Modern medicine has a habit of attributing unknown physical ailments to a sketchy diagnosis of mental illness. The thinking goes "well we don't know what's wrong with you, so it's probably anxiety or depression". The symptoms he states could be allergies, Lyme Disease, a brain tumor for all we know, or something else. The quickness with which some doctors rush to a diagnosis of anxiety or depression is scary, sometimes doing so before running any tests.

Your post kind of comes off as blaming the patient. This is the quickest way to get people to avoid seeking help, because they will be told they are at fault for all their symptoms, which makes them want to seek treatment even less.

Just reading a bit about his life today is enough to convince me that he was a practical, busy, and enterprising person who tackled problems seriously and systematically. His involvement in various projects shows sustained effort at difficult things. He wasn't "bookish" in the least, if "bookish" means tending to neglect the things outside of books. We should take his suicide as evidence that the techniques that work for other people aren't sufficient for everyone. David Foster Wallace is another example of someone who was well-read in everything from mathematical philosophy to self-help literature, who famously talked about cognitive therapy in a commencement address he gave, who was disciplined enough to write 1100-page, two-and-a-half pound books, and who surely did not want to be so miserable that he would choose to end his own life.

Maybe those of us who are doing okay are more skillful, or maybe we are dealing with more tractable problems. How could we know the difference? What evidence would be relevant to that distinction, if not the fact that people brighter and more accomplished than ourselves have failed?

> and that individually crafted cognitive behavior therapy - slow-but-steady, iterative, but radical changes in ones behavior, ones habits is the only way out.

This statement sounds nice and all but I don't think you can back it up with non-anecdotal evidence. Cognitive behavior therapy is one way that some people can overcome depression, and as this post even states it has a 50% success rate. There is no factual basis by which you can claim that those other 50% just "didn't try hard enough".

The fact is there are many ways people overcome depression, through cognitive therapy, through exercise, through medication are very common ways, but there's also things like electroshock which are still practiced today for extremely severe depression. No one approach is guaranteed to be effective by any means and it's likely that the majority depressed people will need to use a combination of approaches in order to experience relief.

I strongly disagree with what you said about self-control and "emotional intelligence". Depression is always caused/triggered by multiple factors. And in Aarron Swartz's case, you have to understand that he was going through a lot of stress and pressure at a very young age. Were you being put into Swartz's position, how could you handle that amount of stress? Everyone perceives things differently. To you, one thing may seem trivial but to others, it may seem important. Maybe to Swartz, this whole thing is a big insult to him. You would never know what he is going through. The fact that you are implying Swartz's lack of "emotional intelligence" makes me wonder if you have much emotional intelligence because a big component of emotional intelligence is empathy and reasoning from other's perspective.