Anhedonia Quotes

Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. And I've got to live with these fuckers for the rest of my life, I thought.

The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for it's own sake, leads to anhedonia. Which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millenial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent... ...Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.

That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this condition clinical depression or involutional depression or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by many names — anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton's melancholia or Yevtuschenko's more authoritative psychotic depression — but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It. It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self's most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible. It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing. This anhedonic Inability To Identify is also an integral part of It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one. The authoritative term psychotic depression makes Kate Gompert feel especially lonely. Specifically the psychotic part. Think of it this way. Two people are screaming in pain. One of them is being tortured with electric current. The other is not. The screamer who's being tortured with electric current is not psychotic: her screams are circumstantially appropriate. The screaming person who's not being tortured, however, is psychotic, since the outside parties making the diagnoses can see no electrodes or measurable amperage. One of the least pleasant things about being psychotically depressed on a ward full of psychotically depressed patients is coming to see that none of them is really psychotic, that their screams are entirely appropriate to certain circumstances part of whose special charm is that they are undetectable by any outside party. Thus the loneliness: it's a closed circuit: the current is both applied and received from within.

Kate Gompert’s always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy—happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love—are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify.

We Anhedonians have adapted to long periods between good news. Our national animal is the hope camel. We have no national bird. All the birds are dead.

It's of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It's maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it's the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip—and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, to be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent.

The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.

Masochism is more widespread than we realize because it takes an attenuated form. The basic dynamism is as follows: a human being sees something bad which is coming as inevitable. There is no way he can halt the process; he is helpess. This sense of helplessness generates a need to gain some control over the impending pain -- any kind of control will do. This makes sense; the subjective feeling of helplessness is more painful than the impending misery. So the person seizes control over the situation in the only way open to him: he connives to bring on the impending misery; he hastens it. This activity on his part promotes the false impression that he enjoys pain. Not so. It is simply that he cannot any longer endure the helplessness or the supposed helplessness. But in the process of gaining control over the inevitable misery he becomes, automatically, anhedonic. Anhedonia sets in stealthily. Over the years it takes control of him. For example, he learns to defer gratification; this is a step in the dismal process of anhedonia. In learning to defer he gratification he experiences a sense of self-mastery; he has become stoic, disciplined; he does not give way to impulse. He has "control". Control over himself in terms of his impulses and control over the external situation. He is a controlled and controlling person. Pretty soon he has branched out and is controlling other people, as part of the situation. He becomes a manipulator. Of course, he is not conciousily aware of this; all he intends to do is lessen his own sense of impotence. But in his task of lessening this sense, he insidiously overpowers the freedom of others. Yet, he dervies no pleasure from this, no positive psychological gain; all his gains are essential negative.

There's this mental illness, right? It's called 'anhedonia.' It means 'without pleasure.' You can look it up, though all you really need to do is look around." She motioned to the door the other women had disappeared through, and to the world at large. "A good deal of people, mostly women, spend their entire lives in this state. It's a sort of half-death. But if you recognize this, you can fix it...You focus on bliss. Small pleasures. Fill your day with as many as you can fit into twenty-four hours. You devote every possible moment not to fulfilling another person-a man-but yourself."-Suzanne "Sounds hedonistic"- Joanna "But once you can do this, you start attracting everyone to you. You dont need compare yourself to some other girl, no matter how young or firm or perky she is.....Trust me. A woman like this, one at her best? We're the color of the world. We're the light and the beauty. So focus on your pleasure, and the man you want can't help but realize...that he may be a prince...but your a goddess.-Suzanne

One of my dinner companions invited me on a strip-club excursion. I demurred, spoiled by the erotic revues of Anhedonia, where the performers remain fully clothed but get emotionally naked, delivering monologues about their top-shelf disappointments, and times when they were almost happy. Hard to enjoy American-style strip clubs after that. Once you go bleak, you never go back.

Psychiatrists describe schizophrenics as suffering from anhedonia, which literally means “lack of pleasure.” This symptom appears to be related to “stimulus overinclusion,” which refers to the fact that schizophrenics are condemned to notice irrelevant stimuli, to process information whether they like it or not.

Depression’s defining symptom is anhedonia, the inability to feel, anticipate, or pursue pleasure. Chronic stress depletes the mesolimbic system of dopamine, generating anhedonia. The link between childhood adversity and adult depression involves both organizational effects on the developing mesolimbic system and elevated adult glucocorticoid levels, which can deplete dopamine.

