In It Together: Navigating Depression with Partners, Friends, and Family

By JoEllen Notte

Millions of people worldwide are coping with depression. Whether it' s you, a family member, a friend or a partner — odds are depression affects your life. Even so, many of us don' t know what to do when it hits someone we care about.JoEllen Notte challenges the preconceived notions that keep us from showing up for each other in a meaningful way and offers strategies for supporting each other and ourselves when depression comes calling. Challenging the notions that tell us "that's not my business" or "they probably don't want to talk about that," In It Together equips readers to navigate depression alongside the people they care about.Informed by interviews with over 200 people coping with depression and featuring practical tips and real-life examples, In it Together is an insightful and much-needed guidebook for people with depression and those who love them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thornapple Press
• Release date: Mar 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781990869099

Book preview

Introduction

I’ve said it before and I will no doubt say it again: I am not a doctor or therapist. I am a writer who focuses on sex and relationships and who has coped with depression for over 20 years. I got curious about how many of us were struggling with depression and its impact on our relationships and sex lives and wrote a book about it. The Monster Under the Bed was released in 2020, and shortly thereafter, I realized that it wasn’t just partners who needed help navigating depression with the people they loved. Friends, family members, and even coworkers want to support the people in their lives who are struggling with depression, but many don’t know where to start. For those people, I wrote this book. What started as a way to say this can happen when depression hits turned into an exploration of how to deal with the things that come with depression and how to keep relationships not just alive, but healthy.

How Did I Get Here? My Story

In 2005, I fell into the first recognized depressive episode of my life. Sure, I had exhibited symptoms for years and even had a doctor diagnose me with depression once, but I really wasn’t ready to accept it until my mid-20s, when I lost a job, was in debilitating pain from a back injury, and lost all ability to function. The thing was, even as I was accepting it, I didn’t really want to talk about it. How did that work out for me? Not great, honestly. It left me without the help I needed. It left friends and loved ones confused and frustrated by my behavior. And, in the end, it left me angry that the people I loved didn’t help when I was struggling so hard.

By the time I emerged from that episode, my loved ones mostly knew about and understood what had happened, but relationships were still damaged and resentments were still forged.

You might think that would have been enough to teach me a lesson, but sadly, it was not. A couple of months after emerging from that episode, I expressed my fear that the depression would come back and someone new in my life who was in the process of wowing me with their wisdom said something to the effect of That’s easy, you will only be depressed if you recognize yourself as someone with depression. You can simply choose not to be that person and you won’t be.

It’s kind of amazing that I fell for this, but I did. Then my father died and I decided I wouldn’t be depressed. What did that look like? Working days that started at 5 a.m. and ended at 9 p.m., going on a dating rampage that saw me tearing through OkCupid like it was a box of chocolates, and not consistently eating or sleeping. In short, I was a mess, but what was happening didn’t look like depression as I knew it—I was active instead of sedentary! I was thin instead of uncontrollably gaining weight! I was socializing instead of withdrawing!—so I thought I was winning.

Truth be told, this strategy probably made life easier for people around me. But, as I would realize years later, it set me on a mental and physical collision course that derailed my career, kept me from my loved ones, and ultimately saw me lose years of my life to trying to shoulder the burden of my physical and mental health problems all on my own.

Eventually I shifted my strategy to one where I was open and honest about my mental health struggles but still felt and acted like I was mostly on my own to handle them. I pushed myself to see different doctors, explore different treatments, and try as hard as possible to get to the healthy place where I never had to be a burden or inconvenience to anyone.

One day, I looked up and it was 15 years after that first depressive episode and I was not the gleaming paragon of health and mental stability I had imagined I would become. I was angry, anxious, depressed, and, frankly, exhausted. I constantly felt like just about anything was too much for me to handle, and that was just the typical day-to-day stuff. When things went wrong (as they often do in life) or when I had to face bigger challenges, I completely fell apart. I had a wonderfully supportive partner who I was always afraid would run out of patience and dump me. And then when 2020 came for me (as it did for all of us), I became terrified that I would never again see my family, who I had spent years living 3,000 miles away from.

I finally decided to let go. I made a plan to move back east and let myself sink into the supportive embrace of my mother, who had spent the last decade reading my work and getting better and better at navigating depression alongside me. In the summer of 2020, I called her and told her that I was going to move back home in the spring of 2021. I let her joy about the news and my excitement about feeling loved and comforted and not constantly panicked buoy me up for the next eight months…and then, two weeks before I moved back home, back to the support and unconditional love I desperately needed, my mother died. The one place I knew I could go for support, without a shadow of a doubt, was gone.

