Let me first say you do not ever just cope with depression, you attack it. When I had depression it was due to numerous factors like a shit job (still have it but work less), not knowing what I wanted to do, living at shit place with some shit people, and having a lot of pressure being put on me, I also had to deal with my wifes dad dying so put all those together and it eventually got to me down. I 'coped' with it by eating shit food and stopped exercising two terrible choices. After a while I got over it by fixing what was wrong, confronting people, removing crap things, learning to look more positively on things, dealing with problems as they come up. Theres a lot more to it but basically that the start.