"A dear friend of mine..." Problem.
"Two Beds in a Hospital" Solution.

Once upon a time in a faraway land there lived a man who got depressed.
This person was normally very happy, energetic and a great source of inspiration to anyone he come in contact with.
His condition saddened his friends.
It was hard to see a person of this intellectual and spiritual magnitude begin to loose ground.
When "rock bottom" loomed it's ugly head for the umpteenth time his friends suggested an extreme measure.

They put the man into a hospital.

The faraway land was a poor country.
They didn't have separate rooms for patients in their hospitals.

Several patients shared one room.

And the inevitable happened.
There was another man on a bed next to our hero's bed.

And his condition was WORSE.

This second man didn't want to live.

In "normal" countries doctors don't allow this sort of "neighboring".

But in the faraway land they had their own way of performing healing miracles.

The two men talked and talked and guess what happened.

The first one got well in no time flat.

Moral:
1.There is only one way to get well in this situation:
AT ANY COST FIND PEOPLE WHO FEEL AS YOU FEEL (anything will do - form a club, a group, a forum, a newsletter "For Those Who Feel Sad"...)
2.You will immediately realize that your problem is not "your" problem at all - it is common to thousands.
3.Register your condition and share, register and share.

To Dien: There is only one way to TURN a failure into a success force.
Register your failure, describe it, follow it, document it and share with ANYONE interested in failures (through books, letters, seminars).

By and in itself, without registering, without consciously turning your failure into an "information product" a failure IS NOT and never will be a success force.

Simon