The thing was, I was still surrounded by family who loved me. I come from one of those constantly around your aunts, uncles, and cousins families and I knew my family was thrilled to have me back, even as we all reeled from the death of my mom. I struggled, though. People wanted to support me and I wouldn’t let them. People wanted to support me but didn’t know how. People loved me and wanted me to be healthy and happy. But they were also prone to saying things like that’s not my business and it wouldn’t be my place, which left me afraid to reach out and slightly resentful because it felt like the vague idea of my privacy was being valued above my well-being. I was never really on my own, but neither I nor the people around me really understood what needed to happen for them to give me the support I needed, so I felt alone all the time.

I know that if I—someone who has based their life’s work on talking openly about depression—still struggle to reach out when I need support and accept support when people offer it, odds are a lot of other people are struggling with those same things. If my close-knit family was struggling with how to show up for me, other people’s family, friends, and partners were probably struggling too. In It Together was born out of a desire to use what I have learned from my own struggles as well as what I have learned from over 200 interviews with people coping with depression, in a way that could benefit others and to create something that would help folks better navigate depression together. It’s not a roadmap—because, after all, there are so many ways everyone’s depression experience is different. But maybe it’s more like an atlas, to give folks a general lay of the land and some ideas as to where they might want to go.

Putting It Together: The Research Behind This Book

Believe it or not, this whole project started with me, a person with a history of depression, writing about sex. In 2012, I started my blog, The Redhead Bedhead, and when my depression started to kick up again, I discussed it there. The responses I got showed me that people were pretty curious about the impact of depression on sexuality, and their curiosity fueled my own, leading me to survey and interview over 1,300 people from all over the world.

My first anonymous survey in 2014 and the subsequent interviews in 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2021 all came with a notice informing participants that the responses were being gathered for possible inclusion in my books. Because I knew how hard it could be to participate in something like this, I promised anonymity to all participants. In fact, with the exception of one round of interviews with 20 participants, I never saw anyone’s full name.

The initial survey took place in the fall of 2014 and was conducted under the supervision of Registered Psychotherapist Stephen Biggs. I used a website called SurveyMonkey to survey 1,100 participants on their history of depression, interactions with doctors, diagnoses, symptoms, side effects, and relationships. The results were fascinating and it was exciting to have numbers to put with the conversation.

On the final page of the survey, participants were given the option to submit an email address if they wished to participate in a one-on-one interview with me. Over 500 participants submitted their emails. When it came time to schedule interviews, nearly 100 people claimed spots. In the spring of 2015, I completed 20 one-on-one interviews in which the conversation focused on the actual experience of depression and how it can impact a relationship. Those interviews uncovered some things I had missed in the initial survey (why do some relationships crumble under the weight of depression while others thrive?) and left me with more questions.

After these interviews, I decided I wanted more detailed information, longer conversations, and more space for people to really talk about their experiences of navigating depression with partners. So, throughout 2016 and 2017, I did something a bit different. The one-on-one interviews were not super-successful in terms of getting people to show up—my people (folks coping with depression) aren’t always terrific at keeping appointments and I really didn’t want to add another have to to their lives. Instead, I decided to conduct the next round of interviews a bit differently. I created something of a long-form survey—essentially an interview that could be completed entirely online at the convenience of the interviewee. These questions covered depression history; doctor-patient interactions; how participants felt their experience of depression was impacted by their race, gender, and/or sexual orientation; the support they received—or didn’t receive—from their partners; what they felt they needed; and what partners should know. They also gave people a chance to talk about the impact of depression on their lives in their own words, rather than simply choosing options. This resulted in over 200 people telling me how depression affected their relationships, and their responses changed the direction of my work.

In 2016, armed with everything I had learned in my own relationship and from the interviews, I wrote a piece titled 5 Steps To Take When Your Partner Is Dealing With Depression. This one piece took my first book from being about simply showing people that they weren’t alone to giving them a toolkit to help them navigate depression with those they love and, in doing so, laid the groundwork for In It Together.

Finally, in 2021 I launched another small round of interviews, this one focused on the support people received—or didn’t receive—from their communities (as opposed to romantic and sexual partners) while coping with depression. I asked what they felt they needed, what loved ones should know, what others had done that they found helpful and hurtful, how they would support someone with depression, and more. I asked them what they wanted people to know—doctors, partners, the world at large—and they told me. In the end, with 1,100 survey participants and nearly 250 interviews, more than 1,300 people shared their experiences. Each one of them helped to shape the book you are reading now.

