You're assuming that depression comes first and the lack of self-responsibility comes second. He's saying that the lack of self-responsibility comes first and depression is often a consequence of that.

Spot on.

The idea of learned helplessness is well known in psychology. When people feel powerless, they do typically experience feelings of depression. Well, you will make yourself feel powerless if you tell yourself there is absolutely nothing you can do to change your situation.

Learned helplessness, just like everything else, relies on lower-level processes. It couldn't exist in isolation.

Knowledge feeds into it. So does memory. So do the senses. So do the thousands of processes that feed into all of these. And out comes a synthesis in the form of that particular behavior.

My point is: it's not simple at all.

I can give a personal example. I used to work for a person who was downright horrible. A truly evil, abusive person. I definitely had some form of Stockholm Syndrome going on because I was always making excuses for the way he treated me. But I was extremely depressed working for him. I felt like I couldn't leave. I tried to leave a few times, only to be threatened back into submission. I told myself I had no choice, I was just a victim, there was nothing I could do. That was a lie. I could have asked someone for help. I could have called the police. I could have just refused to go back and let him make his threats. I could have stood up for myself in some way. But I didn't do any of these things because I believed they were not real options. It wasn't until I actually took responsibility for my own role in enabling the abuse that I was able to see that these things were all real options and then take the necessary steps to leave. As soon as I saw that there were in fact things I could do, that I was not actually as powerless as I had believed, I was not as depressed and I was able to find the motivation to do what I needed to do. If I never took responsibility, then I never would have seen myself as having any power over the situation and I would never have left.

You weren't able to act logically, not because you didn't take responsibility, but because you only had bogus information to work with.