As gently as possible, I want to let you know that not all relationships are like the one you so unfortunately experienced with your father.

No where in this post did it imply that his wife has this behavior. HN nerds have a really bad habit of conflating and projecting. I'm sorry about your father, but you can't infer that about his wife from the given information; the severity of that implication is why your experience is as extraordinary and makes it difficult to buy that his wife is the problem.

Imagine if we were advising him to remain silent about this to his close business associates. Would we advise an engineer having a rough go of it to not talk to their manager? Would you advise a student to not talk to a parent if they were having a really hard time at school? What benefit would remaining unproductively silent about these problems other than choking on your own poison?

In addition to what other people are saying, a marital relationship typically starts between adults. We all have a back story and everyone has some kind of baggage, but a marriage is fundamentally different from a parent-child relationship in terms of power dynamics. An abused child has zero real alternative but to cope as best they can with what the parent is doing to them. Marriage is a bit more complicated than that.

> Depressed people need to make changes to their lives. You can't do that when you have someone being your crutch.

You also can't do that without a great support network. That piece is critical in the path to recovery, and you should not so arbitrarily dismiss the possibility that to many people, family (spouse, parents, even children) is that support network.