Because if you talk to your friends and family about it, their reaction will be to shun you, and tell you to get professional help. Professional help is very u

Because if you talk to your friends and family about it, their reaction will be to shun you, and tell you to get professional help. Professional help is very unsophisticated. Standard psychoanalytic talk therapy has very low success rates. Pharmacologic solutions seem to work but are dicey ( big side effects and long lag between start of drug and effect, obscuring value of treatment and making settling on a course of treatment hard ). The best treatment in all my reading is excercise, which can be applied as "self-medication". In America, where we have no practical medical record privacy, if you seek treatment, pre-Obamacare you would be practically denied insurance on the open market forevermore, and likely the information may be leaked in a variety of ways, or - again in the old system - you might be practically denied. I have heard stores about people getting insurance, then seeking treatment, getting a bunch of treatment, then the insurance company coming back ( remember, after approving care ) saying "This was probably a preexisting condition so we're not going to pay it after all, and we're going to retroactively cancel your policy, and you can never have a policy again with us, and you have to tell any other insurance company why we denied you coverage - because you lied when describing medical history, which will block you from any other insurance". Very reliable source, who obviously I can't disclose. I suppose America is past those dark days --- but I'll need another 2 years before I believe it. If you fundraise successfully, you will be asked to fill out a questionnaire regarding medical history. You will be asked whether you have a history of depression. This may be asked as due diligence, this may be asked as part of the "key man insurance". At least, I'm pretty sure I had a number of those --- and I was very happy I could truthfully answer "no history of any medical issues" to all of those questions. You don't want to go looking for money as a founder with "history of depression" on your resume. Really don't. Funding is hard, founding is hard, don't need more "hair on the ball".