I like the Doctor because he’s full of life.
He’s full of energy. Vitality. He’s a problem solver. He pokes and prods. He asks uncomfortable questions, mucks about where he’s not wanted. He never gives up.
With depression, life is the one thing you don’t have. Depression is all about giving up.
Depression means you don’t care. You can’t care. You don’t have the energy to care.
The Doctor cares. He has opinions. He changes things. Usually for the better, sometimes for the worse, but he’s always at the center of the action.
In an episode I saw recently, a girl asks, “What do monsters have nightmares about?”
“ME!” is the Doctor’s response, proud, confident, boundlessly enthusiastic. The kind of person you want to be around. The kind of person you want to be.
You feel better just being around him.
If you’re an artist of any kind – painter, musician, writer, TV show creator – and you’ve wondered if your art really matters, the answer is yes.
Art always matters. This is why.
Brian D. Buckley 
It’s funny, but you can sort of tell that the Doctor was created back in the 1960s. More recently, heroic characters seem required to have angst, or self-doubt, or anger, or some other sort of “dark side.” Wolverine and the Dark Knight seem to be the template. Aragon in the Lord of the Rings movies had a bunch of self-doubt that he certainly never had in the books. Cripes, these days even Superman kills.
I can imagine Ellen Ripley saying the same thing about what monsters have nightmares about, for example, but not in that same way.
Not that I don’t enjoy Wolverine and Ripley, but the best part of the most recent X-Men movie, as I talked about on my blog, was the Quicksilver scene, because finally we see somebody enjoying their abilities, rather than complaining about them.
All of which reminds me, not coincidentally, that my favorite piece of music is still “Ode to Joy.” 🙂
What I love about Doctor Who is its positive nature. Even when things are dangerous, there is always hope. And fun.
Well said. 🙂