Police chiefs today don't have it easy. Like teachers in the toughest schools, they are expected to clear up an Augean stable of social mess; they are hobbled by regulation, political correctness, directives and targets. A chief constable turns from confronting terrible human tragedies to be abruptly held to shrill promises made by some panicked Home Secretary, then suddenly shoved in another direction entirely by the local police authority. Below the chief are layers of officers - good, bad, tired, bent, worried, idle, hopeful - and a generation of cadets to be moulded. The goalposts move, skip, dance: laws are ceaselessly fiddled with, technology advances at baffling speed, mass immigration and globalism make social and cultural mores bafflingly fluid.

While the top copper rides this bounding, exhilarating, terrifying tiger of a job he or she is unwillingly labelled a universal role model, whose private life is fair game. Even though, of all jobs, this is the one where you'd most need to let your hair down. Alison Halford, who could have made chief constable, was pilloried (partly by colleagues) for a laddish night out. Brian Paddick sued - successfully - after his gay partnership suffered press intrusion. The Northern Ireland Chief Constable was hammered for having a child out of wedlock.

And after the lonely death on Snowdon of the Manchester Chief Constable Mike Todd, the heart sank when the terrible words “Max Clifford” occurred in a report. The publicist, never slow to include himself among his clients, was only reporting that an unnamed man had claimed he had a sex story that would “bring down a top copper”. There was something unspeakably, depressingly modern about the suggestion that media prurience would rob us of an energetic and committed police chief, and his family of a father. The tabloid headline “How many MORE affairs did suicide cop have?” was met in this house with cries of: “Mind your own business, creep!”

Mr Todd was academically clever but also a well-liked leader (the online tributes from his rank and file are heartbreaking). He was a smart tactician in tricky civic demonstrations, and admirably tough on street crime; he policed a cheerful Golden Jubilee. In Manchester he bluntly attacked racism, sexism and homophobia in his force, joined his men on the front line and put his body forward to being knocked out, painfully, to test the Taser gun. If his wife stands by his memory now, his affairs are not our business. For newspapers to drive such a man to despair on a bleak mountain would be intolerable.

However, it is unlikely to be that simple. Suicide - if such it was - is never simple. What emerges now is the portrait of a complex man: growing up without a mother, studying and working hard, his energetic professionalism merging with a romantic and emotional nature and a powerful depressive streak. The most telling, and touching, evidence comes from an ex-lover and colleague (why name her?) who says that seven years ago he hinted at suicide, talking of pills. She says simply: “Michael's job was his medication for depression. It was his absolute anchor.”

For this I honour him. I honour all those who, inheriting troubled genes or a troubled childhood, attempt like Churchill to control the black dog of depression by being useful. The people of Greater Manchester - and before it, London - were beneficiaries of Mr Todd's drive, even though it may have been depression that fuelled it and impelled him into a less than ideal personal life. The present-day neurosis about “workaholism” is sometimes overstated, and the emotional dangers of idleness forgotten.

Certainly it is bad to work so hard that you neglect your family, but it is equally bad to give up and loaf around because you find happiness elusive. A few people do get seriously mentally ill with clinical depression, but when you read in The British Medical Journal that depression is the most common reason for claiming sickness benefit, alarm bells ring. For some - maybe many - of those people, work would be the best cure. Conversely, it is not hard to draw a line between chronic multi-generation unemployment and the chaotic consolations of drink and drugs associated with it. Philip Larkin got it right in his second poem about the “toad work”, when he ended: “When the lights come on at four/ At the end of another year/ Give me your arm, old toad/ Help me down Cemetery Road.”

Paid or voluntary, interesting or tedious, work is a lifeline for the morose. Turning outwards and keeping busy, fending off your demons with achievement and effort as Mike Todd did, is often the best hope. Even if it fails, salute the effort. On the kitchen radio in my coffee break I just heard the elegantly glum Julian Barnes - a healthy and affluent novelist with no apparent problems apart from being 62 - who has written a beautifully phrased book about how frightened he is of being dead. Seems he wakes up in the night going “Oh no, oh no!” and banging the poor pillow. Well, enjoy. He's caught a Zeitgeist, a solipsistic and masturbatory post-Christian gloom. It will do well.

Yet despite whatever confusion, regret or despair overcame him on that stormy mountain day, I can't help feeling more inclined to honour Chief Constable Todd. His colleagues and city will remember him running around in squad cars, hacking through paperwork, tackling knotty problems, kicking butt, facing that Taser gun, encouraging cadets. Trying, perhaps, not to think about death at all, though it stalked him always and got him in the end.

Times Recommends

• A new kind of western conservatism
• Georgiana is the wrong role model
• Alaska, where cops don't bother you