These four categories of symptoms are also associated with the disease:

1) Changes in the way people think – Difficulty in focusing on something for long and making decisions. This goes with their tendency to also have short term memory loss.

2) Emotional changes – Many people report feeling depressed about things that they used to love. Once even-tempered persons now become short-tempered and irritable. Feelings of helplessness and hopelessness dominate their emotional being.

3) Turn into a hermit of sorts – Become anti-social, avoiding people that they used to talk with frequently. They may stay indoors and overeat or may not eat enough. Besides losing their sex drive, many people slowly stop taking care of their personal hygiene.

4) Physical changes – Despite spending more hours sleeping, people will be constantly run-down and tired. Most can’t fall asleep and if they do, can’t sleep soundly. Laying awake for hours, when they do fall asleep they’ll wake up throughout the night. A minority of dysthymic disorder afflicted people will sleep many hours – apparently soundly – only to awaken feeling more tired than when they went to sleep.

How To Treat Dysthymic Disorder

It turns out that treatment with standard anti-depression methods work very well for this disease, which should come as no surprise since it IS a form of depression. But most people improve with a combination of psychiatric counseling and prescription medications, which parallels traditional depression treatment methods.

Personality disorders like this are best treated with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is recognized by the medical societies. CBT is becoming the psychiatric treatment of choice. Since people tend to over-react to problems in their lives, cognitive behavior therapy helps them separate which problems are truly big and which are inconsequential. Problems will definitely come up in everyone’s life; CBT allows a person to recognize if the problem is worth his concern or not.

And lastly, therapy is needed to address the high-stress parts of a person’s life that are contributing to his or her depression. Interpersonal relationship conflicts are treated with interpersonal therapy, while the behavioral therapy addresses a person’s ability to cope with life’s stresses.

Find out more information about dysthymic disorder and other forms of depression at http://dealwithdepression.org/