This tool is a depression symptoms checker. It gathers the most important signs, symptoms, and risk factors for developing the condition. Therefore, it would tell anybody who uses it the likelihood of having depression.
Depression and, more specifically, major depressive disorder is a severe condition. It contributes to both illness and death by causing suicide, prompt and enhance other diseases, damage to interpersonal relationships, increase substance abuse, and loss of work time to people.
What is more, this is a widespread disease. The estimation is that nearly 8% of the Americans aging more than twelve had either moderate or severe depression between 2009 and 2012. Importantly, the disease affects the most women and people between their forties and sixties.
Hopefully, as much as three-quarters of people with this condition will see a reduction in their symptoms after treatment. So, it is essential to identify such patients and treat them for significantly improving their life and reduce the chances of complications.
Furthermore, many people think that people with depression look entirely different or portray overt symptoms. However, this situation is inaccurate and not real—most patients with depression present with a normal appearance.
Nowadays, the estimation is that two-thirds of people with depression do not seek medical help. This situation exists because of the lack of information. Basically, people do not understand they have a disease that requires treatment.
Besides, the general public tends to have misunderstandings about this disease, sometimes including healthcare providers. Therefore, it causes people to avoid seeking help because of unawareness. This circumstance is something to worry about, given that depression can yield severe complications, including death.
There are many types of depression disorders. They can also be named according to many other features that the doctor finds. However, the most important thing is to rule out other diseases that can mimic depression. Importantly, these impostors do not go away by just taking anti-depressive medication.
Moreover, the treatment includes drugs, and others without them as psychotherapy. Many of them have had success in treating this condition. However, it is impossible to predict what would be the response from a particular patient to the treatment. It varies from person to person.
Medication and psychotherapy are the two cornerstones of depression treatment. Medication or psychotherapy by themselves is not sufficient. They need to be together for treatment to work.
Combination therapy leads to higher and quicker rates of improvement in depressive symptoms, increase quality of life, and yield better treatment compliance.
Depression treatment takes around 4- 12 weeks to produce evident changes. Treatment failure is often the consequence of medication noncompliance, inadequate duration of therapy, or improper dosing.
Although the diagnosis of depression is mostly clinical, laboratory tests are useful to rule out organic or physical causes of depression and medical illnesses that can present themselves as a major depressive disorder.
This tool is a depression symptoms checker. It will help determine the likelihood of someone having this disease.
The diagnosis of this disease mostly relies on questions about how the patient feels. Luckily, this tool gathers the most important signs, symptoms, and risk factors for developing depression. Therefore, anybody who uses this free tool would get an estimation if it has or not depression. It would only take you a few minutes.
Originally published at symptoms.care on August 11, 2020.
