When a psychiatrist makes a diagnosis of a patient's depressive illness, he or she may use a number of terms to describe it. These labels confuse many people who don't understand that they can overlap. People with depressive illness may also receive more than one diagnosis since the illness is often linked with other problems, such as alcoholism or other substance abuses, eating disorders, or anxiety disorders. Depression is one of the most treatable mental illnesses. Between 80 and 90 percent of all depressed people respond to treatment and nearly all depressed people who receive treatment experience at least some relief from their symptoms.
More severe symptoms mark the period as an episode of major depression.
These disabling episodes of depression can occur once, twice, or several times in a lifetime. A major depressive episode can hit the dysthymic person, too, causing double depression, a condition that demands careful treatment and close follow-up. Dysthymia A less severe type of depression, Dysthymia, involves long-term, chronic symptoms that do not disable, but keep you from functioning at 'full steam' or from feeling good. These people almost always seem to have symptoms of a mild form of the illness. Sometimes people with Dysthymia also experience Major Depressive episodes.