How did you tell burnout and depression apart? Two weeks off didn't touch it Still In It

The distinction people find useful in practice is that burnout tends to be job-shaped. You're flat about work, cynical about work, and on a Saturday morning with no work anywhere in sight there is still something left in you. If the flatness follows you into food, into friends, into things you used to love, that's the part that points elsewhere. Worth knowing too that the formal classification in ICD-11 puts burn-out under factors influencing health status, explicitly as an occupational phenomenon rather than a medical condition — which is exactly why 'is it burnout or depression' is a question a professional can answer and a forum cannot.

Mine was both, in sequence. Nine months of a genuinely bad job, then the burnout took my legs out and something older got a foothold. Treating it as an either/or cost me about half a year of trying to fix the job when I also needed help with the other thing. It is allowed to be both and the framing of the question hides that.

The 'two weeks off changed nothing' data point is more informative than people realise. A merely tired person comes back from two weeks noticeably better. If a real break moves nothing at all, lead with that when you see somebody. Don't walk in with a theory. Say 'I took two weeks off and felt no different' and let them ask the questions — it's a much more useful starting sentence than a self-diagnosis.

Practical thing before you see anyone: write down for two weeks what your energy is doing, hour by hour, with no interpretation. Mine turned out to have a very obvious pattern that I simply could not see from the inside, and it made the appointment enormously more useful than 'I've been feeling off for a while'.

Your partner noticing is worth taking seriously. The people around you can see the shape of this from outside, and burnout in particular wrecks your ability to assess yourself. Mine told me for four months before I actually heard it, and I'd been arguing with her the whole time using evidence I was in no state to evaluate.