Throughout this book, I’ve included quotes from interviewees and survey participants that highlight the subjects being addressed and allow you to hear what people have to say about their own experiences. When I quote people who participated in any of the interviews, I’ve included a pseudonym, as well as the age and gender identity given by each participant. The decision to include this information was born of my desire to allow readers to see that other people like them (or not like them) are having experiences they can relate to, and to challenge some societal misconceptions about who experiences depression and how they experience it.

I’ve included as much demographic information in the quotes as the participants provided, which is why sometimes you’ll see age and gender, and sometimes you won’t. While I make no conclusions about the results based on these demographics, I’ve included them for context and because I think it can be helpful to know a bit about a person’s identity when hearing their story. In most cases, you will see abbreviations for genders (F for female, M for male, GQ for genderqueer) but, in some cases, you will see more elaborate answers. Apart from correcting typos and adjusting formatting, I am including the responses as people gave them.

Who Is This Book For?

In It Together is written for people who are coping with depression and the people who care about them. It is written for the friends, family members, and partners who have stood by anxiously, feeling confused and frustrated watching a loved one struggle, with no idea how they could help. It is written for the folks coping with depression who have been told that their symptoms are weird or made up, or that they are lucky anyone would be around them in spite of their depression. This book is written for anyone who feels like they explain and explain what’s going on and people still don’t understand, and for the people who don’t think they can help because they don’t understand. Ultimately, it is written for people who, in the face of depression, want to show up for each other in useful ways.

This book has two goals: to give people a bit more of an understanding of life with depression and to provide tools for navigating that experience together. We’ll start off looking some of the very real and diverse experiences of people who have depression. We’ll talk about the stigma attached to mental illness, the ways in which depression can manifest, some of the reasons reaching out both to get and to offer support is so challenging, and some of the stumbling blocks that keep us from successfully navigating depression together. Then, we’ll get to work with concrete strategies for navigating depression with loved ones, pitfalls to avoid, ways to make your world a bit more mental illness–friendly, and a cheat sheet to help support folks coping with depression even if you haven’t yet read the whole book (though you should read the book—it’s awesome).

Some Caveats

I’m going to be 100% honest with you: there is always a chance that the information in this book will not work in your particular relationship. I don’t have all the answers, and the answers I do have won’t be applicable for all people or in all situations. I have done my best to fill this book with information that has been helpful to me, my friends and family, my readers, and my interviewees, but I know that doesn’t—can’t, really—cover everything.

With that said, here are the two big caveats to keep in mind as you read:

Sometimes it’s legitimately not your place

Throughout this book, I come down pretty hard on the whole it’s not my place concept, but sometimes it’s really not your place. Sometimes the person coping with depression is a work colleague or an acquaintance or someone else you just don’t know that well, and in those cases, some of the stuff we discuss would not be appropriate. Feel free to take the ideas that work for your particular relationship and leave the ones that feel inappropriate. These things exist in levels. Maybe you shouldn’t show up at your work colleague’s home with a cooked meal, but you can choose to check in rather than immediately get mad when they miss a deadline. In chapter 8, we’ll discuss something called Ring Theory, which will help give you an idea of how to be helpful and supportive depending on your relationship to the person coping with depression.

Some people will not be ready, willing, or able

I’m not going to lie—the information I share in this book about supporting someone coping with depression is not simple and it is not universally effective. You might reach out to someone and they might reject your efforts. They might not be willing to confront or even acknowledge their depression. They may have no interest in getting treatment for their depression, which could put you in a bad position (because none of us, no matter how well-meaning and loving, is really prepared to fight the constant uphill battle that is untreated mental illness). Honestly, there are any number of reasons someone might push you away or reject your support. While this book will prepare you to let that person know you are there for them when they are ready, willing, and able to accept that, it will not change the fact that some folks aren’t there. That said, reaching out to and showing up for someone who is currently fighting their battle alone and needs you, or someone who thinks their mental illness means they don’t deserve the love and support you have to offer, or someone who is ready and willing but aren’t sure they are able? Learning how to be there, and putting that knowledge into action with those people? That’s where the magic happens.

Conventional wisdom tells us that people don’t want to talk about mental illnesses like depression, but my work has shown me otherwise. People want to—need to—talk about depression and they need people who will listen without judgment. Unfortunately, we live in a world that judges so many of the symptoms of depression as everything from lazy to crazy, a world that tells people to mind their own business and wait for people to ask for what they need, even when the people in front of them are drowning.

We will take apart the judgments, the stigma, and the misconceptions that prevent us from showing up for each other and talk about how they can all lead to what I think is the thing that actually tears apart our relationships and friendships. We will get real about the pattern of silence so many of us are trapped in, why it is unfair to all of us, and how—despite it being 100% not your fault—you may be making your life and the lives of those who love you harder by continuing the pattern. We will learn about talking, listening, helping (actually helping), and