Joanne Rowling is well-known for reaching out to fans in need, often through social media. So it probably shouldn’t surprise us that, when a depressed young Brazilian fan tweeted her asking for help in banishing his own dementors, she responded with encouragement, as did many other Potterphiles.
Rowling has always been open about creating the dementors from her own experience with clinical depression. The two major effects of depression, intense despair and the inability to feel happiness, correspond to the first two symptoms listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s official guide, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. But, the dementors also induce the rest of the nine symptoms. Harry is often confused or unable to concentrate 
when confronted with dementors, and Sirus tells us that Azkaban prisoners stop eating, have sleep disturbances and “go quiet after a while,” representing the symptoms of loss of appetite, insomnia and psychomotor retardation.
Dementors sap the prisoners’ mental and physical energy, so that they lose the will to escape. As Lupin tells Harry, “They don’t need walls or water to keep the prisoners in, not when they’re trapped inside their own heads.” Harry guiltily relives his parents’ deaths under dementor influence and, during the Battle of Hogwarts, comes close to a type of suicide.
Fred was gone, and Hagrid was surely dying or already dead… How many more lay dead that he did not yet know about; he felt as though his soul had already half left his body…A hundred dementors were advancing, gliding toward him, sucking their way towards Harry’s despair… his own wand trembled in his hand, and he almost welcomed the oncoming oblivion, the promise of nothing, of no feeling…
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