How do you know?!

How do you know?

How do you know if your friend is just really down, has Dysthymia, major depression, or bipolar disorder? What are the characteristics that make the differences?
I know the symptoms can be varying and different.
Do you know of any free depression/ mental health screenings that I can give her that can be found online?
I'm concerned about her!

2 weeks ago
She went through a traumatic experience earlier in life, which is only now causing major problems. She doesn't want to seek treatment!

"Really down" doesn't have an official definition.

Dysthymia iirc has to last at least 6 months and basically means that the baseline of your mood is "feeling down" instead of "feeling normal". If a normal person would rate their mood 6 or 7 out of 10 on average, a dysthymic person might rate their mood 4 or 5 out of 10 on average... not severely depressed, but just not as happy as normal people.

(Major) depression has to last at least two weeks and you have to be rather down for it... say if you rate your mood 4 or less on a scale from 1-10. This can seriously interfere with your life (dysthymia interferes with your life also, but on a lesser scale... people with depression might even have a hard time getting out of bed etc).

Bipolar is when sometimes you're depressed and sometimes you're manic. Everybody feels up and down from time to time but bipolar people much more extremely so. When manic they might believe they can do anything, might barely sleep, spend tons of money, talk a *lot* and really fast, have unsafe sex or w/e. There are a few other variations on this but it doesn't really matter, if a person is depressed sometimes it's probably best to leave it up to a psych to figure out whether it's just depression or bipolar.

Yes, there are some questionnaires online that will try to determine whether you're depressed or not. Use google, you can probably find them as quickly as I can.

It sounds like your friend really has a problem though. Just tell her that you're really concerned about her and that it'd make you feel happy if she'd go see a doctor/psych once to determine whether she's depressed or not. I don't know your situation but if you offer to pay for it it'd make it even more clear to her that you're really worried about her and she'd probably take you more seriously. Let her know that you think that her unhappiness is outside of normal range and that you want to help. Just telling her how you feel might be a wake-up call to her that something is really wrong with her.

Good luck. :)