depressive behaviors so as not to feed your negative view of things.
- Control your anger. If you see that the person has not responded as expected, has not done something that should, etc, try not to get angry, this only increases the feeling of uselessness of the person making him feel worse.
- Propose activities but keep in mind that the depressed person will not be very willing, with what must be activities that do not require much effort, start small things.
- Reinforce small changes anything, like a smile, take the initiative in something, get ready, etc, in this way we generate positive emotions and we encourage it to be repeated in the future.
Rocío Navarro Psychologist Director of Psicolari, integral psychology
