Sometimes words or encouragement or sitting with someone is not enough. Depression is that insidious. It doesn’t play fair; it has no rules, rhyme, or reason. It doesn’t respond to life even at its best.
“Reach out to someone because you never know” is not bad advice. But simply being kind to someone is not enough to stop an avalanche. It’s a drop of water in a desert. It’s not as if enough words will suddenly activate a lever that stops depression in its tracks. It shouldn’t be on family or friends to find a magical threshold, as if the right amount or combination of words was ever going to help.
Being a presence, to be there for someone, is always enough to give—but it may not always be enough to save.
You may not feel adequate enough to help someone who struggles with depression, but that was always true: you can’t be enough all the time.
We cannot cure terminal, and some sorrows only get healed by heaven. That’s a terrible, awful, unfair truth. But God forbid if I ever go that way, I hope you will be released from the guilt of thinking that it was up to you somehow.
When I enter that fog of depression, I’m always aware this might be it. This might be the one that wins. I wish I could tell you that your prayers and messages and books and casseroles and pizza dates and medicine and therapy and holding my tears will get me to the other side. So far, it’s worked. One day, I don’t know. I hope to God it will keep working. For one more day, I hope so. To experience your love and laughter and kindness is still worth it to suffer this fog.
J.S. Park: Hospital Chaplain 
I’m sorry you “suffer the fog.” Even in the fog, God has used you and is using you. You are an encouragement to others. I know that doesn’t lessen the fog, but I hope and believe that your “thorn in the flesh” is not without purpose.
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I was a mental health care worker and I have NEVER, until now, told anyone how depressed I have been, let alone how many times I have considered killing myself.
Learning, as a provider, to ASK whether a person has ever thought about killing himself MAY have saved a life or two. I wish someone had been that blunt with me.
Of course, here I am, so maybe they saw my light at the end of the tunnel, even if I didn’t? Dunno.
But, ask! Do you ever think about hurting yourself? Practice saying it! It could be a life saver.
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