Patrick Rhone, writing on For You about choosing how to feel:

If you don’t like what you find within, only you can change that. No one can make you happy. No one can make you unhappy. Only you can do that. No one can make you angry. You choose to react angrily. How you feel is a choice that you make.

There’s a tendency to dismiss someone talking about your feelings because “they don’t understand”. More so when a common reaction to depression is often “just cheer up” which is frankly a ridiculous statement. But I do think it is important to realise why you react or feel like you do and examine it closely.

The best tool I have at my disposal when I am having dark times is myself. To ask myself “what reason do you have to feel like this” and a surprising number of times there isn’t one. Even if there are reasons, more often than not some examination of what you are reacting to is enough to bring in some light.

Listen, there is no amount of thinking that can solve mental illness. However, there is a lot of personal responsibility to also bear, and that is typically hard to hear. You control your thoughts, feelings and how you display them. Even when the piggyback guy is around, trust me, it works.