The thing that most people get wrong is the direction of causality and that when you're not depressed your mind fools you into thinking you have more free will

The thing that most people get wrong is the direction of causality and that when you're not depressed your mind fools you into thinking you have more free will than you really have. What allows you to say to yourself "I will solve it for good and be free" is because you're less depressed and it's allowing you to say that, believe it, and act on it. It is not the case where saying that to yourself and acting upon it is what relieved your depression. This is why the advice to "just do it" doesn't work. It's backward. If you weren't depressed you could say, "I will solve it for good and be free" or you could do nothing and say, "this can wait for another day" or "I have better things to do right now" and they'd all be ok. There are definitely things you can do to make it worse and some things you can do to make it better but in general changing the symptoms, difficulty making decisions, anxiety, doesn't do anything because they don't effect the cause. If you want to simulate depression a great way would be to become extremely sleep deprived. That kind of sleep deprivation where you don't actually feel tired exactly but just wiped out. Now you're sitting on your couch, exhausted, and your friend comes in and says, "snap out of it, let's go to a party." You don't really want to go. You're not going to be excited about it and just want to stay on that couch. You could force yourself to go but you're not going to have a good time. You can list all the reasons why you should have enjoyed the party but you just couldn't get into it and just wanted to go home. Forcing yourself to go to the party doesn't fix the problem even though you might have felt a little better than when you were on the couch.