There is a lot of arm-chair thoughts on this matter in this thread, and I feel this lecture sets a lot of things straight.
A helpful quote from the talk: "...the single point I want to hammer in here over, and over, and over, is something that people with depression constantly battle with. Back to semantics, we all get depressed. Bad stuff happens to us. We all get depressed. We feel lousy. We feel withdrawn. We feel a sense of grief. And we're not taking much pleasure. And we withdraw. And then we get better. We cope. We heal. We deal with things in life. What's the deal with you that you can't do that? And there's this lurking sense given that all of us have periods of being depressed and come out the other end. When you look at people who instead go down and stay down there to this crippling extent, there's always this little voice between the lines there of, come on, pull yourself together. We all deal with this sort of thing. I will make the argument throughout here that depression is as real of a biological disorder as is juvenile diabetes."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc
There is a lot of arm-chair thoughts on this matter in this thread, and I feel this lecture sets a lot of things straight.
A helpful quote from the talk: "...the single point I want to hammer in here over, and over, and over, is something that people with depression constantly battle with. Back to semantics, we all get depressed. Bad stuff happens to us. We all get depressed. We feel lousy. We feel withdrawn. We feel a sense of grief. And we're not taking much pleasure. And we withdraw. And then we get better. We cope. We heal. We deal with things in life. What's the deal with you that you can't do that? And there's this lurking sense given that all of us have periods of being depressed and come out the other end. When you look at people who instead go down and stay down there to this crippling extent, there's always this little voice between the lines there of, come on, pull yourself together. We all deal with this sort of thing. I will make the argument throughout here that depression is as real of a biological disorder as is juvenile diabetes."