he's trying to make the point that depression should be taken seriously (i.e. not written off as something hard work can resolve, like calvinists and liberals tend to), but his argument falls apart into hippie bullshit halfway through.

depression is a component of consciousness. like every other component of consciousness, it has a chemical basis. don't accept that? ok, well back to the nineteenth century with you. go pick berries over the rolling fields and explain your holistic completeness to the birds - and tell me what they say. yes, reductionism has it's limits, but to deny a chemical basis of consciousness is to retreat back to the world of magic; to discuss the limitations of reductionism, in context, means to question the abundance of complicating factors.

happy? your body has an app for that, in the form of a chemical reaction. sad? yup. depressed? absolutely.

now, suppose you're fucked up on heroin. "get up! pull yourself together!". successful approach? probably not - you're fucked up on heroin, and it's preventing you from doing much of anything at all except drooling.

likewise with depression. as an aspect of consciousness, it has a chemical basis. as with any other chemical reaction, it has a period of influence.

the difference is that we don't get to pick when we inject depression, or when we stop shooting up on it. and there may even be a chemical dependency that develops, as we wallow in our own despair.

when i'm tired, i take caffeine. like every other component of consciousness, alertness has a chemical basis. for people that have bodies that are running off depression-inducing chemicals every which way, drugs are at least a short term solution. we understand this much: the mechanics of it. depression = chemicals. eliminating depression = chemicals.

the tricky part is in asking why some people's internal chemistry is doing this to them. genetics? environment? addiction? bad luck? there's probably not a neat and clean answer...

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/jamie-flexman/depression-mental-illness_b_3931629.html