How come I can’t do anything right? What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I be like the others? They all have such an easy time of it.
Well, you feel bad and you sit around, feeling defeated and useless, and you think about yourself a lot.
I do believe that the function of depression is to push someone to figure out how to do something better. It’s a high pressure way of doing so—so high, that some people die before figuring it out.
It can also come from growing up in a family that expects high achievement and perfection—goals that are impossible. Yet, growing up in such an environment, one feels like perfection is not an unreasonable goal. So when you keep on missing the target, you have to wonder what’s wrong with you.
I suppose you could call it a diagnostic mode, although I would prefer to call it a problem solving mode. Diagnostic is too neutral. I mean, you can diagnose a problem and then not fix it. That’s hardly useful.