I suffered from severe depression when I was a teenager but eventually learned to overcome it. I don't know how old your friends are but based on your profile I'm guessing you're in your teens. The teenage years are some of the hardest years of life. Teens haven’t matured enough to gain full control of your emotions, so they can be really hard to deal with. As a teenager everything seems more traumatic, but over time dealing with emotions becomes easier. Below are some life lessons that I've learned over the years that changed me from a miserable person into a happy person. Pass them onto your friends and study them yourself so you can help them take the necessary steps to get through their depression.

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DON'T LIVE IN THE PAST

It's important to look at life as a timeline and to keep your mind in the present, not the past. Here is an example of what I mean. Let's say on Monday someone says something hurtful to you. It's now Wednesday and you are still thinking about what happened on Monday. Essentially what you are doing is going back in the past and reliving the event over and over in your mind. Why would you do this to yourself? It sucked the first time, why put yourself thought it again? You need to leave that horrible event in the past and live in the present. When you find yourself thinking about a bad event in the past just think to yourself "Is the event over? Yes. Is reliving it over and over in my head going to make me feel worse or better? Worse, so don't do it!" With enough practice you will be able to let things go in minutes, not days.

YOUR THOUGHTS CONTROL YOUR FEELINGS

If you spend all day thinking about depressing things, guess what, you're going to feel depressed. The reverse is true too; if you think about happy things all day you will feel happy. Even though you would think this would be a no-brainer, you wouldn't believe how many people don't seem to make this connection. I spent 10 years of my life completely miserable because I focused my thoughts on the negative aspects of life even though I had a pretty good life. Take some time to examine what you think about all day. If it is mostly negative things, you need to recognize that you're the one responsible for yourself feeling miserable by focusing your thoughts on negative things. It's important to train your brain to focus on positive things. We are creatures of habit, and breaking habits can be difficult to do and can take time. If you think about negative things all day, it's going to become a habit. The longer you do it the harder it will be to break that habit.

DON'T WORRY ABOUT THINGS YOU HAVE NO CONTROL OVER

When you encounter negative things in life you need to first ask yourself, "Can I do something about it?" If the answer is yes, then write down the necessary steps to make the situation better and do them. If the answer is no, then you need to accept that it can't be changed and stop thinking about it. Thinking about it is just going to make you miserable.

EXAMINE WHO YOU ARE

Are you the kind of person you would want to be friends with? When most people think about the qualities they want in a friend they think of things like caring, empathetic, respectful, honest, humble, positive, thankful, fair, and patient. The qualities that would make someone not want to be friends with you are uncaring, selfish, disrespectful, dishonest, egotistical, negative, whiny, ungrateful, and impatient. I highly recommend that you spend some time at the end of each day looking over all these qualities and see which ones you exhibited that day. If you did things that were on the negative list you should think about how you could have handled the situation differently, and see if there is someone you should apologize to. We all make mistakes in life and do things on the negative list, but the people who work each day to improve themselves and who make amends for their bad behavior are the ones who end up happy in the end.

If there is something you don't like about yourself you have 2 options, you can mope around feeling sorry for yourself or you can take action and change it. Make a list of things you would like to change and the steps necessary to make those changes. Most importantly, make sure you follow through with those steps.

SEEK PROFESSIONAL HELP

It's important to seek help from a professional. Just keep in mind that there are a lot of so called "professionals" out there that don't know what they are doing, so if you feel that no progress is being made after a sufficient amount of time try a different one. Whatever you do don't assume that if one person is unable to help you that you are hopeless. It just means you need to try someone else who may know more about treating depression than the other person did.

MEDICATION

There are a lot of medications out there for depression. For some people they have little effect, but for other people they work wonders. I have a friend who was struggling with depression and anxiety. Her doctor put her on Lexapro and within a few weeks she was a completely different person. I couldn't believe how much of an effect it had. I know of other people who have tried it and it didn't help at all. If one medication doesn't work, try another until you find one that does. Just keep in mind that medication is only part of the solution. Learning to properly deal with negative thoughts is essential to a full recovery.

DON'T LISTEN TO DEPRESSING MUSIC

When you're depressed you will want to listen to depressing music. DON'T DO IT!!! It will just make you feel worse.

FIND SOME HOBBIES

It’s a lot easier to keep negative thoughts out of your head if you have hobbies that you can focus your attention on. If you Google “hobbies” you’ll find tons of ideas.

HANG IN THERE

I know things may seem hopeless right now, buy as you mature you will learn how to keep your emotions in check, learn to focus your thoughts on positive things, and learn how to make the most of your life. As you learn these skills life will get easier.

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Print this out and give it to your friends. The hard part is going to be getting them to help themselves. If they aren't willing to make any effort to help themselves then there isn't really much you can do, so your #1 task is motivating them to help themselves. Ask them every day what steps they have taken to fight their depression.

I wish you the best of luck. Feel free to message me if you have any questions or need some advice.

Just make sure you save money for flowers.

It's not about helping them, and not letting them do things. It's about being there and giving reaching out to them while they're drowning. Don't tell them things to "help," listen and understand. Find something that they have dear to them and clarify how there self being affects those people as well. In all honesty i have "real," problems but suicide is the weak path. You can't help someone who isn't willing to help themselves.

The best thing to do is just ask then listen. Don't put in your opinion unless they ask for it, don't try and force help if they don't want it. I hate to sound cruel and say that you cant try and play the hero and run every time they that their life is terrible and they want to end it. I was in a situation where i had to rush and drive over to my friend's house because he'd just told me he polished off a bottle of vodka. You might go so what he was partying, but no he had stage 3 liver disease (not related to an alcohol problem, towns drinking water was bad started at stage 0, military messed him up more after that). When i got there he was crying and had a gun in his hand, i consoled him listened helped him around. With his liver problem the relatively small amount he drank was amplified. I just listened. His fiance had dumped him and was dating another guy all in the same week (ironic but the super slore found out that the guy she was dating gave her a no refundable gift HERPES, ha still funny to this day). But suffice it to say that he has a history of depression I have a history of depression, and he was one of my best friends and it became too much looking after each other to where were not friends anymore. I cant say how hes doing now but ill always love him, I'm doing better. Back to the point of just listening...you're friends might not feel like they can can approach you maybe because you seem happy and like you have it together and their mess makes the embarrassed. My and my dysfunctional friend would talk for hours and feel no judgment between us, maybe you an help your friend find a person like that to talk to.

Suffering only persists if you cling onto it. Depression is caused by maladaptive thinking, ultimately it's caused by oneself. This is a harsh bitter truth, obviously, but it's one your friends need to acknowledge. They shouldn't waste time analysing why they feel like they do, rather, they should merely acknowledge that they have problems. Nothing else needs to be done. Every person has a bunch of emotional, practical and professional problems all the time, but your friends need to deal with a problem of a very different nature: They don't want to have any problems.

It makes no sense to pick in an open wound. They musn't believe that thinking about their problems will somehow solve them; it's much, much better to have an observational stance towards it than a participatory one. The only real solution is acceptance, patience and a fair bit of hope.

Your role here is to help them pull themselves out of their holes. Make them play some sports with you, take them to new surroundings. You obviously can't be inside their minds watching over them, but if you sense that they are descending into their usual ways, try to bring them back. Ensure them that things can and will get better if they just let go.