None of this is a verdict

Read the loop again and notice what is missing from it. There is no step where a person chooses badly, no step that requires weak character, and no step that requires a faith problem.

It is an ordinary feedback loop. Reward drops, activity drops, reward drops further. You could draw the same shape for someone recovering from an operation who stops walking because walking hurts.

That matters because most people arrive at this course with an explanation already in place, and the explanation is usually about themselves. There is a mechanism here, and mechanisms can be interrupted.

It is worth adding what the causal research actually looks like, because it is nobody's idea of a moral account. Twin studies put the heritable share of major depression at roughly a third, with most of the rest coming from a person's own circumstances rather than from anything shared with their family. Neither of those two terms is character.