We all know someone who is negative about everything, who finds any reason to be depressed.

In fact, if you have a social circle, hopefully not shrinking like mine, you probably know a number of such individuals.

In some cases, they have justification, as they have had tough lives, illnesses, deaths of loved ones and more than their fair share of bad luck. But are any of those valid reasons?

Yet there are some people, who no matter what life throws at them, don’t get down or find a scapegoat for their misfortunes. Admittedly they are a rare breed, but they do exist.

A number of years ago, my friend – I’ll call her Dee for the sake of this article – lost her young son to cancer.

In trying to save him, she and her partner Bill, amassed massive medical bills. However, despite them trying every known possible route, sadly the little mite died. She and her partner Bill were left with horrendous debts and loans from friends they now had to repay.

Bill was a commercial pilot, so he went to Afghanistan to fly for the Americans to earn dollars to settle their debts. There he did commercial as opposed to military flying. Earning dollars helped enormously with their dire financial situation.

Gradually they started getting out of the financial hole they had dug for themselves trying to save their son.

Bill had been in Afghanistan for some time when he caught a mini bus for the airport to come home for his regular leave break.

That day it just happened to be a target for the rebels because of the number of pilots on the bus and was blown up. Bill was one of eight who were killed in the explosion.

Dee was pregnant at the time with a second daughter.

Her first was turning two and hardly knew her father.

At this juncture a claim was put in against the American administration to get compensation for Bill’s death. It was rejected because they had never married. Eventually after a tense battle, it was eventually paid.

Soon after Dee was diagnosed with breast cancer. In time she had to have both her breasts removed – a double mastectomy.

After this tale of dreadful happenings to Dee, it seems a trifle implausible to then mention what a positive, cheerful, content, enthusiastic and wonderful person she is.

Once I asked her if she ever got depressed. “No, I don’t,” she smiled. “Obviously I don’t welcome or enjoy bad things happening, but I can’t say I’ve experienced depression and how it supposedly makes you feel helpless, sad and despondent.”

Without knowing it, Dee is endorsing Viktor Frankl’s principle: “Everything can be taken from a man, but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances; to choose one’s own way.”