These symptoms have a significant intensity and duration and can affect a person's functioning and sense of well-being in a variety of ways. This type of depression impairs a person's ability to carry on with normal life activities, work, and relationships, and causes significant distress. If you experience feelings of sadness or loss of interest plus four or more of the other symptoms listed above most of the time for two weeks or more, you could be depressed. More people suffer from depression than you might think. Depression strikes people of all ages, backgrounds, lifestyles and nationalities.
Women are twice as likely to develop a depressive illness.
At any given time, about 5 percent of the population of the United States suffer from major depression. Unlike other diseases that an individual can contract only once in a lifetime, depression is a recurrent condition. Those who have had an episode of depression have better than a 50 percent chance of the depression sometime in their lives. Depression can occur at any age, but the average age of onset is about 40. Although many people experience their first episode of depression in their late teens or early adulthood, the incidence of depression increases with age.