Having seen depression from the outside in and from the inside out, I thought the way the writer handled that was very smart, actually.To steal a line from Ebert, it's not what it's about, it's how it's about it. Yes, the episode was "about" clinical depression, but not in any kind of complex way. It was fluffed over, I thought, made very safe and palatable. His depression was charming and eccentric, not at all what it is in real life. A missed opportunity, perhaps. The episode was afraid to make us feel uncomfortable with Van Gogh, because it had its heart set on us liking him and finding him all cuddly and stuff.
Depression is not something people actually want to deal with, not if they can avoid it at least. It makes people extremely uncomfortable. They want to fluff it over, joke about it, talk about something else and if they're ready to address it at all, they usually think that it will disappear if we say nice things to each other. And it doesn't work, and people die, which is exactly what happened in this episode. I thought that was very clever.