During a period of severe low mood, a 47-year-old woman describes each afternoon feeling as though it lasts an entire day, remarking that she has repeatedly checked the clock certain that hours must have passed, only to find that mere minutes have gone by. When asked directly, she correctly states the date and time. What is this presentation?

This is a distortion of the experience of time: a change in her personal, felt sense of how quickly or slowly time is passing, here markedly slowed in keeping with her severe low mood, while her actual, objective grasp of the date and time remains fully intact. It is not disorientation, since she correctly states the date and time when asked; not perplexity, which is a bewildered inability to make sense of experience generally rather than a specific distortion of time's felt pace; and not derealisation, which concerns the sense that the surrounding world feels unreal rather than the pace of time itself.