Have you tried… not being depressed?

The advice everyone hands you, and why it lands like a judgment.

If you’ve ever been depressed and tried to tell someone about it, you know the look.

There’s a half-second pause. Then the pivot. “Have you tried getting outside more? Maybe some exercise? Honestly, when I’m feeling down, I just…” And you nod along, already certain that whatever they’re about to describe isn’t the thing you’re living in.

It doesn’t really matter who you tell. Everybody’s got a version of the same advice. Have you tried thinking positive. Have you tried a gratitude list. Have you tried just… not being so hard on yourself. Almost all of it some flavor of have you tried thinking your way out of it.

And then there’s the church version. Same advice, spiritual upgrade. “Have you been praying? Have you been in the Word?” Same pivot — except now there’s a sharper edge: if their fix doesn’t take, the unspoken conclusion is that the thing that’s broken must be your faith.

That one cuts deeper. It’s hard enough to be handed advice that doesn’t fit. It’s worse to walk away feeling like you’re failing God on top of it.

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Sad and depressed aren’t two tidy boxes — they’re a spectrum, and most of us land somewhere on it at some point: a brutal week, a grief that won’t lift, a stretch where the color drains out of everything. That’s real, and I’m not here to rank anyone’s pain. But the advice that fits one end of that spectrum can misfire badly at the other.

Here’s an analogy that hits home. Imagine someone who badly sprained their ankle years ago. It hurt, it took weeks to heal, they iced it and limped around and recovered. That experience is real. They know what foot pain is.

Now imagine that person watching someone whose bone is protruding from their leg. And saying, “Oh, I understand. When I sprained my ankle, here’s what I did…”

The advice might be well-intentioned. It might even be technically accurate. But the distance is so vast that it doesn’t just miss — it lands like a judgment.

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And before anyone reaches for weak faith as the explanation: the Bible is full of people who show every symptom of clinical depression, and not the minor characters.

Elijah, fresh off one of the most dramatic demonstrations of God’s power in the entire Old Testament, runs into the wilderness and asks God to let him die. “I have had enough, Lord,” he said. “Take my life” (1 Kings 19:4). An angel doesn’t show up with better theology. He shows up with food. “The journey is too much for you.”

That’s the whole thing right there. The journey is too much. He didn’t need a sermon. He needed bread and rest.

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I get a lot more personal in the full post (in keeping with the oversharing theme) — including what my own depression actually feels like from the inside (I’ve come to picture it as a river, not a pit, and there’s a reason for that), and an image I’m just beginning to share, for anyone who wants to help someone who’s down there: stop shouting down the hole.

Because what helps isn’t better advice. It’s presence. A light. A rope.

If you’ve been on either end of this — in the hole, or standing at the top not knowing what to say — I’d genuinely like to hear it.

Thanks for reading. — JT