Different Types Of Depression
Major Depressive Disorder – When people use the terms depression or clinical depression, they are generally referring to major depressive disorder. Major depressive disorder is a mood disorder characterized by a depressed mood, a lack of interest in activities normally enjoyed, changes in weight and sleep, fatigue, feelings of worthlessness and guilt, difficulty concentrating and thoughts of death and suicide. If a person experiences the majority of these symptoms for longer than a two-week period, they may be diagnosed with major depressive disorder.
Atypical depression is a variation of depression that is slightly different from major depression. The sufferer is sometimes able to experience happiness and moments of elation. Symptoms of atypical depression include fatigue, oversleeping, overeating and weight gain. People who suffer from atypical depression believe that outside events control their mood (i.e. success, attention and praise). Episodes of atypical depression can last for months or a sufferer may live with it forever.
Dysthymia Depression: The Greek word dysthymia means “bad state of mind” or “ill humor.” As one of the two chief forms of clinical depression, it usually has fewer or less serious symptoms than major depression but lasts longer. Dysthymia refers to a prevalent form of sub threshold depressive pathology with gloominess, anhedonia, low drive and energy, low self-esteem and pessimistic outlook. Although co-morbidity with panic, social phobic and alcohol use disorders has been described, the most significant association is with major depressive episodes. Dysthymia and major depression naturally have many symptoms in common, including depressed mood, disturbed sleep, low energy, and poor concentration. Like major depression, it is more common in women than in men, but it tends to arise earlier in life.
Manic Depression: Manic depression can be defined as an emotional disorder characterized by changing mood shifts from depression to mania which can sometimes be quite rapid. People who suffer from manic depression have an extremely high rate of suicide.
Recurrent Episode Depression: This describes depression in terms of its frequency. Recurrent depression describes the situation where a patient experiences two or more episodes of depression, separated by at least 2 months of essentially ‘normal’ function.
Anxiety Depression: Not an official depression type. However, anxiety often also occurs with depression. In this case, a depressed individual may also experience anxiety symptoms (e.g. panic attacks) or an anxiety disorder (e.g. PTSD, panic disorder, social phobia, generalized anxiety disorder).
Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder: This is an uncommon type of depression affecting a small percentage of menstruating women. It refers to the variation of physical and mood symptoms that appear during the last one or two weeks of the menstrual cycle and disappear by the end of a full flow of menses. It is a cyclical condition in which women may feel depressed and irritable for one or two weeks before their menstrual period each month. If you have unpleasant, disturbing emotional and physical symptoms before your monthly menstrual periods and these symptoms disrupt your life and interfere with your usual activities and your relationships with others and the symptoms go away when your flow begins or shortly thereafter, only to return before your next period then this condition is known as Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder.
Bipolar disorder is an illness that consists of alternating periods of elevated moods, called manic episodes, and depression. Mood swings run on a spectrum from mild mania (called hypomania) to more severe, debilitating highs. Periods of mania can last for hours, days, weeks or even months before depression returns.
Choose the most reliable cocaine addiction treatment . Find out more on residential inpatient drug rehab center .
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!