Yeah, I've been on both sides, too--and I honestly don't have trouble with helping out friends, or even complete strangers. I go out of my way to override my "I don't care" response when I think it's the right thing to do. The problem, for me, is when folks basically start treating me like an on-call therapist, and basically contacting me every time they has a twinge of the sads. It's one thing to talk about something when something good might come out of it, but I have a really hard time knowing what to do when someone comes up with the same problem over and over and over again, no change in the situation, no change in my reaction, no apparent desire to work on the problem. You see, when I wound up in that scenario, I realized that I could just tell myself the things that I knew they were going to say, and thus only one of us ended up bored.
On the other hand, I suppose that most people don't stop being depressed because of revulsion for ennui >_>
Seconding the thing about therapy. Really didn't work. I've actually had other friends who, apropos of nothing, mentioned that there are just classes of people talk therapy doesn't tend to work for, so I suspect that we may be both members of that group.
Joe Blow Depresso wasn't in lecture this morning and my "friend" the DM decided that, because I made a comment about my mom hating LA, he needed to attack both of us personally (he basically called both of us stupid). I also told him before this about my professor saying nice things about how I should go off and try to hack it as a comedy writer (not going to happen, but I thought I'd share the compliment) and he went on and on about how "as a person who actually knows comedy writers, the failure rate is 99.95%." Yeah, I also joked about joining a convent a while ago and he said I was too much of a party girl to make it as a nun and practice asceticism. Fuck this guy.
I'll talk to him when I'm feeling a little bit better, but man, he heard about the party we threw a mutual friend when he was out of town and commented about how he wished the guy "could have had a real party," we went off and got food together another time and of course, lots of comments about how he was glad about some dish or other so that the eating establishment was "good enough for him," and on and on and on complimenting himself on his mother's riches and fame.
Especially around me, because I let slip that my family was poor and from a rural area.
Fuck this guy.