In depression, it feels like you just can't cope with your life. There's too much going on, it's too hard, and you can't cope. You just want to freeze life and maybe take away some pieces to make it that you could possibly try to cope with it.💙

That's why it's so frustrating when someone says, "I know what you should do, you should do X or Y or Z". It's like, it's not possible to add something to what's going on in a depressed person's life. They simply don't have the energy, they don't have the cognitive ability to deal with something else. 💙

So the best way to support someone with depression is to try to take things off their plate or to just be there with some kindness and compassion. But please don't say, you should do this, you should do that, you should do the other as something extra. 💙

One of the diagnostic criteria for depression, from the DSM, is that, "symptoms must cause significant distress or impairment". Which means, you can't cope with life. Therefore, adding more to life is simply going to make depression worse.