Advice needed. My friend admitted herself to hospital for depression, she was in hospital for 4 months and came of hospital around six months ago and told me they changed her medication and is feeling a lot better.
Since I have known her, she has always been a stay at home mum with her husband supporting her. She has one child, who is now a teenager and has told me that now that he is growing up she does not see what her role in life is any more, coupled with the fact that she can not stop thinking about the second child (girl?) she wanted, but never had.
We have coffee together, she tells me all is OK, but she still comes across as lacking in energy and without any zest for life (a common feeling that comes across on several posts within this thread).
I have offered her concert tickets & theatre ticket and more recently a spa day - she has ummed and erred and then decided that she has not been feeling up to any of them (I can understand her refusing the concert & theatre - but really thought I could have convinced her take up my offer of a spa day).
What I want to know is:
Do I keep trying to encourage her to do things, or is this putting unnecessary pressure on her?
And secondly: How do you come through something like this? I appreciate you can take medication to improve your state of mind and it helps to have a strong support system. But what I am trying to understand from the people who have come out the other side, is how much of it has been down to you as an individual e.g. did you make a decision to pro-actively change aspects of your lifestyle or have you learnt to apply some self help mechanisms when you start recognising the signs of feeling down.
You sound like a great friend who's there for her. Depression can also take also take its toll on friends and family. We can't help but want those we care about to be fine, and it makes us sad and anxious when they're not.
There's lots of resources out there for friends and family, e.g.
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from Mind.
My take on your friend is that she has grief for the child that never appeared, and anxiety about a major life change coming her way when her role as a mum inevitably lessens as her son grows up. Both of these are huge issues and only she can resolve them. It sounds like she's had proper treatment and this is continuing. A common treatment for major life issue-driven depression is talking therapies so that the individual can vocalise all their sadness, grief, anger and anxiety, and by doing that begin to get a hold on it. Once that starts, nature does its miraculous healing thing and the individual comes to be a little more at peace with the sad event, and eventually to see a future which might not be the one that was planned, but which is bearable and even, possibly, enjoyable.
The above describes my own experience of reactive depression. Friends and family are important support through this, but ultimately the hard work, the actual curing, is done by the individual and their therapist.
However the fact your friend was hospitalised with depression for 4 months suggests a different kind of case, and one that's outside my ken.
I know when I was in the throes of mine, I wouldn't have been up for concerts and spa days, but I was up for getting out for an hour or so. I remember a friend took me to the pub for a drink. We had one, we were there only about an hour, and then I wanted to go home. She felt she had failed but in fact that single hour had been absolutely wonderful - yes, it was all I could cope with at the time, but it was brilliant to be in a different place, hearing her chat, enjoying the buzz of the pub. I reassured her that she'd done me a huge favour, and we made it a more regular thing. Your friend will know what she enjoys (and there will be stuff she enjoys). You can ask her to find out what that is, but sometimes just listen really, really carefully to what she's saying. E.g. she may be talking about something she did and you'll notice that she gets animated and happy while talking about it. Whatever that thing was - cooking, building an airfix model, window shopping, walking in the park - register it and maybe suggest something similar in due course.
In answer to your second question, if you look back through this thread there's loads of people talking about their experience of how they got through it: drugs, talking therapies, exercise (of limited value in my case but many on here highly rate it), relaxation techniques (I personally can't rate mindfulness highly enough), making lifestyle changes etc.
Hope this helps. Feel free to PM me.
