 Hello from Pookie and Buddy who, let's be honest, is the true star of the show, aren't you boy? Now today's video is going to go through five things that you need to understand about your friend or family member who is living with depression. Number one, small little teeny tiny weeny weeny miniscule tasks can seem insurmountable. It might be doing the washing up, it might be walking the dog, it might be putting a pair of socks in the washing basket. The tiniest, tiniest things can feel like this massive mountain that has to be climbed and feel completely beyond what is manageable and that can make everything feel out of control and can make us feel completely and utterly useless. What you can do to help with that is actually give a hand with practical tasks. So just come and get your hands stuck in and give us a help with things. Maybe you wash, we dry, doing stuff together is sometimes easier. So yeah, little things feel massive but if we can manage to achieve little things we therefore feel like we have achieved something and that's good. Number two, it hurts. People don't always think about the kind of, it's not just physical pain but emotional pain too but people don't always think about the pain of depression so they think of it as purely a sort of cognitive dysfunction. But when you are struggling with depression, you are experiencing pain sometimes physically and certainly emotionally on a level that feels unimaginable. It hurts so much that you just sometimes wish you wouldn't have to take another breath to continue managing that pain. It's why people contemplate suicide or one of the reasons that people contemplate suicide, it's really, really painful. So if you know someone who's struggling with depression then what you can do to help with that is to kind of acknowledge that this must be really hard, acknowledge that it hurts. But also think about how you would be responding to a friend if the scenario were that they had a physically debilitating illness such as cancer or they had very, very hard flu or something like that where you understand a bit more about the physical ramifications and how painful that illness might be. So yeah, depression hurts. Number three, we're not ignoring you. So what will often happen is that we might withdraw ourselves, become more and more isolated and we may have really good friends who continually try to reach out. You might do that by picking up the phone, by trying to come and see us, by sending us texts or messages on social media. And you might find that you're hitting a brick wall. Please don't stop sending the messages. Sometimes one of the tasks that feels insurmountable is responding to those messages and so we might not get around to responding. But actually when we don't get any messages at all, when we lose that connection with the outside world, that can be really, really tough. So the fact we're not responding doesn't necessarily reflect the fact that we don't care that you've been in touch or it doesn't mean that we're ignoring you. It just means that responding right now is beyond what we can manage at this moment in time. So we're not ignoring you. Please don't think that we don't want to be your friend. Just right now it's beyond what we can manage. Number four is that it's very hard for us to understand why you care. So when you reach out with your kind messages of support and you want to help and you want to listen and you are unconditional in your love and friendship. That kind of creates cognitive dissonance. So it makes a jumble in our head when we compare that with how we feel about ourselves. So often our self esteem is really, really rock bottom. We think we're completely worthless and pointless and there's no point in us being alive maybe. And we have a very negative self dialogue going on much of the time. And then when that comes up against a friend who despite the fact we've ignored all their messages, we haven't been fun for a long time who continues to stick by us. That's really hard for us to understand. Really cannot figure why you kind of keep on being there. And that's difficult for you too because you probably want to help and we're probably not enabling you to help. And I guess the one thing I would say there is just please do try and be consistent and persistent. In the end it will come good. We'll begin to see those chinks. We'll begin to allow you to enter a little bit. It's super hard for us to plan. Now there's a few reasons for that. One reason is that when you are deeply depressed then the idea of making it from the bed to the bathroom can feel beyond what you can manage. So there's that. There's the fact that you can't imagine making it to this afternoon, let alone thinking about what's going to happen next Wednesday evening. And then finally there can be a lot of fear and anxiety that goes with planning stuff, with the potential of what might happen if we were to go out and that kind of thing as well. We also don't really know where we're going to be in terms of our wellbeing and our kind of headspace at the point at which something in the future is happening. So it's really, really difficult to plan. And the way that you can help us with that is to not stop involving us in your plans, but rather to try and find ways of doing things that's in a bit more of an accessible way to us, or perhaps reminding us a little bit nearer to the time and trying to make this sort of a bit more achievable for us. Making some simple adjustments can make it possible for us to attend things we might not have done otherwise. So you might arrange for like a group of a few closer friends to meet up prior to a bigger meet that might be too overwhelming for us, for example. Or you might decide, hey, I can understand you're probably not really feeling up to going out. How about I pop over for half an hour before I go meet the rest of the gang? It's sometimes the small things that make a big difference. So there you go. Five things that it's really helpful to understand about your friend if they're depressed. I hope you found this helpful. I think I could probably list a hundred. If you have others that you would like me to discuss in a further video, then leave them in a comment down below. Please take a moment to like or comment, share anything that you like, and other questions you'd like me to answer or address in future videos. And if you want to be kept updated with me and my now very sleepy, sleepy buddy, subscribe. I hope you liked it. See you soon. Bye.