What Is Minor Depression? How Is It Different From Major Depression

Major depression is the name of the illness that's defined by the Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders. The manual lists nine symptoms that are typical of someone who is depressed and you must have five out of the nine symptoms for at least two weeks occurring all at the same time. Here's a handy mnemonic to remember the symptoms. It's the word depression.

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Depression has 10 letters and with the mnemonic,

The I and the O are combined to form one of the criteria that are used in the manual. Let's take a look.

• D is for depressed mood.
• E is for energy loss or fatigue.
• P is for pleasure lost, and this is referred to as anhedonia, where you don't experience pleasure in anything or previously pleasurable things.
• R is for retardation or excitation, and this refers to your activity level. Depression can make you slow or agitated.
• E is for eating changes. And your appetite either increases or you can lose your appetite completely or just eat less.
• S is for sleep change and this can be sleeping less than usual, tossing and turning throughout the night, or sleeping more than 10 hours and still not feeling rested.
• S is for suicidal thoughts.
• I is for I'm a failure or loss of confidence, and you can also feel hopeless.
• O is only me to blame, which is guilt, also known as guilty ruminations. And so again, the I and the O are one criterion that includes all of these negative ways of thinking.
• N is for no concentration.

As you can see, these are a lot of symptoms and more than just feeling sad. Also for the diagnosis, one of the five things has to be a depressed mood or an inability to experience pleasure in anything. What would you do if you had all of these things going on? Some people suffer without getting treatment, but it's a struggle.

A major depressive episode

 Causes you to have trouble fulfilling obligations or completing tasks. You may not be eating or you may be binging on junk food. You could miss work or school because you can't wake up. If someone forces you out of bed, you may be so drowsy and foggy-headed that you're stuck in zombie mode for another hour or two. You're awake, but you're just a shell going through the motions, and you can't work like that. Most times, a person with this type of depression needs treatment in the form of therapy
and/or medication. Often major depressive episodes are self-limited, meaning they come and go away on their own after three to 12 months, whether or not you get treatment. Some people have symptoms that persist for longer than this, 

But the usual is that major depression is an episodic illness that comes, stays for a while, then goes away, but comes back. If you're not on any medication, it can come back months later or even years later. If you have a first-time episode, there's a 50% chance that it won't come back at all. But once it comes back, there's a greater chance it will come back again at some point down the road. So that's major depression.

What's minor depression?

Minor depression isn't an official term or illness, it's more of a description of a milder form of depression. With minor or mild depression, you have two to four of the depression symptoms. So for example, you may feel sad and have fitful sleep. That's two symptoms. And you may be thinking how is that different from having a bad day where something made you sad and then you didn't sleep well that night? Mild depression symptoms, they still also last at least two weeks and often last much longer than that. 

Mild depression is a persistent depressive disorder. This used to be referred to as dysthymic disorder.
With persistent depressive disorder, you can have a few of these symptoms for a couple of years. It's like this low-hanging cloud of low-grade depression that affects how you feel but doesn't keep you from fulfilling your normal duties like work, school, managing your home, cleaning, paying bills, et cetera. You can still do these things, but it's like you're limping along and not operating at optimal efficiency. Another way you can experience mild depressive symptoms is if you're burned out. Burnout, like minor depression, is not an official diagnosis, but it's a real entity nonetheless. It happens when you put in a lot of work with little reward for that effort and the reward doesn't have to be monetary. In fact, you can do something that pays very well, but the money doesn't make up for the fact that you put your heart and soul into your work, but it feels senseless, or you may be criticized for it no matter how hard you work, or some person or entity puts unreasonable demands on you to keep churning out work with little regard for the toll it takes on you. And you can feel like the system will just chew you up, spit you out, and move on to the next juicy worker who's ready to serve. With burnout, there's a cynicism that sets in, that affects your motivation. You also feel exhausted and even small tasks that were easy for you to do before, now feel overwhelming. 

Sometimes burnout can feel like or look like depression, but instead of having all of those symptoms, you may have a few of them like exhaustion, appetite changes, or trouble enjoying pleasurable activities. I mentioned that major depression usually requires some kind of treatment like therapy or medication. This is not necessarily the case for minor depressive symptoms, so what do you do about it? A natural approach to treating mild depressive symptoms is getting 150 minutes a week of aerobic exercise and that's moderate aerobic exercise like brisk walking. This kind of movement helps depression, even mild symptoms, through chemical changes in the brain. The next thing you can do is change your diet. The Mediterranean diet has been shown to treat depression independently of medication or therapy. In short, though, eating Mediterranean involves eating less meat, like only one meat meal a day, eating unlimited fish, eating more vegetables, and healthy fats like nuts and avocado. The Mediterranean also includes whole grains instead of processed grains like white bread and white rice. People with special dietary needs can modify this to address those needs like making it gluten-free or nut-free. 

The last thing I'll mention that you can do is optimize your sleep. Chronic sleep deprivation, which would be getting less than six hours of sleep a night for the majority of the week and for the majority of the month can worsen depression or even cause you to have depression symptoms. There are lots of things you can do to improve your sleep hygiene, but one thing that I'll mention is wearing blue light-blocking glasses two hours before bedtime. Blue light is emitted by sunlight, but you can also get exposed to it from electronic devices and the modern compact fluorescent bulbs that you use to light your home. This blue light exposure can delay or decrease melatonin release. Melatonin is a sleep hormone. I've talked about using the glasses to block blue light for people with sleep disorders or in dark therapy for bipolar disorder, but here you would use the glasses to help keep your sleep regular. I wear them every night as part of my sleep routine. Sleeping pills like Ambien, Lunesta, or the newer medicine, Dayvigo, can help you log some good restorative sleep if you take them for a couple of weeks. Filling the void of sleep loss can make a difference in your mood when you have mild depression with sleep loss. You want to think of using them as a short-term solution so that you don't become dependent on needing something to help you sleep every night. And short-term would be one to three months. If your sleep problem is partly due to poor sleep habits, like not having a regular bedtime, staying up late, or using alcohol to fall asleep, just to name a few things, sleeping pills can help you establish a sleep routine. For example, if you don't fall asleep until 1:00 AM but you need to get up at 7:00 AM, it's going to be very hard, if not impossible, to start falling asleep at 10:00 PM on your own. You can push your sleep back, but you need help bringing it forward. Taking something that makes you fall asleep earlier can help you reset your body clock to fall asleep earlier and have that be your new bedtime. Using the blue light-blocking glasses two hours beforehand and sleeping with eye covers to block the light in the room can further help you fall asleep at your desired time.

So these are natural solutions for mild depressive symptoms. Does this mean that you can't take medication? No. Antidepressants may help mild depressive symptoms, but you have to weigh the risks of side effects from the medication against the benefits of taking them. It may not be worth it to take medication if natural interventions make you feel better. Also, it's important to know that what we call recovery from depression does not mean zero symptoms. You can still have a few things like appetite changes or sleep troubles and still be considered to be in remission from depression with medication. So if you start out with three symptoms, you may not want to add in a medication if that medication only relieves you of one of those three symptoms.