You can never be certain about other people's intentions, whether you're depressed or not, but I suggest you ask yourself whether you want to have the kinds of default assumptions about people that make every social interaction a negative sum game.

That's a really deep question, whose answer is very state-dependent.

As learning agents, our algorithms for dealing with the present are necessarily path-dependent. If my path through experience-space has shown me that most social interactions were negative-sum games at some point in the past, and that repeated attempts to behave as if they might NOT be negative-sum games result in losing, and losing badly, then it might not be worth the perceived risk to take a chance on new people, unless those new people go to extraordinary efforts to demonstrate that they aren't playing a negative-sum game.

Now, posit that in the past, people have gone to extraordinary efforts to demonstrate that they weren't playing a negative-sum game with me, only to turn around and spring elaborate traps, because they thought it was hilarious and worth the cost of the effort just to trip me up. Now what are my expectations primed to? What should I rationally expect from the world, given those priors?

I'm not sitting here accusing you of malevolent intent just because I'm a depressive curmudgeon. I'm also attempting to use this as an explanation for why people become depressive curmudgeons, and describe actual steps that I believe could be taken to break the cycle. When a system gets into a feedback loop, you don't tell it that it's being a bad system and it should feel bad; you change its inputs so the loop can be broken. If hundreds of other people are telling it that it's being a bad system and it should feel bad, and those inputs are strengthening the loop, then if you want the loop to break you have even more work to do. Or you can acknowledge that the loop isn't worth the effort of breaking.

Drilling down a level, you're having trouble acknowledging that the loop isn't worth the effort you would need to expend to break it, because YOU believe that that would make you an "evil asshole". I made no such value judgment. In fact, I have complete empathy for people who realize that the effort that it would take to fix people with my level of psychological problems isn't worth what they'd get out of it. But because YOU continue to believe that it would be evil for you to stop trying to help, AND because you know subconsciously that it would not be worth the effort to actually help, you continue to perform weak half-measures that only serve to agitate the problematic mind-states further, and then turn it around to being my fault when you do so.

I challenge you to re-read our conversation from that perspective, and ask yourself which facts lend towards which hypotheses. (And yes, there are alternate hypotheses. But when we're talking about internal mental states, we cannot separate the map from the territory so easily.)

EDIT: I'm also going to try to tackle this a different way, through metaphor.

Imagine that a boat has capsized just offshore, and there are drowning people in the water who don't know how to swim. (Ignore the point that people who can't swim shouldn't have been on the boat in the first place; this is life, you don't get to pick where you're born.) There are also some very good swimmers in the water, and they all start swimming merrily.

Now, the articles you just posted, are like standing on a rock just off-shore and shouting swimming lessons. Telling them to watch how the swimmers do it, and maybe even telling them specific techniques about positions and kicking and arm strokes and what-not. But for those who have already started taking on water, and panicking, and thrashing, that isn't going to help them much even if they can hear you.

So, you dive in and try to rescue someone - it's a pretty natural response. But he's kicking and flailing and thrashing because his body is already in full-panic drowning mode, so he winds up punching and kicking at you. Maybe he even grabs you and starts dragging you down with him.

Telling him that he's a bad swimmer and if he's going to act like that he can just drown and it'll be his fault isn't going to do him any damn good, is it?

On the other hand, acknowledging that maybe you aren't a coast guard, and if you're going to rescue people you might need to know how to rescue people who are kicking and thrashing and actively resisting, will make you much better at this.

The trouble is, in the USA today, there aren't very many coast guards (psychologists) who will just dive in and pull people out of the water for free, and most of the people who are drowning are the ones least able to afford payment.

Ideally, we'd rescue drowning people for free, then put them in a safe pool where we can teach them to swim. Instead, when we do rescue drowning people, we just throw them back out into the water and then get mad when they start drowning again. And if they shout too loudly, we tend to tell them to go drown someplace else where they won't bother us.