If you are experiencing thoughts of suicide, please call the National Suicide Hotline right away, at 800-273-8255, or chat with someone online.
Everyone has bad days, sad feelings, difficult seasons, and hard situations. Everyone goes through mood swings, and everyone has those days when it’s just hard to get motivated.
But if the gloom starts to drag on, or the energy doesn’t seem to return, you might start to wonder if you’re sad or really depressed. Are you just feeling blue or are you suffering from an actual depressive disorder?
If you’ve never dealt with depression, or been close to someone who has, it can be hard to know for sure. Terms like “depressed” get thrown around a lot, which just adds to the confusion.
Clinical depression (also called “major depression” or “depression disorder”) is more than just a bad feeling: It is a mental health disorder with clear symptoms. Learning how to recognize those symptoms can be a first step toward getting the help and healing that you need.
Depression Quiz
Below are nine questions that focus on the frequency of certain symptoms. Everyone experiences at least some of these things from time to time, so think about how often you have noticed these in the past three or four weeks.
Note: This quiz is intended to help you recognize symptoms of depressive disorder, in order to better understand your own experiences. It is not a complete or thorough diagnosis and does not replace a professional evaluation.
For each question, ask yourself if you feel that way never, occasionally, frequently, or pretty much all the time.
1. How often do you feel down, hopeless, or sad?
Primary symptoms of depression—and often the first ones that people notice—are lingering feelings of sadness or hopelessness.
If you’ve recently been through a negative experience like an illness or death in the family, divorce, job loss, etc., it’s normal to feel sad for more than a few days. It takes time to find grace and healing after those kinds of events.
If there has not been a negative life event, however, or if you haven’t made any kind of rebound after a couple of weeks, it might be something more serious than just feeling sad.
Finally, keep in mind that none of these symptoms are guaranteed—even feelings of sadness. Once thought to be a requirement for a diagnosis of clinical depression, more recent studies have found that older adults especially may suffer from clinical depression without feeling sad.
2. How often have you noticed that you take little (or no) pleasure in activities you used to enjoy?
This experience is known as anhedonia, and is considered the other “core symptom” of depressive disorder. There are two kinds of anhedonia:
Social anhedonia is the sudden lack of pleasure in social activities. Where you used to enjoy getting together with friends, you just don’t anymore — even for your favorite sports or activities.
Physical anhedonia is the sudden lack of pleasure in physical activities like eating or touch. A diminished libido or consistent physical pains and illnesses are also associated with physical anhedonia.
While a common, core symptom of clinical depression, anhedonia is also sometimes experienced by people who are not depressed.
3. How often have you noticed dramatic changes in your appetite?
Depression often affects a person’s appetite, but in different ways.
Loss of appetite — As depression dwindles a patient’s interest and energy, the appetite sometimes follows. It can be a result of physical anhedonia or a lack of energy to cook and prepare food.
Insatiable appetite — Other people who struggle with depression turn to food for comfort. Prolonged emotional eating can be a sign of depressive disorder.
In either case, the change in appetite is dramatic. People suffering from depression often experience noticeable and unhealthy weight loss or weight gain.
4. How often have you been tired and lacking energy or motivation?
Depression takes a toll on energy and motivation by disrupting serotonin balances and dopamine signaling in the brain.
This debilitating lack of motivation is known as avolition. Avolition is not just about dragging your feet on a task you’re dreading. It is the feeling that normal, everyday tasks are monumental difficulties. It is a very common symptom of clinical depression as well as schizophrenia.
5. Has your sleep schedule been irregular lately?
Organizing your school resources can clear away a lot of the excess mental clutter that makes anxiety and depression so unbearable. It can be hard to get organized on the outside when you feel a bit chaotic on the inside, though, so this is a good opportunity to get some help.
If you don’t know where to start, reach out to a parent, friend, counselor, or coach who can help bring some order to your school work. Everyone prefers different strategies and tools, so learn from someone more organized than you, but also work with someone who will listen to your input about what you can maintain.
6. How often have you had thoughts of self-harm or suicide?
Self-harm is not necessarily a symptom of depression, but it can be. If you are hurting yourself in an attempt to maintain control or deal with emotional pain, please tell someone or contact the Crisis Text Line.
Thoughts of suicide, chronic thoughts of death in general, or suicide ideation (with or without a specific plan) are always serious. If you notice these thought patterns in yourself—even if you feel like it’s not serious—please tell someone or contact the National Suicide Hotline.
7. How often do you have trouble concentrating or remembering?
Depression has been repeatedly linked to cognitive impairments like memory loss and trouble concentrating. Cognitive processing slows and memory retrieval becomes hindered.
The first difficulty with this symptom is that many people don’t immediately associate it with depression. It can quickly start to hinder work performance, personal relationships, and more. In turn, those professional and personal problems exacerbate feelings of failure, loneliness, and hopelessness.
Impaired cognitive function is another symptom of depression, like poor sleep, that can become a vicious cycle of cause and effect. Depression makes it difficult to concentrate and recall short-term memories, and that lack of concentration leads to conditions that feed depression.
8. How often do you notice feeling bad about yourself?
In addition to feeling sad in general, a common symptom of clinical depression is chronic feelings of worthlessness or excessive, inappropriate guilt. You may find that you frequently feel like a disappointment—to yourself, your family, your boss, etc. You may even have a list of “reasons” that you feel like a disappointment or a list of “failures” you feel chronically guilty about.
Some people who suffer from depression feel guilty about their depression. You may tell yourself that other people have it much worse than you, that you don’t have anything to be depressed about, etc.
Studies have suggested that depression inhibits reasoning and problem-solving functions in the brain. This allows feelings of guilt to “spread,” in a way, from one action that may have actually been wrong or unkind, to a hundred other situations where guilt is completely unreasonable.
9. How often have other people noticed you moving or speaking very slowly?
Clinical depression slows cognitive function and executive thinking, which can in turn slow down a person’s speech. You may notice that you’re speaking more slowly and even that your speech is marked by prolonged pauses.
Depression can also slow motor function. This is known as psychomotor retardation, and most often occurs during depressive episodes. You walk and move slower, as if in a thick fog.
In cases of depression, slow speech and motor function are not just sluggish feelings. They are noticeable to friends and loved ones.
Depression Quiz: Scoring
Reviewing the nine questions above, give yourself:
One “point” for every time you would answer “occasionally.”
Two “points” for every time you would answer “frequently.”
Three “points” for every time you would answer “all the time.”
If your total is below 10, and you mostly answered “never” or “occasionally,” you’re showing few signs of clinical depression.
If your total is between 10 and 18, you may be experiencing symptoms of depression.
If your total is higher than 18, or you answered “all the time” to more than one symptom, you need to seek help urgently.
Most importantly, no matter what your “score” is, remember that depression exists on a scale, and no internet quiz is a real diagnosis. If you are concerned about your experiences or what you are feeling, please tell a loved one and reach out to your doctor or a therapist.
Getting Help for Depression
One of the surest signs that you should talk to a counselor or therapist about depression is simply that you’re worried you may have a depressive disorder. People who are just down about a difficult season in life or a negative experience don’t often wonder if they’re clinically depressed.
You know, better than anyone else, what is normal for you. If what you are feeling and experiencing isn’t normal for you, please talk to someone.
If you are in Austin or Houston, or anywhere across the State of Texas, one of our licensed counselors would be happy to talk with you, to help you figure out what’s going on. You can call us at 512.669.5701 or schedule a free consultation online.