A depression is when you lose your job.

The difference between the two terms is not very well understood for one simple reason: There is not a universally agreed upon definition.
The standard newspaper definition of a recession is a decline in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for two or more consecutive quarters. The Business Cycle Dating Committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) determines the amount of business activity in the economy by looking at things like employment, industrial production, real income and wholesale-retail sales. They define a recession as the time when business activity has reached its peak and starts to fall until the time when business activity bottoms out. When the business activity starts to rise again it is called an expansionary period. By this definition, the average recession lasts about a year.

Before the Great Depression of the 1930s any downturn in economic activity was referred to as a depression. The term recession was developed in this period to differentiate periods like the 1930s from smaller economic declines that occurred in 1910 and 1913. This leads to the simple definition of a depression as a recession that lasts longer and has a larger decline in business activity.

A good rule of thumb for determining the difference between a recession and a depression is to look at the changes in GNP. A depression is any economic downturn where real GDP declines by more than 10 percent. A recession is an economic downturn that is less severe.

It depends on the severity and period of economic crisis.
The recession is the term to describe a period of overall reduced economic activities.
The depression describes a long period of low general economic activity marked especially by rising level of unemployment.

This will last longer than most because government has spent a lot of money and so businesses will earn less in the future because of increased taxes. Government spending does not help business. The bailouts the democrats will pass will not stimulate the economy.