Your sense of "depressed," i.e. not in a good mood , saddened, or discouraged by identifiable events, is confused with clinical depression, which is a horrible, debilitating, illness.

In situational depression, e.g. death of a loved one, there is a clear exogenous cause of the depression. This is normal, and is usually worked out "solo" or through counseling, sans medication, or in some intractable cases with short-term use of medication. However, chronic clinical depression, dysthymic disorder, and their ilk are pathological. Depression is a disease. Your method works for most healthy people, but a clinically depressed patient is in open-loop mode: logic, reasoning and "working it out," as you say, don't work. It is wonderful that you are healthy and have worked out your own problems on your own sans pills, but the lives of countless people--whose brains are wired differently than you--have been saved or extended by antidepressants.

Insightful? Believe it or not, there are people who cannot function or would be dead were it not for antidepressants and counseling. Talk to people who have had the actual disease. Empathy will come to you as you grow up and get outside your own myopic view of the universe.

Chandra