How Do You Know You Have Depression and Anxiety

depression

Depression Symptoms and Warning Signs

Do yous think you might be depressed? Hither are some of the signs of low to look for—and tips for getting the aid you need.

Woman, folded arms resting on balcony railing, face resting on hand, gazing out, sad, depressed, hopeless, in emotional pain

What is low?

Feeling down from fourth dimension to time is a normal part of life, but when emotions such every bit hopelessness and despair accept concur and merely won't go away, you may have depression. More than just sadness in response to life'south struggles and setbacks, depression changes how y'all think, feel, and function in daily activities. It tin interfere with your power to piece of work, study, eat, sleep, and relish life. Just trying to go through the day can exist overwhelming.

While some people describe depression equally "living in a black hole" or having a feeling of impending doom, others feel lifeless, empty, and blah. Men in particular can feel angry and restless. However you experience the problem, left untreated it can become a serious health condition. But it'south important to remember that feelings of helplessness and hopelessness are symptoms of low—non the reality of your situation.

No thing how hopeless you feel, you can get improve. By understanding the causes and recognizing the unlike symptoms and types of depression, you can accept the get-go steps to feeling improve and overcoming the trouble.

Signs and symptoms

Depression varies from person to person, only in that location are some common signs and symptoms. Information technology's important to recall that these symptoms tin be part of life'south normal lows. Only the more symptoms you have, the stronger they are, and the longer they've lasted—the more than likely it is that you're dealing with depression.

10 common depression symptoms

Feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. A bleak outlook—nothing will ever get better and there'due south nothing you lot can do to improve your situation.
Loss of interest in daily activities. Y'all don't care anymore about sometime hobbies, pastimes, social activities, or sex. You've lost your ability to experience joy and pleasure.
Appetite or weight changes. Significant weight loss or weight gain—a change of more than 5% of body weight in a month.
Slumber changes. Either indisposition, especially waking in the early hours of the morning, or oversleeping.
Acrimony or irritability. Feeling agitated, restless, or even vehement. Your tolerance level is low, your atmosphere brusque, and everything and everyone gets on your fretfulness.
Loss of free energy. Feeling fatigued, sluggish, and physically drained. Your whole body may feel heavy, and even small-scale tasks are exhausting or accept longer to complete.
Self-loathing. Strong feelings of worthlessness or guilt. Yous harshly criticize yourself for perceived faults and mistakes.
Reckless behavior. You engage in escapist behavior such as substance abuse, compulsive gambling, reckless driving, or dangerous sports.
Concentration issues. Trouble focusing, making decisions, or remembering things.
Unexplained aches and pains. An increase in concrete complaints such as headaches, dorsum hurting, agonized muscles, and stomach pain.

The link between depression symptoms and anxiety

Depression and anxiety are believed to stem from the same biological vulnerability, which may explicate why they then often go hand-in-hand. Since anxiety makes depression worse (and vice versa), it's important to seek treatment for both conditions.

Is it depression or bipolar disorder?

Bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, involves serious shifts in moods, free energy, thinking, and beliefs. Because information technology looks so similar to depression when in the depression phase, it is often overlooked and misdiagnosed. This can be a serious problem as taking antidepressants for bipolar disorder can actually make the status worse.

[Read: Bipolar Disorder Signs and Symptoms]

If y'all've ever gone through phases where you experienced excessive feelings of euphoria, a decreased need for sleep, racing thoughts, and impulsive beliefs, consider getting evaluated for bipolar disorder.

Depression and suicide hazard

Depression is a major chance gene for suicide. Deep despair and hopelessness tin can make suicide feel similar the only way to escape the hurting. If you lot accept a loved one with depression, take whatever suicidal talk or behavior seriously and watch for the alarm signs:

Talking about killing or harming ane's self.
Expressing strong feelings of hopelessness or being trapped.
An unusual preoccupation with expiry or dying.
Interim recklessly, equally if they have a death wish (e.chiliad. speeding through red lights).
Calling or visiting people to say cheerio.
Getting affairs in gild (giving away prized possessions, tying up loose ends).
Saying things similar "Everyone would be better off without me," or "I desire out."
A sudden switch from being extremely down to acting calm and happy.

If you think a friend or family member is considering suicide, limited your concern and seek aid immediately. Talking openly about suicidal thoughts and feelings can save a life.

If yous are feeling suicidal…

When y'all're feeling suicidal, your bug don't seem temporary—they seem overwhelming and permanent. Only with fourth dimension, you will feel better, especially if you get help. At that place are many people who want to back up you during this difficult time, so please reach out!

Read Suicide Help, phone call 1-800-273-TALK in the U.S., or visit IASP or Suicide.org to notice a helpline in your country.

