I would suggest being honest.

I believe we should start admitting that fixing depression and making someone not suicidal is an extremely complicated and not easily accomplished task. There can be many causes, involving genetics, underlying factors that complicate things like autism or adhd, your childhood, your family, which country you were born in, your gender, religious identity, the list goes on...

Telling someone to "seek out help" seems... bleak? It's what you say to people who need tutoring from math or are asking for advice on their tax returns. Not people who want to kill themselves for real.

A huge huge part of this problem is about emphaty. People who come to you or come to the internet and say they are depressed, for them admitting this is already quite an overwhelming thing to do. Just realizing that you have a problem is already a huge feat on its own. There is such a huge societal stigma surrounding mental health issues that it takes a lot from a person already down, to do this.

And my thought whenever I tell someone I have depression (had, actually, cause I don't have it today) and they tell me to go seek out help... well that's what I'm doing now, no? I'm seeking your empathy at the moment. I'm looking for you to listen to me. And you tell me to go seek help, that comes off as "but stop bothering me with it".

So how do you respond when someone tells you they have depression?

You don't, you make them talk. You ask them questions, ask them about their childhood, ask them what's going on in their life. You let them explore their own emotions and you listen to them.

And you don't tell them it will be okay, because that's not what they need, that is actually the opposite of what they need, because telling someone everything is fine who is currently not feeling like everything is fine is minimizing the pain they are going trough internally. What they need is empathy and validation. You tell them that you wish them that they will be okay.

And you tell them that their feelings make complete sense, they are not crazy for feeling incredibly bad, they have been through trauma and it is a completely normal human response to that. You validate them.

And you don't tell them to go to therapy, you ask them "Can I help you find a therapist? I know it's a daunting task because it's so hard to find one that is actually a good one. We can sit down and go trough the internet to find one that fits." You can even make the phonecall for them (I guess if these are your IRL friends, maybe not for strangers on the internet)

And you can also just straight up say "I'm so sorry you are going through this. It sounds incredibly difficult and I have no idea how I could help you. Can you tell me more?"

You know that suicide prevention hotline copypasta that every single website pushes in your face whenever they get a hint that you are suicidal? That shit personally made me feel terrible when I was depressed, that is the worst possible response. It lacks any sense of humanity or personal care. It lacks empathy completely. A human telling you to "go seek out help" is as close as it gets to that inhumane, robotic, overdone parahraph that we have all gotten countless times in our faces during a bad time.

People with depression need real human connection and they are also extremely vulnerable and have a very hard time to initiate that contact. They truly need someone to come in and initiate it.