It's one thing to have external factors such as stress cause depression. Most of what I read concerning "founder depression" is along those lines. It sucks and isn't something to take lightly, even if some view it as self inflicted.

But there's an entirely different class of mental illness that's closely tied to depression; those caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. Stress often amplifies the symptoms (think of people with multiple personality disorder, schizophrenia, etc) but isn't the root cause.

I imagine the founder you're quoting has never had a close friend or family member that suffers from the latter. I get that they might not understand but it's unfortunate they hit "depression" with a sledge hammer by generalizing it so much.

> I imagine the founder you're quoting has never had a close friend or family member that suffers from the latter.

I would imagine the same, except for the description s/he gives for depression where s/he describes it as being a numbness that can be addictive to fall back into. It is such a spot-on description that he either read it someplace or went through it personally.

It's complicated. You could argue stress is always the root cause and what varies is simply one's reaction to the stress. I feel deeply uncomfortable drawing a line between people who have "real depression" and "stress caused" depression. You wouldn't make the same comparison with people who have less advanced degrees of cancer, and yet those too can be stress induced, and thus viewed as "self inflicted."

Isn't cancer much easier to diagnose than mental illness? I think the complexity of mental illness is why we struggle, as a society, to properly understand and deal with it.

That being said I agree that drawing a line is difficult and possibly counter productive. When dealing with people's lives it can lead to more confusion than it helps explain.