Living with a Partner's Depression

The most important person in my life suffers from depression (I will refer to him as M). He is my life partner, my love, and my best friend. He has suffered from Major Depression for most of his adult life. He has these depression episodes that can last anywhere from 1-3 days. They start out with him sleeping excessively and shutting me out. Then he starts to get angry and talk a lot about how hopeless his life is, how he isn’t happy, how he will never be happy,  and things will never get better, etc. Sometimes this would progress to talks of suicide. 

When he would have an episode, it physically felt like there was a cloud in our home. Everythingseems so dark when depression is present. He would be in so much pain and filled with so much self hate, I could feel the physical weight of it and the light seemed so far away. I would be so stressed out I’d get sick if I tried to eat. 

Sometimes he would grab the keys to our car and tell me he was going to go drive off a bridge or drive into a wall. Sometimes he would tell me he was researching how many pills to take to overdose. Sometimes I would walk in on him in the kitchen, staring at the knives in our drawer. Sometimes he told me he tried to drown himself in the bathtub. Sometimes he told me he was going to go buy a gun. I always took this very seriously when he said these types of things. Usually I would try to reason with him, logic him out of those feelings, but that’s not what someone with depression wants to hear. He never wanted a solution, he wanted me to join him in his downward spiral into hopelessness and got mad at me because I didn’t.

I would call the suicide prevention hotlines and on several occasions they advised me to call the cops. I could never bring myself to go through with calling the cops (even though I probably should have on a few occasions), I thought it would traumatize him in ways that he wouldn’t be able to recover or forgive me from. I would also call his parents, who have loved us both in ways that are beyond words.

Depression has changed my view of the world, and made me a much more understanding person. After a particularly scary depression episode, I tried my best to encourage him to go to the doctor and get on an anti-depressant. He did, and he found one that works for him. To date, M has not had an episode in almost 9 months! We both also see a therapist regularly, which has been important for healing. I am not expecting that he will never have another episode, I know that it may happen and we will face it together when it does. But for the present moment, I am so glad he is happy and not being weighed down by his depression. 

What is depression and its cause

From watching my partner suffer through depression, it feels like the loss of hope and the inability to see the truth. I remember so many times during an episode my partner telling me how he had never been happy and he always felt depressed, and that it was never going to get better and he would always feel like this. His thoughts would go into this downward spiral that (because of the depression) he wasn’t able to pull himself up out of. 

The cause of depression? I would love to know the answer to that one. Instead of asking why someone has depression, I think it is more important to view depression the same way you would any other illness. If someone gets cancer we don’t stop and ask them why they got cancer, but rather we prioritize their health and take it very seriously. And, most importantly, we talk about it. So much of the pain of depression is built around this stigmatism of it. Just because someone is depressed, it doesn't mean they are weak, selfish or have an inability to cope with life, it just means they need medical treatment. 

I remember feeling so completely alone when my partner went though an episode. I am very close to his parents, so they always knew when M was going though an episode, but besides them, I felt very isolated. Sometimes I would leave M to go to work and I would just cry the whole way in as I drove. I knew he was suffering and in so much pain, and so of course I was feeling his pain too. And not being able to talk about that is really isolating. 

People would come into the office on Monday and talk about what parties they had gone to over the weekend and I would just try to not cry when they asked me because I had spent the weekend trying to talk M out of hurting himself. 

Dealing with Suicidal Tendencies

There are a few steps that I would always take. First I would call the Suicide Prevention Hotline and they can help out a lot. They can send people to your house to help for a psych evaluation if you think you/someone you love is going to harm themselves. They can also send the police to take you to the hospital.

Also, reach out to your/their support network. I would always call my partner’s parents when he was going through an episode. Being able to talk to them really helped me a lot. It’s important to not let you or your loved one get isolated from your friends, because that can make the loneliness of depression even worse. 

Another important thing is to talk directly to the depressed person in your life about if they have plans to harm them selves and what method they will use. Talking about it isn’t encouraging it, but it helps give you more information as to exactly how well thought out it is and how quickly you need to take action. 

Before of after an episode, make sure you talk to them and come up with an action plan. For example, if you say this than I am going to call your therapist. If you threaten to harm yourself I am going to call the cops or take you to the hospital. When someone we love is in a dark place, we tend to panic. Having a plan to fall back on (especially one you’ve both agreed to) helps alleviate that panic and gives you a roadmap to follow that you don’t have to create when you’re in the moment.

As more of an ongoing strategy, make sure you are regularly seeing a therapist if you can afford to. It’s extremely important to take care of yourself and talking to an unbiased third party can really help. Encouraging your partner to also see a therapist and a doctor is key as well. 

Resources for Depression

Talking to a therapist has really helped me overcome the effects of M’s depression episodes, and having honest conversations with him after each episode. After he has an episode, we always talk about it and all the things he said. I try to understand if he really meant everything the said or if it was the depression talking. If was something that was bothering him that we could fix, we would fix it together. We have learned a lot from those post depression conversations. 

Some books that I have found helpful are:

Talking to Depression by Claudia J. Strauss 

Depression Fallout by Anne Sheffield

Living with Depression by Deborah Serani

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

A new Earth by Eckhart Tolle

For those who reddit, there are also a few subreddits that have helped me:

r/depression

r/mylittlesupportgroup

r/lifeafterdepression

Perspective of a Partner

I wanted to share my story as a family member of someone with depression, because I remember always feeling so completely frustrated with the lack of resources available to people in my situation. And more importantly, I remember feeling so completely alone. There are so many books available for people who have depression (or other mental illnesses), but the selection of books for family members is pretty much non existent. So my hope is to at least to help other people in my shoes know that they are not alone and maybe they can relate to what I’ve experienced. 

One of the things that my partner would say to me over and over was that I didn’t deserve to go through his depression with him. That I deserved someone better. And I think this is a sentiment that rings true to a lot of people with mental illnesses…this feeling of being a burden. So to those people I just want to say that your your mental illness IS NOT a burden. Depression or not, I view my partner with love and compassion. Life is difficult and full of challenges, some of them which are in your control and most of them are out of your control. Mental illness is out of your control. 

If I could choose to do it over again, and be with some one else who wasn’t depressed or be with my partner, I would always choose M. Yes, going though his depression episodes has been one of the most painful and challenging things I have experienced in our relationship, but we are stronger people for it. I now view mental illnesses with so much more empathy than I did beforehand and I have him to thank for that.