Honestly, it sounds like you&#x27;re backpedaling. I don&#x27;t mean that to be super critical. There&#x27;s nothing wrong with changing your position in response to feedback, but pretending that&#x27;s what you originally meant seems a little fishy. But I may be misinterpreting what you&#x27;re saying.<p>To your clarified point, I&#x27;m not sure that&#x27;s really accurate. I&#x27;ve known a LOT of depressed people and had my own struggles. I&#x27;ve never met a depressed person who logically thought there was nothing they could do to improve the situation. It&#x27;s well established that regular exercise, sufficient sleep, establishing routines, talk therapy, antidepressants, etc. can help with depression. Again, I&#x27;ve never met anyone who suffered from depression and denied those treatments can help. Anecdotal but true.<p>The problem is that depression is not logical. If you&#x27;ve never experienced it, you really can&#x27;t understand it. And it&#x27;s doubly frustrating, because it can manifest itself differently for different people.<p>I read an analogy recently that I thought was pretty decent. Imagine you are sleepy all the time, just dead tired, exhausted, and you feel like you can never really get fully awake. Now imagine you&#x27;re talking to somebody who never really gets tired; they&#x27;re just naturally full of energy. Imagine trying to explain to them what being exhausted feels like. It&#x27;s not a logical thing. It&#x27;s not that you think it&#x27;s a smart decision to stay in bed all day. You&#x27;re just drained of all energy.<p>And when you describe what you&#x27;re feeling, their response is to give you a bunch of solutions you&#x27;ve already tried. Have you tried drinking coffee? Black out curtains? Maybe your mattress is bad? You know when I&#x27;m feeling sluggish, I like to get up and do some exercise, that always perks me up!<p>At that point, you probably want to punch them in the face. They have no idea what they&#x27;re talking about. If you had enough energy to get up and make coffee – or exercise for christ&#x27;s sake – you wouldn&#x27;t be in the situation you are.<p>Aaaaaaaaanyway, I&#x27;m not disagreeing that personal accountability is important. You can&#x27;t help the depressed person (or alcoholic or anybody suffering from a disease), if they don&#x27;t make an effort get help. The problem with depression is that making an effort – any effort to do anything – is often the very thing that person is unable to do.<p>So, people need to be careful discussing &quot;taking responsibility&quot; for depression, especially if they&#x27;ve never had first- or second-hand experience. Despite their best intentions, they&#x27;re likely to come off looking like ignorant assholes. From your follow up comments, I think it&#x27;s clear you&#x27;re not an asshole. :) But I&#x27;m also not terribly surprised by danharaj&#x27;s visceral response to your original sentiment.