When people call it [depression] I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state … Well this - isn’t a state. This is a feeling. I feel it all over. In my arms and legs … All over. My head, throat, butt. In my stomach. It’s all over everywhere. I don’t know what to call it. It’s like I can’t get enough outside it to call it anything. It’s like horror more than sadness. It’s more like horror. It’s like something horrible is about to happen, the most horrible thing you imagine – no, worse than you can imagine because there’s the feeling that there’s something you have to do right away to stop it but you don’t know what it is you have to do, and then it’s happening, too, the whole horrible time, it’s about to happen and also it’s happening, all at the same time. … Everything gets horrible. Everything you see gets ugly. Lurid is the word. … That’s the right word for it. And everything sounds harsh, spiny and harsh-sounding, like every sound you hear all of a sudden has teeth. And smelling like I smell bad even after I just got out of the shower. It’s like what’s the point of washing if everything smells like I need another shower.

This is how apathy goes: First, old joys become new sorrows. Then all your mornings in bed transcend into eternities. Your best friend no longer calls because the new self is unrecognizable. And your father. Your father feels unfamiliar because you are growing and he is not.

when some of the neural “lights” in question have been switched off by injury, the outcome can be connected to a form of generalized depression, or what Dr. Jim Pfaus of Concordia University calls “anhedonia”—a state of pleasurelessness, bleakness, or grayness, in perceptions of the world.

Anhedonia’, which means the clinical inability to experience happiness.

Serial-Killing [10w] "Serial-Killing's no longer fun. I think I'm suffering from anhedonia.

The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.

Café olvidado a temperatura ambiente, Recuerdos verdes, helados por la noche, Un último cigarrillo como postre. Los frutos de mi anhedonia.

Anhedonia is something different. This is when we stop taking pleasure in the things that we used to enjoy. Anhedonia is associated with a number of mental health problems, including depression.

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip — and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J. O. Incandenza’s The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it’s natural that Himself’s dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive. Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia. 281 281 - This had been one of Hal’s deepest and most pregnant abstractions, one he’d come up with once while getting secretly high in the Pump Room. That we’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that he goes around feeling like he misses somebody he’s never even met? Without the universalizing abstraction, the feeling would make no sense.

Hal Incandenza, though he has no idea yet of why his father really put his head in a specially-dickied microwave in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, is pretty sure that it wasn’t because of standard U.S. anhedonia. Hal himself hasn’t had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he’s in there, inside his own hull, as a human being – but in fact he is far more robotic than John Wayne. One of his troubles with his Moms is the fact that Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows. His Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is lonely.

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip–and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self.

I would represent my country, the Republic of Anhedonia. We have no borders, but the population teems. No one has deigned to write down our history, but we are an ancient land, founded during the original disappointments, when the first person met another person.

Viví como morí, todavía no.

Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.

It's of some interest that the lively arts of the millenial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It's maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it's the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip -- and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great tanscendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the sahpe of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that save us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J. O. Incandenza's The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it's natural that Himself's dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive. Hal, who's empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is thie way he despises what it is he's really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.

It pisses me off when people tell me things like ‘it can’t be that bad,’ ‘It’s not the end of the world,’ and ‘think positively.’ It’s not that simple! I don’t think people who are uneducated about depression realize how crap it is to wake up angry or disappointed to be alive. Where there is nothing that makes you excited to get out of bed, your dopamine’s in the gutter and your anhedonia is boss. To battle with suicidal thoughts throughout the night. To slowly and painfully lose everything that gives you the x-factor. A place where food is disgusting and pleasure almost non-existent. Some days it genuinely feels like the end of the world, and trust me, it’s horrifying. It has been equally horrifying for those around me.

I am not alone. Existing in this melancholic world causes numerous individuals to feel remorseful and even harbor resentment. Contemplating the world fills me with melancholy. I sense a profound disconnection from the world. Feeling completely drained by my internal and external despair and indifference. I find myself filled with regret and eagerly await the conclusion. I believe my overwhelming anxiety has transformed into anhedonia and depression. Feelings of emptiness and not fitting in are common to all people. Feeling like an outsider hinders connection with others. Once quite the extrovert. I have always experienced a deep sense of disconnection, but at this stage of my life, numerous things have gone awry, making it almost unbearable.

The key to the problem, I would come to understand, was this: I lacked both spiritual guidelines, and an ability to enjoy anything. But at the same time, I was also an excitement addict. This is such a toxic combination I can't even. I didn't know this at the time, of course, but if I was not in the act of searching for excitement, being excited, or drunk, I was incapable of enjoying anything. The fancy word for that is "anhedonia," a word and feeling I would spend millions in therapy and treatment centers to discover and understand. Maybe that's why I won tennis matches only when I was a set down and within points of losing. Maybe that's why I did everything I did. "Anhedonia," by the way, was the original working title of my favorite movie, the one my mother and I had enjoyed together, "Annie Hall". Woody gets it. Woody gets me.

