Thread by @spacetwinks

thinking about life with depression and the people in my life without depression and how many non-depressed people ask "how can i help?" and how i think one of the big underrated things is learning how to check in with people casually, without sounding like you're gonna panic

people with depression are oft gonna clam up and like tell you everything's fine if they think telling you how they really feel is gonna be some burden on you or lead to like some big thing or intervention or whatever

it feels contradictory but knowing how to be casual is huge

you don't need to even have advice or ideas on how to deal with an issue, a lot of the big relief for depressed people is knowing someone is willing to listen but won't go to defcon 1 if you tell them what's really going through you

i do this kind of thing with my own depressed pals too like if they've been making a bunch of depression jokes or the like lately it's a simple check in of "hey you doing alright?" without scaling up to some big intervention thing

having every expression of depression be treated as needing a crisis level response is one of the quickest ways to get depressed people to hold back their feelings, having trust that they can just casually admit "i feel like shit rn tbh" is big