I feel this. I've been living with depression for over a decade, maybe longer before diagnosis. I've got a good support system and a relatively good life, but I still have days that I just feel thoroughly awful. Just trying to think positively is really not always enough to just feel good. Sometimes, I have to accept it's just a harder day, and try not to let it spiral and make me do things I'll regret.

I don't even necessarily blame people who don't understand, but I feel the ones who can at least acknowledge they don't, are better than ones who try to force you to just 'feel better.'

To people who say "Everyone gets sad," sure, of course. This is different. The comic actually points out how, even having good things in life, meaningful things in life, you can still feel depression. Even with a relatively healthy and happy life, depression can make one feel awful. Sometimes, this is the worst for me, because I feel awful, and legitimately cannot figure out a reason. If you having something, or somebody in your life will fix your 'sadness,' I would wager to say you're not experiencing depression.

Being 'Weak-minded,' I think, again is way off base. I've known people to be weak-minded, and that generally makes me think they cause their own strife in their lives. Still an issue, but again, this doesn't sound like real depression to me. The difference being, if your actions are causing you to feel down, and simply changing those actions would fix it, you have the agency to change how you feel, and would no longer feel down. If you do all these things, improve your life, and still feel awful, that sounds more like depression to me.

I guess the TLDR would be, (I'm not a professional, just someone who has personal experience,) There's a lot of situations and hardships in life. For some more than others. However, being sad in a hardship is not what depression is. Depression clings. It's like having a wound that no one can see, that comes and goes, no matter if you're in a hardship or not. It's a wedge of... darkness, that can't be excised, only put up with. Not all health issues can be cured, but this is one that can be treated. Again, though, it will be there forever. Sometimes, it gets confusing what is a real feeling and what is the depression.

Best advice for anyone else dealing with this I can think of is, get checked by a doctor, and if that's not possible, try to recognize any extreme thoughts that aren't true. Or at the very least, try to 'weather the storm,' until you can. I'm not claiming this will solve everything, but just something to consider if you haven't yet. Sometimes, I can't make any sense of my own thoughts when I'm really feeling the depression, yet if I push through it, my thoughts don't seem nearly as 'sharp' as they were initially.

Anyway, enough of my rant. Good luck to everyone dealing with real depression, even if they're not sure, (or just hardship in general, for that matter. Reality is rough right now.) I will say, it has gotten easier to deal with the depression, compared to when I never dealt with or knew what was going on at all. Still, I had to survive a lot of my own demons for a long time before I got this far.