When trying to help someone who is depressed or hanging around them, it is best to keep your thoughts guarded and talk about your feelings with some one. It is possible for depression to rub off on you, so its best not to keep everything to yourself.
Sometimes, when trying to help someone who is depressed, you feel like giving up, since there is nothing you can do, but it is best to stick it through, since that is when your loved one (family or friend who is depressed) needs you the most.
Depressions affects on your identity:
Depression can change your entire mindset.
-Pessimistic view on life
-negative thoughts
-low self-esteem
-low self-confidence
-anti-social or destructive behavior
Depression can often make you think many negative thoughts of yourself and others around you and can make you feel worthless, and useless. This lowers your self-esteem as well as your self-confidence. For example, in the book "Speak" by Laurie Halse Anderson, Melinda Sordino, who was depressed, had stopped speaking because she had no confidence, and she had no social-support since she had no friends either, so then she stopped talking entirely, when she finely got the truth out, about what was making her depressed, she could speak a bit more freely. Depression makes your outlook on life negative too, meaning depression can take some one from a high point in their life and completely make them crash.
“I can pinpoint a moment when I came to believe that depression was not just an illness that struck from time to time but part of my identity as a person. I was talking with a friend one day about how big a problem depression had become. He thought it must be brought on by feelings that life had no meaning. I told him it wasn’t like that at all. It wasn’t caused by anything but kept coming back on its own, for no apparent reason.
When I said those words, I suddenly realized that there was very little in my life that had not been influenced by depression. It was at the center of everything I thought about and tried to do.I didn’t just get depressed. I was a depressed person.”
http://www.storiedmind.com/2011/03/31/depression-identity/
Being depressed can affect the way people see you in the society, it can affect your identity. When you go out it’s hard to hide the fact that you are depressed and as this feeling grows and becomes more and more serious people notice it more and soon enough you are known to be depressed.
