RE: Why are people depressed, anxious or suicidal?
While I agree with your assessment that each and every single one of us has strengths and weaknesses, we must also recognize that as children, we don't have the emotional and mental maturity to deal with the behaviours, violence and abuse of the adults around us. We are also molded by our environment during our informative years and many of us struggle to heal from what happened in that period of time. It manifests in our struggles well into adulthood. That is far greater than what is within. however, as adults, it is our responsibility to heal and learn from those experiences rather than unconsciously living the rest of our life carrying around that trauma and acting out as a result of it. Through my own interactions with people around me, I was able to heal and learn but it also required that I surrender to that process. It started with a conscious choice in my part, but I absolutely needed my community to help me through the rest. There was no way I could have done it all by my self. I needed others to be the mirror for me to see in myself what I could not see for many years. I felt weak due to the violence of others. When we put the violence aside, we end up building each other up rather than tearing each other down. Our social groups play a pivotal roll in how we view life and each other. The choice though, still rests with the individual.
That is a very difficult subject to understand my dear friend @wwf, See the case of Oprah Winfrey, for mentioning one. She received many abuses, even sexual ones in her childhood, but she is a successful woman now. Surely, as you say, she surrounded herself with people who helped her overcome those traumas. She made herself strong. I tell you my case: I am the fourth of my brothers, my first brother, the son of a first husband of my mother, my second sister, daughter of a second husband of my mother, and my third sister and I, daughters of a third husband. I stopped seeing my dad when he was 12 years old and at the insistence of my sister we went one day to visit a city where they told me my father was there. My mother marries for the third time and I adopt that father as my own and he adopts me as his daughter. Our father-daughter relationship was good, but my sister's and he's not. His trauma did not let her see what a good man he was. I do not say that I did not have traumas, but I accepted the situation. I am a weak woman due to the traumas of my childhood, and that did not let me be as successful as I wanted to be. Thank you for responding to my humble opinion. PS: We all need psychological help.