In casual conversation, we sometimes talk about depression like it is a deep sadness. When we have a few bad days, we say things like “I feel depressed,” and we’re usually talking about feeling low, feeling sad, and feeling emotional.
Now, depression can feel that way. Many people have very strong negative emotions when they struggle with depression. But depression is not *only* a feeling of sadness. In fact, it’s possible to have depression and feel very few negative emotions at all. Instead, what they may struggle with is not sadness, but the *absence of pleasure.* It’s important that we talk about this more to help people identify and understand when they’re feeling depressed in order seek treatment.
What It’s Like to Not Experience Pleasure
The technical term for the inability to experience pleasure is “anhedonia.” It is one of the symptoms that psychiatrists like Dr. Sehdev of Aware Behavioral Health use to diagnose depression. For someone that has experienced anhedonia, it can be difficult to describe what it feels like, as words cannot always adequately convey what it means to be without pleasure.
Let’s try to describe it. Imagine something you typically enjoyed – or once enjoyed. Let’s pretend that you love horseback riding. When you’re on a horse, you feel intrigued. You feel a tiny amount of anxiety. You feel high in the air. Maybe even a tinge of physical excitement. You also feel joy and pleasure from having fun on the horse.
Now, imagine you feel exactly the same way, but you are incapable of feeling joy or pleasure.
You’re not sad. You’re not lonely. You still have the intrigue, the bit of excitement, and the tiny amount of anxiety. But you cannot feel the joy that you felt on your ride, as though it’s not an emotion you can experience or understand. No emotion takes its place. It’s just… gone.
Life without pleasure is life without the ability to feel happiness or joy. Some people can still experience emotions that may sound positive, for example:
- Pride over their kids.
- The ability to understand humor.
- The ability to notice beauty.
But they cannot experience pleasure from it. They simply do not experience anything at all. Patients that experience anhedonia without many of the other symptoms can often hide it as a result (or do not know they’re experiencing it), because all of the other emotions are still there.
Anhedonia with Other Symptoms
To be clear, anhedonia does not necessarily occur solely on its own. Many people do have heavy sadness, loneliness, and other strong negative emotions to go along with anhedonia. Yet some people experience anhedonia as the primary symptom. All of these are still depression, just with different ways of manifesting.
Depression is Treatable
There is more than one way to experience depression, and yet they’re all still depression. It is because of these many different symptoms that we at Aware Behavioral Health in Dallas have to always take the time to get to know you and understand your symptoms in order to help you manage depression and experience pleasure again.
Depression is treatable. Yet it is important to determine what treatment may work. Medication can help. Other treatments, like TMS therapy and counseling, can also help. Part of that determination comes from understanding your symptoms and your diagnosis, and that can be helped when you and those around you understand what anhedonia is, what causes it, and what it’s like.
If you would like to learn more about our treatment for depression, please contact Aware Behavioral Health, today. Based in Dallas and serving all of Texas, let us help you get the support you need and address and identify your symptoms as best as possible.
