Dealing with Down

I’ve come to realise that what people need when they are in a bad way is not intellectual arguments, but emotional support. We might think that we are logical, but in reality we are far more instinctually and emotionally driven than we realise. We post rationalise a great deal more logic into a situation than was actually there.

When people are down, they aren’t being logical. Being down is a state of mind, not an argument of the mind. The depressed just aren’t interested in logical arguments. You need to give them arguments relevant to their state of mind.

That doesn’t mean you have to be nice to them. People that are down are often not helped by you being nice to them. Often they have to be shocked out of their behaviour. Frequently, people use their downward mood swings to get attention. Many people crave sympathy and pity, often enjoying the very act of self pity in a masochistic kind of way. The thing is that any intense emotion – be it love, hate, desire or self-pity – can be addictive.

Don’t get me wrong, for many people are helped by the moral support that a good friend can offer. They will use that person to help themselves get back up again, as a sort of crutch. The problem is that sometimes they then become dependent on that crutch or come to enjoy the act of being helped so much that they can’t help but fall back down again to provoke a similar reaction.

A tactic I’ve started to use with some success recently is to not allow them fall into self pity. It is a matter of imposing your own frame on their world and not giving them the chance to let the world slide into their frame, in which case their problems again become important. By pulling these people into your own frame and showing them it is possible to live without their problems for a while you give them an alternative. Hopefully they will then pick up a new mindset and learn to let go of their problems.

Once they do this they can actually start to solve their own problems, or come to realise that they aren’t actually as big as they’ve made them out to be. Self-pity is self defeating in that it pushes those who can help you solve your problems away from you. Often many of the problems in a depressed person’s life are actually created by their depression and can’t be dealt with until the depression is first cured. They do things the wrong way around by dealing with their problems (the symptoms) and not the depression (the root cause).

Help these people let go of their depression and the rest of their lives will often get a great deal easier, with many things falling into line. The best way to make people let go is to show them an alternative setting without depression and show them how much better things are.