Yeah, sorry, no joke here.
As far as depression goes, I tend to hole-up and work (which incidentally is what I also do when I'm not depressed).
Someone asked me after I launched Plagiarist.com how I was able to manually scan, OCR, and edit 4,000 poems (it's like 10,000 now) in about six weeks (in which time I also taught myself PHP and built the rest of the site) and I told them that it helps to have a really bad breakup with the love of your life, and then do nothing else but build a huge web site for six weeks.
Incidentally, I launched Plagiarist.com on 10 September 2001, and then took it down the next day to put up a black page with a link to the Red Cross for a week before finally launching a week late. Thanks, terrorists.
Anyway, the day it finally went live I also took an IT contract that required me to show up on site 9-5 as though I were a regular employee (and I pretty much was, except in how I got paid and the fact that I got no benefits). The work wasn't very interesting but I did enjoy the social aspects of it.
I think I had a point when I started typing up there, but now I forget what it was.