Very, very different to mental problems. It’s like saying that cancer patients suffer panic attacks. Of course they do. Anybody would, in that position.

Mental health problems like serious depression are something else altogether.

I do not think that “adults are (always) within their rights to just leave”. I can think of dozens of occasions when that is evidently not so – for example they may be abandoning duties and obligations towards others, or they may be forgetting not to take with them cash that is not theirs.

I couldn’t agree more. In Mintoff’s darkest days when the police force’s reputation was justifiably at its worst, there were many, many worthy policemen, from gazetted officers to “other ranks” policemen who risked their all in protecting me and my family when I had been illegally compulsorily retired from the government service because I insisted that I give my professional service, without discrimination, to all policemen irrespective of their political affiliation but according to their needs.

I salute them from the bottom of my heart. It was they who kept me one step ahead of villainous plots being hatched openly in the “other ranks” inside the Police GHQ.

Unfortunately this is true when it comes to its leadership and most of the selected entourage surrounding it. The fault lies squarely with those responsible for this set up, who have inculcated the over-riding principle of serving the political masters rather than the public. Under such conditions the honest policeman and policewoman find it very hard to prosper.

Nowhere did I mention laziness or malingering. I simply pointed out, and in this I am entirely correct – excepting, of course, cases of catatonic depression and psychosis, which are in a completely different category – that depressives are only able to retire to bed and flop about when they have an enabler. A depressive’s enabler is no different to an alcoholic’s or drug addict’s enabler. Enablers think they are being kind but they merely fuel the situation and make it a hundred times worse.

People will stay in bed for days and weeks or even months on end only when they know for a fact that they have somebody they can depend on, who will make it possible for them to do this. Everybody else just hauls himself/herself up every morning and gets going, even if it means dragging along.

Try this experiment: if you are the only person living with a depressive who refuses to get out from under the bedcovers, pack a suitcase and go away for a month. If you imagine that you’ll come back to find the person dead of starvation and dehydration, still in the same clothes you left him/her in, you couldn’t be more wrong. You can bet your last euro that before 24 hours are up, they’ll have hauled themselves to the fridge and eventually to the television., and within five days they’ll be on the phone hectoring people – not nice but at least they’re doing something.

More so in the case of women.

Obviously, it’s actually created by the bio-chemical imbalance, in the same way that cancer is created by problems with the cells. But something triggered the problems with the cells and something triggered the bio-chemical imbalance.

Of course, you do have to have a genetic predisposition, but the fact is that depression never comes out of nowhere. Your coping mechanisms are developed in childhood, and poor parental relationships create very bad coping strategies that lead to what we call a depressive personality. The person simply can’t cope with life’s problems.

You will also notice that there is a greater tendency to give in to depression when there is somebody else to pick up the slack. You’re not going to spend day after day in bed if there is nobody to shop and cook for you or to look after the children and the chores. If there’s no other parent to do this (rather than tell them to get the f**k out of bed), then they will place the burden on the older children.

And if there is nobody to do it, then they get out of bed.

Quite frankly, I have no time or patience for people like this because, whatever the myth to the contrary, they are well aware that they are making life miserable for those around them and that is one of the reasons some of them do it.

I prefer to reserve my sympathy and understanding for those who have to cope with people like this, rather than for the depressives themselves. Nobody thinks of them.