6 Tips to Care for Someone with Depression

Helping someone struggling with depression, anxiety, material abuse, or other mental illness can be quite overwhelming, especially if the patient is close. Seeing someone you love going through pain or having a tough time can be a painful experience one has to go through. Because of this reason, most centers for psychiatry in Dubai give the caregivers proper instructions on how they can look after the patients. 

There are many ways how you can educate yourself to become helpful to your loved one struggling with mental health issues. Therefore, we’re going to talk about some effective ways in which you can help your loved ones.

Let’s take a look at some of them:

Care For Yourself

Taking proper care of yourself is essential if you want to be able to look after someone else. You have to be healthy to look after some patients because it needs a lot of energy to do it. And if you, yourself, have depleted energy, how can you look after someone else. This is the main reason therapists recommend that the caregivers of the patients should focus on their own health too.

Take into Account Your Own Feelings

Not just care about the patient, consider your own feelings too. Remember that depression can be really demanding both for the patient as well as the caregivers. So, it’s important to check your emotions from time to time because your feelings can serve as a valid response to certain challenges you might be facing. 

Because of the stressful nature and fatigue that a caregiver has to go through, it is always good to join some caretaker support group. These groups can come in quite handy, especially when you feel stuck at a dead end. Talking with some other caretaker or a therapist can help you vent out your frustrations and come up with a better plan.

Get Insight on Depression

One should also have some deep knowledge and know-how about the issue they’re going through. Therefore, before you start caring for a person with depression or anxiety, you must know exactly what depression is, its symptoms, and how you can treat it. Gaining knowledge about it can really make it easy for you to understand the patient. 

Moreover, when you know how depression works, you’ll be able to help the patient way better than before. So, it’s always good to do some research on depression and gather some facts about it. But remember that you must get the information from a reputable source.      

Research

Likewise, it would be best if you also researched the way a depressed person behaves as it will give you a proper understanding of what the patient’s going through.

Don’t Be Personal

When you’re dealing with someone with depression, you have to keep your personal feelings at bay. It would help if you remembered that depression could greatly impair a person’s thinking capabilities and social skills. And they may act like someone that you don’t know. They can even withdraw from you entirely or become really shy, sullen or even angry. But you have to keep in mind that this isn’t the person doing it, instead what the depression is making them do.  

We are well aware that being a caretaker, it can be really hard to be the one always receiving outbursts of anger, sadness, depression, anxiety, etc. but you’ve to keep in mind that most of the time, these outbursts aren’t even directed at you. You’re just at the wrong place at the wrong time so, you shouldn’t take it personally. Rather try to understand them because they’ve no one else other than you they can turn around to. 

We know it’s really difficult not to feel anything when your loved ones pull away from you, especially when you’re in a romantic relationship. In situations such as these, you might even feel that the other person doesn’t love you anymore. However, you have to understand that this behavior is only because of the depression that the other person is going through.

Be Supportive

Every psychologist in Dubai suggests that you must learn to support the patient in every situation if you want to be a caregiver. Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do for anyone struggling with depression or any other mental health issue is to lend your support. Making the patient believe that they are not alone and you are in that with them is the best thing you can do for them.

In all, these are some of the ways using which you can effectively care for someone suffering from depression.