Demanding perfection in all areas of your life, from work to home and everywhere in between, may seem like a noble deed -- even one that perhaps we should all strive for. But perfectionism is actually responsible for making many people miserable.

Challenge your negative thinking with positive statements and realistic thinking. When encountering thoughts that make you feel fearful or depressed, challenge those thoughts by asking yourself questions that will maintain objectivity and common sense.

"Being happy is something you have to learn," says Harrison Ford. Each of us can learn something from his experiences of triumphing over negative thoughts and turning his life around. He grew up a shy kid, continually bullied at school for not 'fitting in'. He studied English in college, and hated it. It was soon afterwards that he started showing symptoms of depression..

The third major thing that we found was that depression and irritability are related:  21% of the men said that they were depressed often or almost always – high  levels of depression, and that we’re actually seeing this irritability and anger rather than  being an indication that they’re just crotchety old men, or even irritable old men, is that there’s often, this is the way that men experience depression.

Depression is an illness of loneliness. And the primary experience is the feeling of being isolated, of being alone, of being cut off from everyone and everything. /// These experiences of darkness make the light more beautiful, that the pain of being acutely depressed allows you to experience an unbelievable happiness in every day when you aren't depressed and a sense that each of those days is a gift. So that's the real message of hope, is that you can get better.

Excerpt from PBS interview with Andrew Solomon. By his mid-twenties, Solomon established himself as a multi-disciplinary wunderkind, earning international accolades for his work as a novelist, journalist and historian. After the death of his mother, the then 31 year old Solomon descended into a major depression, rendering him unable to work or even care for himself. He was helped by a combination of medications and talk therapy.

I began to notice I was constantly bored. My first novel had been published in England and yet its favourable reception did little for me. I read the reviews indifferently and felt tired all the time. I found myself burdened by social events, even by conversation. It all seemed like more effort than it was worth. I began to feel that no one could love me and that I would never be in a relationship again.

In the recently published "Against Happiness," popular writer Eric Wilson disparages our current love affair with putting on a happy face. With our "feel good" culture and the widespread use of happy drugs, everybody's trying to be cheerful and there are no decent dollops of melancholy and sadness, he says. When this happens, art becomes bland, unchallenging and redundant.
http://talentdevelop.com/articles/ArtandHapp.html

Whether the condition is a physical condition that one suffers from or a psychological condition.. there is the tendency to identify oneself with the illness or with the—whatever it is.

You might call it melancholy on steroids -- a muscular mixture of fast-driving, heavy drinking, hard-charging cussedness. For perhaps 3 million American men yearly, that's the plotline for depression.