Language in Mild Depression: How It Is Spoken, What It Is About, and Why It Is Important to Listen.

Background: Our previous research demonstrated that mild depression (MD) is characterized by patterns of atypical language use such as inverted word order, greater repetition, increased use of reflexive/personal (e.g. myself) or negative/ indefinite (e.

Language Patterns Discriminate Mild Depression From Normal Sadness and Euthymic State.

Objectives: Deviations from typical word use have been previously reported in clinical depression, but language patterns of mild depression (MD), as distinct from normal sadness (NS) and euthymic state, are unknown. In this study, we aimed to apply the linguistic approach as an additional diagnostic key for understanding clinical variability along the continuum of affective states.

Methods: We studied 402 written reports from 124 Russian-speaking patients and 77 healthy controls (HC), including 35 cases of NS, using hand-coding procedures.