Fluffy

If your husband is rebelling against you, all the medication will do is enable him to connect to something else. In other words the medication and the subsequent distraction will cure the depression by enabling him to ignore you. If your situation is that he doesn't trust you to tell the correct lie then he is out of depression, ignoring your opinion and still in fallout.

Yes if you ignore them they cannot react, meanwhile the relationship will tiptoe along without love because the love is ignored in reciprocation.

They must do it for themselves is a misconception. They know the options; medication, therapy, another woman, pornography, drugs, alcohol and gaming. It depends upon which of these they have encountered before in terms of having an meaningful experience. You are just lucky that he opted for medication and just lucky that one of the others wasn't taken up before he started the medication.

Their view of life isn't different they are still capable of doing anything they want as long as you aren't involved. You don't exist as a person whilst you do exist as a truth (only) in combination with someone/ something else.

Since your husband was always with you when happy, then he won't remember ever being happy when he discusses happiness with you. He can probably discuss happiness differently when he's out with his mates.

"He thinks his anger & unhappiness is a personality flaw or someone else's fault because this is the truth he needs to believe (in your company) to keep the depression at bay." If he were to say his unhappiness is his fault this would be a big risk because he fears your input. You are going to argue against this by saying it isn't his fault, which turns him into the liar that he fears.

"He seeks help on the off-chance that the books, doctors & I just might be right. I think he feels he has nothing to lose & even as irrational the thought of him finding happiness is to him, he figures if we are right, he has a lot to gain." I think his upbringing and your confidence is making him think.

Where he's going wrong is in seeing these solutions together. He sees the book with you, the doctor with you, and his unhappiness with you. I know it.

If he could see the book separate to you, the doctor separate to you and unhappiness separate to you he would see all three.

He needs to know this and as sooner the better.

When you state you learned long ago that you can't do things for him, you never ever did. All you did was to arrange things for yourself. You connected the doctor to yourself, the articles to yourself etc, the medication to himself, all as truths. There are no lies in these truths, which to him is perfectly acceptable and the more you arranged, the more he probably agreed to. The problem he had was in making contact with them because he is viewing each as if they are also you. If the doctor and yourself are the same solution how can he bring the doctor close to himself to get a diagnosis. He would have to push you away as not being part of the solution which would make the combination of the doctor and yourself into a lie.