Anyway, In cyan's favour, have any of you ever known someone with really totally cripping depression? See, all these comments of 'man up and go do it' assume that the affected person has enough agency left to do that.
I know at least two people with depression so crippling that they cannot do anything.
One of them copes by simply placing himself at the disposal of other people 24 hours a day. He has coped by literally making himself into a slave. This keeps him busy, employed, and able to continue life, but left to his own devices he basically dies. When he was away at university, he spent literally a year and a half, sitting in his room, leaving his room once a day to eat (the SAME MEAL for a YEAR AND A HALF) until he was kicked out for never having attended a single class after the first month. Now he's a cripple, one marginally able to function, but who has lost all capacity for acting on his own.
I know another fellow in even worse shape. He spent a DECADE living in his parent's living room after high school. He cannot complete even the smallest of goals, always self-sabotaging anything through gross rationalization. He managed to get a job about three years ago, after being mostly sort-of thrown out by his parents. Unable to stand it any longer, he quit a year and a half ago and now lives on his savings from this job (he is so frugal as to make Scrooge McDuck look like Paris Hilton, living on approximately $50-$100 a month, other than rent) He barely eats and lives in his room in darkness 24 hours a day, leaving only to go to the bathroom and to occasionally buy grocieries - which are more like rations, really. Sooner enough, he will have to get another job, at which point the cycle will probably repeat, until he finally loses all moorings and becomes a homeless indigent, commits suicide, or just disappears.
Disclosure: These two people are my oldest friends in this world.
These people are not in any kind of condition to break out of their carefully constructed mental prisons just like that. It's akin to a deep hole. There is a threshold, a depth. Above that threshold, it is possible to combat depression on your own crawling out under your own power, below it you can only be dragged out by powerful forces beyond your control. There is a level of mental illness and depression that will effectively cripple a person more thoroughly than the loss of all four limbs. And it's more common than you think.
I don't pretend to know how deep cyan's personal pit is*.
*obvious joke goes here.