How depression symptoms vary with gender and age

Depression often varies according to historic period and gender, with symptoms differing between men and women, or young people and older adults.

Men

Depressed men are less likely to admit feelings of self-loathing and hopelessness. Instead, they tend to mutter about fatigue, irritability, sleep problems, and loss of interest in work and hobbies. They're also more likely to experience symptoms such as anger, assailment, reckless behavior, and substance abuse.

Women

Women are more probable to experience symptoms such every bit pronounced feelings of guilt, excessive sleeping, overeating, and weight gain. Low in women is besides impacted past hormonal factors during menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause. In fact, postpartum low affects up to 1 in 7 women following childbirth.

Teens

Irritability, acrimony, and agitation are often the most noticeable symptoms in depressed teens—not sadness. They may too complain of headaches, stomachaches, or other physical pains.

Older adults

Older adults tend to complain more about the concrete rather than the emotional signs and symptoms: things like fatigue, unexplained aches and pains, and memory problems. They may too neglect their personal appearance and cease taking disquisitional medications for their health.

Types of depression

Depression comes in many shapes and forms. While defining the severity—whether it'southward mild, moderate, or major—tin can be complicated, knowing what type you take may assist y'all manage your symptoms and get the nigh effective handling.

Mild and moderate depression

These are the most mutual types. More than simply feeling blue, the symptoms of mild depression tin interfere with your daily life, robbing yous of joy and motivation. Those symptoms become amplified in moderate depression and can atomic number 82 to a decline in confidence and self-esteem.

Recurrent, mild depression (dysthymia)

Dysthymia is a type of chronic "low-grade" depression. More days than not, you feel mildly or moderately depressed, although you may have brief periods of normal mood.

The symptoms of dysthymia are non as strong as the symptoms of major depression, but they terminal a long time (at least ii years).
Some people also experience major depressive episodes on top of dysthymia, a condition known as "double depression."
If you lot suffer from dysthymia, you may feel like y'all've always been depressed. Or you may call up that your continuous low mood is "just the way you are."

Major or clinical depression

Major low (otherwise known as major depressive disorder) is much less common than mild or moderate and is characterized by severe, relentless symptoms.

Left untreated, major depressive disorder typically lasts for about six months.
Some people experience just a single depressive episode in their lifetime, just major low tin exist a recurring disorder.

Atypical depression

Atypical depression is a common subtype of major depressive disorder with a specific symptom design. Information technology responds better to some therapies and medications than others, so identifying information technology can be helpful.

People with atypical low experience a temporary mood lift in response to positive events, such as after receiving good news or while out with friends.
Other symptoms include weight gain, increased appetite, sleeping excessively, a heavy feeling in the arms and legs, and sensitivity to rejection.

Seasonal melancholia disorder (Sorry)

For some people, the reduced daylight hours of winter pb to a form of depression known equally seasonal melancholia disorder (SAD). Pitiful affects about 1% to 2% of the population, particularly women and young people. Deplorable can make you lot experience like a completely different person to who yous are in the summer: hopeless, lamentable, tense, or stressed, with no involvement in friends or activities you normally dearest. Lamentable usually begins in fall or wintertime when the days become shorter and remains until the brighter days of spring.

Causes and run a risk factors

While some illnesses have a specific medical cause, making handling straightforward, depression is far more complicated. Certain medications, such equally barbiturates, corticosteroids, benzodiazepines, opioid painkillers, and specific claret pressure level medicine can trigger symptoms in some people—as can hypothyroidism (an underactive thyroid gland). But almost unremarkably, depression is caused by a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors that can vary wildly from 1 person to another.

Despite what you may accept seen in TV ads, read in newspaper articles, or perchance even heard from a doctor, depression is not just the result of a chemical imbalance in the brain, having too much or too trivial of any brain chemical that can exist merely cured with medication. Biological factors can certainly play a role in depression, including inflammation, hormonal changes, immune organisation suppression, abnormal action in certain parts of the brain, nutritional deficiencies, and shrinking brain cells. But psychological and social factors—such every bit past trauma, substance corruption, loneliness, low self-esteem, and lifestyle choices—tin also play an enormous part.

Chance factors that tin brand you more vulnerable

Depression nigh often results from a combination of factors, rather than ane single cause. For instance, if you went through a divorce, were diagnosed with a serious medical condition, or lost your job, the stress could prompt you to start drinking more, which in turn could crusade you to withdraw from family and friends. Those factors combined could so trigger depression.

