quote:
I do comprehend what you're getting at and agree that "battle" can be an incorrect word choice.

At the end of the day, it is not cancer that can win the "battle" no matter how far you are willing to go.

Now I have to admit that the idea of depression is so foreign to me I can't even comprehend it. My wife feels that I have the opposite disease of perpetual happiness and blissful ignorance, so I don't speak from experience, but a sincere place of empathy and staunch believer in personal responsibility.

I get where you're coming from. I'm a happy person too, always have been, so the first time someone close to me committed suicide, I was so fricking angry with her, angrier than I'd ever been before, or since. It was hard work learning to understand that she had problems I didn't, and had very little control over them. Once I finally did come to grips with that, I was very ashamed of myself. It wasn't my fault that I didn't understand, any more than it was her fault that she suffered from clinical depression, but I was still pretty ashamed. That's why it annoys me when people -- not you, others in this thread -- seem congenitally incapable of seeing past their own noses, but I still understand where they're at because I was there once too.