I feel like I can relate quite a bit.

I have a personal view of psychology and I doubt that anybody else would endorse this, but I will say how I look at things. My own belief is: "Show me a mood disorder, and I will show you a personality disorder." Some people could take real exception to that, and I hope not to sound judgmental.

I worked as a nurse in psych facilities, and I came to learn that in the world of Psych, it seems like it is kind of okay to have a "mood" disorder, but it is a bad thing to have a "personality" disorder. I would hear staff say things that indicated that the first problem was a sickness, meriting compassion, while the second problem was something you pinned on people you felt a certain amount of scorn for. I couldn't disagree more.

I have been treated for about a thousand years for having a depressive disorder. My own belief is that me being depressed is just the result of me having a personality disorder that involves a strong component of "social avoidance." Somehow I was not socialized normally as a child (possibly due to over-possessive/over-protective parents who were kind of lonely themselves and a bit overly authoritative in parenting style) and I never made up for the deficit. Like I was developmentally-delayed, socially - and I could never catch up. Oh, I was precocious on some fronts, and that may have made the problem even worse.

The only treatment that I really believe in is anything that involves me being forced to mingle with other people to an extent that I am not comfortable with, and then me figuring out, through my painful mistakes, what gets me accepted and what doesn't.

When I've had to do that, the result has been me being less depressed and less anxious. There is a catch, though. If the involvement is too challenging, and I rack up too many failures, then I become more depressed and much more anxious. That is the tragedy of not getting the right and appropriate stimulation, as a child. Try as I may, I can not seem to be okay. I am under-challenged, or over-challenged most of the time. Much of the time, I am either in my shell getting nothing out of life, or outside of my shell getting traumatized by inter-personal failure. Now and then, I have been in circumstances that challenged me in a way that was not too frightening, and I found myself doing remarkably well and feeling quite amazingly happy.