Anhedonia is good at being a persistent undercurrent to your life. My aunt, who has major depressive disorder, related to me that she figured out that something was wrong when she looked at the daffodils she had planted blooming, and couldn’t recognize the emotion that she felt when she looked at them. It had been long enough since she had felt happy that she lost the ability to recognize the emotion.

It’s a particularly dangerous depressive symptom, because it robs you of the ability to feel those little spots of joy that keep a lot of people going, while not doing anything to impair your ability to function. If you don’t know that this is a treatable symptom of depression, it’s easy to assume that your ability to feel good is permanently broken, and decide to commit suicide because you don’t want to live like that. It’s not an irrational conclusion, but it is an uninformed one, and everyone deserves to have all the information when making a major decision.

This is what a lot of questionnaires are trying to look for when they ask about “loss of enjoyment”. If you can’t remember a loss of enjoyment because you can’t remember enjoyment, then you probably have anhedonia. If you struggle to define how it is to feel “happy”, “content”, or “good”, or how it feels when you feel those emotions, you probably have anhedonia. If you can’t remember feeling any of those emotions for a week or more, you probably have anhedonia.

Symptoms commonly co-occurring with anhedonia are fatigue (often the cause), clear and thoughtful consideration of suicide, loss of desire to socialize or do activities that used to make you happy, and weight loss (due to lack of enjoyment of food).

It’s also a common symptom of schizophrenia and schizoid personality disorder, but often doesn’t respond to antipsychotics. In addition, in schizophrenia and schizoid personality disorder, anhedonia generally tends to “come and go”, as opposed to depressive disorders, where when untreated, it often doesn’t let up for months or years. This can make it more difficult to spot and treat than in depressive disorders.

ADHD can also have “come and go” anhedonia as a symptom, and ADHD medication has mixed results with alleviating it.

Let’s pretend that in a human mind, there is a status bar for “mood.” It can run from -50 to +50, with a set point in the middle for “neutral mood, feeling nothing in particular, neither good nor bad.”

And let’s pretend that in the regular course of things, events that happen in your life can make the bar tick either down or up. Little things have little effects, big things have big effects. So you can have big things like “I won the lottery +50” or “My spouse died -50.” But you can also have little things; “I got cut off in traffic. -2” “The weather was beautiful today +5” “My boss belittled me in front of the team -10” “I saw a movie I really enjoyed! +7” And even if nothing in particular is happening, over time, the bar will generally drift back to its set point.

When anhedonia is in the picture, the “mood go up” mechanism is broken. It just doesn’t work. You can have an objectively great day, and it’s still like – The trees are in flower here and it’s beautiful +0. I got my favorite drink from Starbucks +0. I spent time with a good friend +0. I met an adorable dog today and got to pet him +0. And the mood also doesn’t return to the set point on its own.

But the “mood go down” mechanism still works. Somebody yelled a slur from a car -5. We’re overdue on bills this month -7. Got rained on -2. So the longer the anhedonia spell goes on, the mood bar just keeps ticking down, down, down. You can try to insulate yourself from losses, but life happens – sooner or later somebody is going to be rude or you’ll see something awful on the news or you’ll bend an ankle going down the stairs. Tick tick tick, down down down.

You can go day after day trying everything you can think of to make mood bar go up – reading your favorite books, talking to old friends, looking at cute kitten pictures, treating yourself to an ice cream sundae – and it doesn’t work. There’s just nothing. Mood bar go up machine broke.

Now I’m an adult and people my age have their lives in order and I’m stuck here, confused, because I never planned to be alive and I’m so far behind.

I want to make an addition to this. I made this post a long time ago.

I’m currently back in university, and I’ve made so much progress with my trauma. I’m in a loving relationship.

Things can and will get better. It’s not too late.

I’m getting married. I’m still in that loving relationship.