Despair can strike whether or not you have failed, and many people who fail never know its anguish at all. What, then, is the connection? In his book Feelings, psychiatrist Willard Gaylin says:

'Depression occurs when we loase confidence in our own coping mechanisms. We become depressed when we are bankrupt of self-esteem and self-confidence, when we no longer have the sense of our own capacities to insure either our actual survival or the worthiness or value of the life which we can sustain.' " (p. 55)