Depressive disorders are often difficult to diagnose because the range of symptoms is so extensive. No two individuals suffering from depression will experience the same symptoms, nor will they experience them to the same level of severity. There are also many physical symptoms that contribute to chronic depression disorders, and these need to be taken into account also.
Some of the common symptoms of depression include:
- A general feeling of hopelessness or worthlessness
- A sense of pessimism concerning your life. You feel that life is just passing you by.
- Unreasonable feelings of guilt
- Chronic exhaustion. You barely can crawl out of bed in the mornings and often take to your bed at other times of the day as well.
- An overwhelming sense of anxiety that is totally unreasonable. Everything in life scares you now.
- The inability to focus enough to complete even the smallest tasks of daily living.
- A fear of being alone or, conversely, a fear of being around other people.
- An inability to take pleasure from things that once gave you pleasure. You just have nothing to look forward to anymore.
- A feeling that things are going wrong in your life because you deserve it – you’re a bad person.
- Changes in weight, either a significant loss or gain.
- A feeling that you are a burden to others around you and that you don’t even deserve to live.
- Severe restlessness or fatigue.
- Physical symptoms such as various aches and pains, accompanied by the very real fear that you are suffering from a serious physical illness.
- Thoughts of death or suicide.
- Inability to concentrate, memory problems and lack of necessary attention to complete certain tasks.
The problem with diagnosing a true depressive order is that many of these same symptoms are attributable to other causes as well. Therefore your doctor must test for a variety of things in order to isolate your symptoms as being the result of chronic depression.
There are also several degrees of severity with depressive disorders, and the symptoms you will experience, along with the severity of those symptoms, will depend upon the type of depression you are suffering from. For example, someone in the throes of full-blown bi-polar disorder may have most of these symptoms, but will experience them depending upon the mood swing they are currently in. If they are in the depressive state, they may not be eating or may have feelings of suicide. If they are in the euphoric state, then they may be going days without sleep and may be unable to concentrate long enough to even tie their shoes.
Asking for professional help
If you find yourself constantly thinking about death or dying, or planning suicide, seek professional help. There is no shame in asking for help when it is needed. Tell someone close to you about your feelings. Remember, the symptoms of clinical depression may seem overwhelming and debilitating, but with proper help, they can be managed.
The medical community is only just recently learning enough about these depressive disorders and their many symptoms to make accurate diagnoses and get their patients onto the most appropriate treatment regimens to give them relief, to help them to get their lives back on track. When depressive disorders are combined with physical disease processes, the task becomes even more complicated. But fortunately today the medical community has begun to recognize just how serious a disease depression is and the necessity to treat it with just the right combination of therapies that will work for the individual patient. No longer are we in the days when doctors considered depression as being “all in the mind” and would hand out a prescription for “happy pills” to resolve it. Today, we have a more sensitive medical community that realizes that drugs alone will often not do the trick, and that far more is needed such as therapies and even hospitalization in some cases. In other words, the medical community is now treating depressive disorders as the serious diseases that they are, and that’s good for their patients.