What not to say to a depressed person

A few days ago I posted on "epistemic humility," or the idea that we can't really know what it is like to go through many of the things, especially the difficult things, that other people experience. That post was motivated by, and was primarily a longish quotation from the blog Crooked Timber.

Today there was a very sad follow-up by Crooked Timber poster Maria, consisting only of a long list of things that get said to people who are trying without success to have children. As you might imagine, the things that people say in this context tend to cluster on the negative end of the spectrum, from the merely useless to the outright hurtful. Random examples:

You know, a friend of mine tried for ten years and then they gave up. And then it just happened like that. And they’ve had two more since.

You know, I have a good feeling that it’ll work out for you. I just know it.

If you could just relax a little, you know? Sometimes that’s all it takes.

Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.

These are all prima facie evidence that the speaker has no idea what sort of suffering is experienced by those who want badly to conceive but have not been able to do so.  And, to bring up again the theme of epistemic humility, these are also evidence that the person uttering such things is unaware that he or she does not know the depth of the suffering, or even of that suffering's existence. That person does not know, and does not know that he or she does not know.

In the comments someone with the tag Widmerpool brings up depression:

Same thing for depression — think how lucky you are, this will pass, have you tried working out, I was really sad once, do something for other people, lots of famous people were depressed.

Yes, this is the same dynamic, which is exactly why I linked to the original Epistemic Humility post to begin with. People who say those sorts of things don't know what depression is like, and they haven't the slightest idea that they don't know. These people are not necessarily bad people, nor evil people, though of course some of them are. In many cases they just don't know what it is like. They have never had to deal with childlessness or depression or (insert your personal hell here). Nor have they ever had cause to think about it. This, of course suggests that many of them lack empathy, and I would not be too eager to draw too stark and thick a line between the unempathetic and the evil. But I have known very warm, emotionally generous and generally empathetic people to say things like "You've got so much going for you" in response to my depression. Or the time after a breakup when I was probably more mopey than was strictly necessary (I was a teenager, after all) and was told, "There are other fish in the sea." There may be more useless things to say to someone who is mourning the end of a relationship, but nothing comes immediately to mind.

So in the spirit of Maria's post at Crooked Timber, here are a few links to places that have listed Things Not To Say To a Depressed Person

Here is a list of 10 as a good place to start. 
And 10 more.
This list of 100 things is pretty comprehensive.

And, How Not To Be A Dick To A Person With Depression.

I'm not sure which of these Things Not To Say annoys me the most. For now I think I will go with the inevitable jerk who showed up in the comments to Maria's Crooked Timber post with the following, which perhaps deserves some sort of asshole award for hitting the main themes with such clueless heartlessness: 

ezra abrams 11.14.13 at 12:31 am

When I was young (<10) and used to complain, my dad told me of a snippet from CBS news:
On camera, they interview an old lady on thestreets of Tel Aviv, and ask her, isn't inflation awful, the price of butter has gone through the roof ?!
And she says, I was in Auschwitz, this isn't so bad…..
so stop whining: you could have been born in Biafra; life sucks; pick yourself up and do soemthing

Because nothing cheers up a depressed person/cancer patient/childless couple quite as much as knowing that children somewhere are starving or maybe shitting themselves to death with cholera while their mothers look on helplessly. (MPA Victoria responds appropriately to ezra abrams)

That is probably enough for now on What Not To Say. Which  leaves us with the little problem of what TO say.  But Maria has this one covered. There is one short, sweet, and safe response, and it covers a multitude of situations:

"I'm so sorry."

We should use it more often.