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John Roderick & Merlin Mann talked about depression starting around the 27m30s mark of Roderick on the Line, episode 55.

This resonated with me and so I decided to transcribe it, because that’s what I do sometimes.

JR: The ultimate thing about this “undiagnosable, unseeable malady” epidemic that’s happening in America, for me it comes home to roost because I suffer from depression… I’m ‘outing myself’ if it wasn’t already abundantly clear!

And it is very hard for me to accept that for myself… for me to acknowledge it as not being a personality flaw…

MM: Like a weakness…

JR: Yes, I look at the course of a typical day or i look at the arc of 9 months of my life and I think “Hrm, the only thing that could account for the choices that I’ve been making is that I’m suffering from depression. I’m clearly suffering. And everywhere I go I talk to a doctor and I say “Here are my problems, doctor” and I run down my problems and they’re like “Well, you have severe depression” and I go “Yeah, yeah, I know… but, come on, help me out here… with something…”

MM: “Is there something physically difficult that I could do or something that I could resist doing for a few months that might improve this?”

JR: I need a better diagnosis than that I mean, anybody can tell that… Give me something to work with here!

…

JR: It was only later when people started ‘coming out’ as [clinically] depressed and talking about the stigma that they felt that it even occurred to me that there was stigma about it, because depression seemed like the only reasonable response to an insane world.

…

As time goes on, I guess why I’m talking about it more is because, I guess I always thought that as you got older ‘depression’ would be something that you had when you were in your teens and early twenties, your peak dramatic years when you’re feeling very dramatic. And it continued into my 30s because every aspect of my youth continued into my 30s… I was still a teenager at 37…

But now that I’m in my 40s and it is not waning, if anything it is waxing it started to be a thing where “Ok, you know what, I’m going to start talking about this more because it’s actually a feature on my landscape.” It’s a thing that every morning I wake up and even if there are no owls in my room there is always this bugbear, and I go “Ugh, you again?”