Interesting approach. I like you putting out your ideas.

As Peter Philippson and some others might say, the depressed "self" is an emergent experience, and it emerges through contact in the environment. Thus, even automatic thoughts (of negative valence) do not arise in a vacuum. One can track the experience of self through a phenomenological method, and in the course of that, one can discover how a person depresses him or herself (so to speak). Even depression which is largely genetic and biological in etiology has a way of emerging within a context of life. Working with the field of any given client, a clinician can suggest medications, physical exercise or rehabilitation, nutritional consultation, home health care (especially in the case of elderly depressed people who need help with their activities of daily living), and financial counseling as ways of shifting influential elements affecting the client. These are not mechanical or strictly behavioral interventions when conducted within the perspective of Gestalt therapy's understanding of experiment, field, and especially of dialogue, when the supportive relationship between the therapist and client forms a ground.