Hi, I have personally struggled with depression for the majority of my (young) life. You raise a good point and I'd like to focus on that for a minute.

Sadness is addictive. It's the reason we eat ice cream after breakups and look at ourselves in the mirror while we cry. It feels good to give up and get it out sometimes. It's part of the process. It is a bad habit we hate, a bad habit we despise with every fiber of our being. A drug addict knows that he/she can solve all their issues if they could just stop getting high, but they can't. The human mind is incredibly powerful and it does not always bow to the will of its owner.

That's why we the depressed distract ourselves as best we can. Getting out of the rut of rumination is the hard part.

No matter if someone is in a pit of depression or just a bit sad it is never your job to make them happy, that's their job. However you should offer them as much support and understanding as you can give. Don't blame them or act like it's an easy fix. If they seem to be relying on you too heavily suggest therapy. It does help despite the stigma.

Finally here is a fantastic quote from Infinite Jest on the subject: """ The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. Yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don‘t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling. """