Andy Wood,

I'm just curious - was the despair about anything? Did it have no referent at all? You had a stable environment, good relationship with parents, self-confidence, social success, and yet still despaired? Was there no consistent content in your despairing thoughts?

I had all those things. Before I became depressed I stopped being sociable and started having problems with school attendance; I don't know if that was the cause of my depression or just an early development of it. I was certainly very bored at school and my home environment didn't offer any alternative intellectual stimulation. But, whether these things caused my depression or not, I can honestly say that I never felt it had any content. Even when the depression caused problems in my life I found the depression itself more overwhelming than the problems. I tend to be very unaffected by life events even now actually. I've considered that perhaps I had two problems and one of them was/remains an inability to fully appreciate consequences.