The following are examples of risk factors that can make you more than susceptible:

Loneliness and isolation. There's a potent relationship between loneliness and depression. Non only can lack of social support heighten your risk, but having depression can crusade you to withdraw from others, exacerbating feelings of isolation. Having shut friends or family to talk to can help y'all maintain perspective on your issues and avert having to deal with problems alone.

Marital or relationship problems. While a network of stiff and supportive relationships can be crucial to good mental wellness, troubled, unhappy, or calumniating relationships can have the opposite effect and increase your gamble for depression.

Recent stressful life experiences. Major life changes, such equally a bereavement, divorce, unemployment, or financial problems tin can ofttimes bring overwhelming levels of stress and increase your risk of developing low.

[Read: Bereavement: Grieving the Loss of a Loved One]

Chronic illness or pain. Unmanaged pain or being diagnosed with a serious affliction, such as cancer, centre affliction, or diabetes, tin can trigger feelings of hopelessness and helplessness.

Family history of depression. Since information technology tin can run in families, it'due south probable some people have a genetic susceptibility to the problem. Notwithstanding, there is no single "low" gene. And just considering a close relative suffers from depression, it doesn't mean you lot volition, too. Your lifestyle choices, relationships, and coping skills matter but as much as genetics.

Personality. Whether your personality traits are inherited from your parents or the result of life experiences, they can impact your risk of depression. For example, you may exist at a greater risk if you tend to worry excessively, accept a negative outlook on life, are highly self-critical, or suffer from low self-esteem.

Early childhood trauma or abuse. Early life stresses such as childhood trauma, abuse, or bullying can brand you more susceptible to a number of hereafter health conditions, including depression.

Booze or drug abuse. Substance corruption can oftentimes co-occur with depression. Many people apply alcohol or drugs equally a ways of self-medicating their moods or cope with stress or difficult emotions. If you lot are already at take a chance, abusing booze or drugs may push button you lot over the edge. There is too testify that those who corruption opioid painkillers are at greater risk for depression.

The cause of your depression may help determine the handling

Agreement the underlying cause of your depression may aid you overcome the problem. For instance, if yous are feeling depressed because of a dead-end job, the best handling might exist finding a more satisfying career rather than only taking an antidepressant. If you are new to an surface area and feeling alone and sad, finding new friends will probably give you more of a mood boost than going to therapy. In such cases, the low is remedied by changing the situation.

Whether you lot're able to isolate the causes or not, the most important matter is to recognize that you take a problem, reach out for back up, and pursue the coping strategies that tin assist you to feel better.

What yous can practice to feel amend

When you're depressed, it tin can feel like there'south no low-cal at the terminate of the tunnel. Merely in that location are many things you lot can do to elevator and stabilize your mood. The cardinal is to outset with a few small goals and slowly build from there, trying to do a lilliputian more than each solar day. Feeling better takes time, but you lot can get there by making positive choices for yourself.

[Read: Coping with Depression]

Reach out to other people. Isolation fuels depression, and so attain out to friends and loved ones, even if you feel like being lone or don't want to be a burden to others. The simple deed of talking to someone face-to-face well-nigh how yous experience can be an enormous help. The person you talk to doesn't take to be able to set yous. They merely demand to be a good listener—someone who'll listen attentively without being distracted or judging y'all.

Get moving. When you're depressed, just getting out of bed tin can seem daunting, permit alone exercising. But regular practise tin can be every bit effective equally antidepressant medication in countering the symptoms of depression. Accept a short walk or put some music on and dance around. Showtime with small activities and build up from there.

Eat a mood boosting diet. Reduce your intake of foods that tin adversely affect your mood, such as caffeine, booze, trans fats, carbohydrate and refined carbs. And increase mood-enhancing nutrients such as Omega-3 fatty acids.

Notice means to engage again with the world. Spend some time in nature, intendance for a pet, volunteer, pick up a hobby you used to bask (or take up a new one). You lot won't feel like information technology at starting time, but equally yous participate in the world again, you will start to experience ameliorate.

When to seek professional help

If back up from family and friends and positive lifestyle changes aren't enough, information technology may be time to seek assistance from a mental health professional. In that location are many constructive treatments for low, including:

Therapy. Consulting a therapist can provide y'all tools to treat low from a variety of angles and motivate you to accept the action necessary. Therapy can as well offer y'all the skills and insight to foreclose the problem from coming back.

[Read: Depression Treatment]

Medication may be imperative if you lot're feeling suicidal or violent. But while it can assistance salvage symptoms of depression in some people, information technology isn't a cure and is not usually a long-term solution. It as well comes with side effects and other drawbacks so it's important to learn all the facts to make an informed decision.

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Source: https://www.helpguide.org/articles/depression/depression-symptoms-and-warning-signs.htm