You bring up a lot of fine points. To be honest, I've been depressed since I was a small child so I don't really have a lot of experience with life without it. When my symptoms from my cancer got real bad, everyone just thought I was really depressed (before hand no one knew I struggled with depression). Then, after the specialist told me about it being cancer, the weirdest thing happened, I actually became happy. I didn't feel deeply depressed again until I was told I was in remission.

When everyone thought I was just depressed, it was hard to tell for me. The thing is, I've always known my head wasn't quite right and when I lost all my energy like that I just knew it wasn't depression. Like you said, of course the pleasure had gone out of my life, doing anything other than sleeping became next to impossible. And now when I begin having similar symptoms, the doc always checks me out and comes up with nothing new that could cause it and I'm just labeled with MDD. It's frustrating because on so many levels they're so similar. Long story short, I can't give much advice here. I just know that depression is something I can usually feel. When it feels slightly different, that's when I go to the doc and make sure.