This is interesting. I wonder if it means anything more than "depressive people are those that are unable to let go of failure"? Seems like an apt description of many generally depressed people I know.
Side note: Anyone have thoughts on whether 'depression' is an umbrella term for distinct mental traits?
In addition to tokenadult's comment, which I would expect is probably correct, I would relate this from my abnormal psych class: A number of conditions given the same label are known to be distinct, in that we can tell there's definitely more than one distinct thing going on, but nobody quite knows where to draw the line. Part of the purpose of the label is to give psychologists simply a word with an agreed meaning so they can discuss it with each other. As they narrow down exactly what the variants are and figure out where to draw the line, psychologists will give the variants new, separate names.
This is closely analogous to the justification given in the Design Patterns book for programmers. And in both the design pattern and the DSM case, there is widespread misunderstanding about the fact that the most important thing for both is simply giving things names, since we can not talk clearly about what we do not have proper names for.
Schizophrenia is the classic example, which started out as all but a synonym for "idiopathic mental disorder" and has gradually been refined into various distinct pieces, but not without controversy [1]. It remains an over-broad distinction, but of course that's because nobody really knows how to cut it down better yet.
Depression definitely would seem to be very similar; just look at all the types listed here [2], which I'd hardly expect to be an exhaustive list. Certainly in the popular press, which rarely takes the time to really nail down what they are talking about, "depression" is a term so broad it has hardly any meaning beyond "I feel sad a lot".
There's a lot of slicing and dicing done by the real professionals, which the popular press is entirely oblivious to. (I only sampled at the beginning, but I can at least say that's a true statement with confidence.) And there's more defining yet to be done. If you're interested in the subject, it's definitely an interesting one for hackers, seeing how the most complicated computing device known to man can go wrong. It can be... scary, though. (I don't have specific book recommendations though. Perhaps others will chime in.)
Side note: Anyone have thoughts on whether 'depression' is an umbrella term for distinct mental traits?