Well for one, because if you ask 5 psychiatrists you'll get mixed diagnoses.
You act as if the diagnosis for depression is some black or white thing. We know for a fact that it isn't by the way that it is diagnosed.
Getting a diagnosis from a psychiatrist that tells you that you have depression doesn't make your advice any more or less qualified.
When I was in my teens I answered like 5 questions on a piece of paper (on a scale of 1-10 type questions) and was instantly prescribed anti-depressants. That's the state of our medical system right now.
Amusingly(?) this was pretty much my diagnostic experience too.
Put another way - it’s like diagnosing cancer. Sometimes it’s so obvious that any doctor can see it. Sometimes it might be benign or malignant, and it might be hard to tell.
Regardless, I would be pretty skeptical of someone who said, “hey I have cancer and here’s how I fixed it” who was never diagnosed in the first place.
In this case it’s entirely possible the author had adjustment disorder/situational depression, which for many/most people will clear itself up, and it helps if you exercise, sleep well, eat well, etc. That’s a very different thing than persistent clinical depression, and telling someone that all they have to do is work out and eat well and get outside is almost cruel.
Except the author doesn't do this. They describe a system in which they track and observe what doesn't and what does work for them. Only someone that's living with a victim mentality would suggest that this is an attack on their own situation.
I'm tired of the suffering-olympics that people put on. "This person isn't as depressed as me. I've got a medical professional to confirm this, therefore what you've shared is unhelpful to anybody"
Surely you realize how ridiculous this position is?
We would be talking about how irresponsible it is - which in fact, we did on this very site:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21156916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14564547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3080176
To be clear - I am not a victim, I have never suffered from clinical depression. I don't care about the victim olympics. But there's a whole host of conditions where we immediately disregard people who say they fixed it themselves, or tried to fix it themselves. But take something like depression and we are saying that "hey this worked for someone else so we should consider it, and criticizing it is a victim mentality"