By Eric Levine, Ed.D. with Becky Shipkosky

Your sweetheart is depressed, and you’re picking up a lot of the slack. While it's important to help your spouse or partner stay physically nourished and minimize emotional isolation or overwhelm, you will also need more pragmatic ways to get through.

There just is no way to make this easy, but the following are a few big levers. From a list of 88 evidence-based tactics, we are focusing on six items that both you and your spouse can do with varying degrees of effort, because their capacity will change day to day, and so will yours.

Executive function goes on staycation during active depression, which means tasks and problems may look like tangled, overwhelming messes to your spouse. Sometimes we can loan our cognitive capacity. This might look like:

What we don’t want to do while we’re being a superhero and picking up slack all over Gotham is take on more than we need to. But, selectively carrying some things temporarily (if you’re able!) can create space for healing. Here are a few examples:

Have you ever had a terrible cold that had you bed-ridden for days? And on day 4, you ran out of patience, got up, put on some tunes, and cleaned the house? And........

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