What Are the Symptoms of Depression?

About half of all people with clinical depression never get diagnosed.

Sometimes a sudden and lasting change in the way you feel makes a depression diagnosis obvious, in other cases, symptoms get missed or misattributed for years, or for ever. Depression affects everyone differently, and the way depression manifests in a young adult woman can be quite different from the way it affects an older man. That being said, there are a number of commonly experienced symptoms of the disorder.

Few people experience all possible symptoms of depression. If you experience some of the symptoms listed below, the way you're feeling affects your life and you've felt this way for longer than 2 weeks, you may have treatable clinical depression, and should talk to a doctor about the way you feel.

Symptoms of Depression

Two major symptoms include:

• You feel sad or hopeless.
• You take no or little pleasure out of activities that you used to enjoy (Sex, hobbies, eating)

Other symptoms include:

• Feeling tired most of the time
• Irritability or anger (depressed men are more prone to these feelings)
• Crying (or feeling like crying) sometimes for no apparent reason
• Having difficulty thinking clearly, or making decisions
• Feeling useless, or feeling like a burden on others
• Social withdrawal
• Suicidal thoughts
• Anxiety
• Bodily aches and pains, without reason
• Feeling guilty, without reason
• Sleep problems – either insomnia or excessive sleep
• Weight gain or weight loss

Treatments Work

Depression drags down the quality of life. Some people struggle with depression, untreated, for years or decades, never taking advantage of treatments that work and that can bring back a lot of joy to life.

If some or many of the symptoms of depression listed above match the way you feel, talk to a doctor about the things you can do to start feeling better.