Brilliant question.

As someone who has recently gone through a period of being diagnosed with severe depression, one of the problems I have myself is I’m not really sure how much my condition - I still hestiate to call it an illness - was due to my own behaviour and how much of it was as unavoidable as, say, chicken pox.

I’ve always had a kind of dual personality, outwardly happy-go-lucky, whilst inwardly full of doubt and low-level non-specific fear, mostly of the future.

I am also a Class A procratinator. Recently I managed to procrastinate over a serious issue for so long that I came close to jeopardising my future. I was faced with losing my job, house and family. The details are irrelevant.

The problem is, in some parts of the world (USA, for one) severe procrastination is itself classed as a mental illness.

So, the problem is to what extent could I overcome my procrastination problem simply be normalising my behaviour. If I could, I would then have avoided the problem that, on the face of it, tipped me over the edge from low-level all-encompassing ‘blueness’ to a pretty full-blown, severe depression. Or was the depression stalking me anyway, waiting to pick its moment to attack?

Is labelling something like ‘procrastination’ a mental disorder part of the problem rather than part of the solution?

As someone who has gone through this, I still haven’t got the foggiest idea.