How to Help Someone with Depression: 8 Ways to Help & Signs

Anyone suffering from depression would often be overwhelmed with the feeling of sadness and generally have no interest in several activities. If it is a student, they may have a hard time performing well at school. This is because depression is a mental illness that affects their thinking, self-esteem, and overall mental health.

Attending family therapy sessions, positive reinforcement, and having a supportive conversation with your teen student can help relieve emotional crisis and, generally, their well-being. We look at how you can help someone with depression and still how to spot the warning signs of depression in teens.

How to Help Someone with Depression?

If you notice a student is showing signs of depression, such as reduced appetite, personality changes, low mood, and more, it is vital to be a good listener and try to help them get out of depression. Below, we look at ways you can use to help students with depression.

Find Ways to Handle Student Fatigue

If you are a fan of Health Canal’s content on managing severe depression, then you would know rest can do a lot in helping deal with depression symptoms. Identify if the student is facing fatigue and give them time to rest.

Some might even have experienced weight gain anxiety because of too much pressure from school. Giving the student short assignments can relieve stress and sometimes act as a suicide prevention idea. You can further organize household chores so that a student is not overwhelmed too.

Provide an Environment for Growth In Class

Having uncommon body movements feelings can be a sign of depression. However, a teacher or family member makes sure to encourage having a growth-based mindset. In case your loved one’s depression is because of poor academic performance, encourage them to have incremental improvement rather than changing their reports dramatically. Support groups with like-minded people can also help.

Encourage Social Integration

Major depression symptoms can also lead to suicidal thoughts. Listen carefully to a depressed person and offer social integration. If a student is struggling in school, encourage group work to help with improving their social life and relieving depression.

Talk Coping Skills of Depression

You may have a depressed friend at school. Just know that you can make a difference in a person’s life. Help the friend’s depression to be managed by introducing a hobby or other activity that the student can use. Before going to a health care professional, try to exercise, journal, and distract yourself from school life, even if it is for an hour. It can help a lot.

Refer to the School’s Counselor

If there is an increased risk of more depression and difficult emotions, or the person might attempt suicide, refer the student to a school counselor. Counselors are trained to listen carefully and sometimes allow prescribed medications to help the student get better. Seek the counselor’s help at any time, and not necessarily when things get worse.

Extend Invitations

What to say to someone who is depressed can be enough to improve their depression that day.

A good example is extending invitations to some activities can help alleviate anxiety in schools. You can invite a fellow student to join in after-school day-to-day activities such as playing games. You can tell them things such as “would you like some company for a while?” Or “Is there anything I can do for you?” If someone had the fear that their social status did not matter, they could see it was not a big deal.

Help with Everyday Tasks

Past failures coupled with tasks in everyday life can also lead to depression. If someone is a student, try to reduce the tasks they have to do daily after school. It could be shopping, doing laundry, and other certain tasks. Family members can help with minimizing the tasks offered to a single person.

Be Patient and Stay in Touch

Depression needs someone to be patient with the depressed student. It mostly involves proper treatment, which is a slow recovery process. We recommend that you be patient with the student and help them recover. A good example is when you are a teacher, let the student have more time with the homework to work on it better. Also, you can have after-school one-on-one to see where the student could use further help. Stay in touch to know if there is something more you can do to help them get better.

Signs of Depression in Teens

Teen students can easily be overwhelmed at school or even at home. Academic expectations, changing bodies, and peer pressure can be driving factors that make a student depressed.

Depression may affect the normal activities of a teen student. Therefore, it is vital to identify the signs of depression before they worsen. Then, starting treatment early can help handle depression before it gets worse.

The symptoms of depression can be grouped as emotional and behavioral.

The behavioral changes of depressed people include;

• Too much tiredness

• Sleeping too much or insomnia

• Lost interest in social activities

• Changes in appetite and potentially weight loss

• Use of drugs and alcohol

• Slowered speaking, body movements, and thinking

• Social isolation

• Feeling lost

• Poor school performance

• Hopelessness angry outbursts

• Self-harm such as burning or cutting yourself

• Suicide attempts

• Lack of interest in physical activity you used to like

The emotional changes you may notice in a depressed teen include;

• Feeling sad all the time. Some can cry without reason

• Always be in an irritable mood

• Have low esteem

• Feel you are worthless or guilty

• Have trouble thinking and remembering things

• Have trouble concentrating

• Have frequent thoughts of dying, death, or suicide

• Extreme sensitivity to failure or rejection

• Feel empty or hopeless

Conclusion

If a teen student is showing signs of depression as those ones mentioned above, then you should need to step in and help. A good example is just helping with their daily activities so that they do not feel too much pressure in their lives. Still, you can have the student talk to a mental health professional, such as a therapist, for advanced depression symptoms.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. When should you see a doctor?

When the depression signs are clearly severe such as the student thinking of suicide, it is important to get him or her to a doctor or mental health professional.

2. Why do teens get depressed?

Teens can get depressed mostly because of school performance. Others would have depression because of family life, sexual orientation, their peers’ social status, and more. Identifying what is causing depression can help manage it better.

3. Can student teen depression run in the family?

It is possible to have depression running in the family, especially for teens. In case there is a history of depression in the family, it is possible for a teen also to experience the same. Just make sure the signs are caught early and proper remedy for depression is offered to the teen.