The episode is not due to the effects of a substance or to a medical conditionĭ. Symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioningĬ. Recurrent thoughts of death (not just fear of dying), recurrent suicidal ideation without a specific plan, or a suicide attempt or a specific plan for committing suicide.ī. Diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness, nearly every day.ĩ. Feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt (which may be delusional) nearly every day.Ĩ. Fatigue or loss of energy nearly every day.ħ. Psychomotor agitation or retardation nearly every day.Ħ. Inability to sleep or oversleeping nearly every day.ĥ. Significant weight loss when not dieting or weight gain.Ĥ.
Markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all or almost all activities most of the day nearly every day.ģ. This mood might be characterized by sadness, emptiness, or hopelessness.Ģ. Depressed mood most of the day, almost every day, indicated by your own subjective report or by the report of others. It’s not enough to experience just one of the symptoms from category A over the two week period you need to have at least five of them to qualify, and one of these five has to be either depressed mood or loss of interest or pleasure in activities.Ī. We will list the criteria from the DSM-5 below and then flesh them out with some commentary.
To qualify for major depressive disorder you need to have been experiencing your symptoms almost every day for at least two weeks, and they are more intense than the normal fluctuations in mood that all of us experience in our daily lives. We throw the word ‘depression’ around a lot, to the point where for some of us a bad day is grounds for saying “I’m depressed.” One of my professors in graduate school used to differentiate the real deal from the melodramatic using the comparison of beverages, where one was ‘depression’ and the other was ‘depression light’.
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