I agree Jon, and am glad you are keeping on keeping on. Masking depression with drugs is like refusing to mourn when someone dies or you lose some hope you had. If you can't respect your own response, what can you respect? It is betraying the honesty of your own existence and experience. And if you believe that the world is meaningless or a machine out to get you, there are good reasons for thinking so! D.W. Winnicott, the child psychiatrist, once said that the patients he respected most were the ones who refused to have a nervous breakdown, and those who had enough courage to have a nervous breakdown. The line gets crossed perhaps when months or years have gone by without any relief, or when one can feel oneself being sucked down too deep. Then drugs or almost anything seem to me to be justified. A close friend of mine once said, just before he was hospitalized, "You know how in Alcoholics Anonymous they say you can't do anything until you have hit bottom? I have discovered that there is no bottom." He is now on drugs, which keep his life and family together, but he is not the person he was -- but then he stopped being the person he was a long time ago. Do I like him better now absolutely? No. Do I like him better than he was when he was beating his wife and lying howling in a bottomless pit? Yes. Some things maybe, just break, and will not come back together again, ever.

When it becomes endless or bottomless, then even a strong person, who has always shunned help, needs help. Even just to try, even if it seems really stupid, or betraying your right to be angry at the world because of all it has done to you. It is a terrible time. I have been there myself, and watched friends grope towards asking for help, and failed to ask for it myself. I came out with just a belief bitterly earned, that asking for help often takes much more strength than toughing it out.
yours, Peter T.