What Is Dysthymia - What Is Depression: Depression

Content provided by the Faculty of the Harvard Medical School

What is dysthymia?

Mental health professionals use the term dysthymia (dis-THIGH-me-ah) to refer to a low-level drone of depression that lasts for at least two years in adults or one year in children and teens. While not as crippling as major depression, its persistent hold can keep you from feeling good and can intrude upon your work, school, and social life. If you were to equate depression with the color black, dysthymia might be likened to a dim gray. Unlike major depression, in which relatively short episodes may be separated by considerable spans of time, dysthymia lasts for an average of at least five years.

If you suffer from dysthymia, more often than not you feel depressed during most of the day. You may carry out daily responsibilities, but much of the zest is gone from your life. Your depressed mood doesn't lift for more than two months at a time, and you also have at least two of the following symptoms:

• overeating or loss of appetite

• insomnia or sleeping too much

• tiredness or lack of energy

• low self-esteem

• trouble concentrating or making decisions

• hopelessness.

Sometimes an episode of major depression occurs on top of dysthymia; this is known as double depression.

Dysthymia often begins in childhood, the teen years, or early adulthood. Being drawn into this low-level depression appears to make major depression more likely. In fact, up to 75% of people who are diagnosed with dysthymia will have an episode of major depression within five years.

It's difficult to escape the grasp of untreated dysthymia. Only about 10% of people spontaneously emerge from it in a given year. Some appear to get beyond it for as long as two months, only to spiral downward again. However, proper treatment eases dysthymia and other depressive disorders in about four out of five people.

Last updated:	January 23, 2007