It seemed that my unhappy state was marked by three things: self-deception, self-abuse, and anhedonia. I told myself things that weren’t true, I neglected my needs or actively punished myself, and I took little delight from what the world offered.

Westwood said, “They call it anhedonia. The inability to experience pleasure.

Addiction is associated with anhedonia, the lessened ability to take pleasure from life apart from whatever one is addicted to, and social media addicts appear to be prone to long-term anhedonia.

We titled it Anhedonia, which is a psychological symptom wherein one cannot experience pleasure.

drinking, my distraction, my utter lack of pleasure in things—this last, I learned, called anhedonia, which to me sounded like the name of a flower Max never planted in the garden I never wanted.

Anhedonia” is the psychiatric term for the inability to derive pleasure

In general, fatigue is not as severe in depression as in ME/CFS. Joint and muscle pains, recurrent sore throats, tender lymph nodes, various cardiopulmonary symptoms (55), pressure headaches, prolonged post-exertional fatigue, chronic orthostatic intolerance, tachycardia, irritable bowel syndrome, bladder dysfunction, sinus and upper respiratory infections, new sensitivities to food, medications and chemicals, and atopy, new premenstrual syndrome, and sudden onset are commonly seen in ME/CFS, but not in depression. ME/CFS patients have a different immunological profile (56), and are more likely to have a down- regulation of the pituitary/adrenal axis (57). Anhedonia and self- reproach symptoms are not commonly seen in ME/CFS unless a concomitant depression is also present (58). The poor concentra- tion found in depression is not associated with a cluster of other cognitive impairments, as is common in ME/CFS. EEG brain mapping (59,60) and levels of low molecular weight RNase L (21,26) clearly distinguish ME/CFS from depression.

1. Sobre el papel del artista: ya no se trata de producir «obras» sino de prescribir sentidos. 2. Sobre la actuación del artista: el artista se funde con el curador, con el coleccionista, con el docente, con el historiador, con el teórico... Todas estas facetas son camaleónicamente autorales. 3. Sobre la responsabilidad del artista: se impone una ecología de lo visual que penalizará la saturación y alentará el reciclaje. 4. Sobre la función de las imágenes: la circulación de la imagen prevalece sobre el contenido de la imagen. 5. Sobre la filosofía del arte: se deslegitiman los discursos de originalidad y se normalizan las prácticas apropiacionistas.3 6. En la dialéctica del sujeto: el autor se camufla o está en la nube. Se reformulan modelos alternativos de autoría: coautoría, creación colaborativa, interactividad, anonimatos estratégicos y obras huérfanas. 7. Sobre la dialéctica de lo social: superación de las tensiones entre lo privado y lo público. La intimidad como reliquia. 8. Sobre el horizonte del arte: se dará más juego a los aspectos lúdicos en detrimento de la anhedonia (lo solemne + lo aburrido) en que suele refugiarse el arte hegemónico. 9. Sobre la experiencia del arte: se privilegian prácticas de creación que nos habituarán a la desposesión: compartir es mejor que poseer. 10. Sobre la política del arte: no rendirse ni al glamour ni al mercado para inscribirse en la acción de agitar conciencias.

En ocasiones, algunos circuitos prácticamente se apagan, como sucede durante la anhedonia (en general, en etapas más severas o avanzadas), de modo que una persona que fue completamente capaz de sentir emociones a diario de repente se vuelve casi inanimada… siendo cognitivamente consciente de todo lo que

A study of skydivers compared to a control group (rowers) found that repeat skydivers were more likely to experience anhedonia, a lack of joy, in the rest of their lives.

And I even managed to put in an inside joke after the credits: my production company was called "Anhedonia Productions," and the ad card we crafted featured a cartoon of me sighing with boredom on a roller coaster.

Anhedonia is something different. This is when we stop taking pleasure in the things that we used to enjoy. Anhedonia is associated with a number of mental health problems, including depression. When we feel that way, we start to question whether anything is worth the effort. Things that once brought joy start to feel meaningless. So we stop doing the things that have the potential to lift our mood because we have no desire for them any more.

But his entire life was set up as a correction of his father’s life, and he and Caroline had long agreed that Alfred was clinically depressed, and clinical depression was known to have genetic bases and to be substantially heritable, and so Gary had no choice but to keep resisting ANHEDONIA, keep gritting his teeth, keep doing his best to have fun …

Occasional feelings of listlessness and anhedonia [inability to enjoy our usual pleasures] are normal and existential. A modicum of ennui and dissatisfaction are part of the price of admission to life. Moreover, depression is sometimes an invaluable herald of the need to slow down for rest and restoration. When depression is most helpful, it gives us access to a unique spring of intuition, such as that which informs us that a once valued job or relationship is no longer healthy for us. In such instances we feel depressed because some irreparable change has rendered some central thing in our lives detrimental to us. This functional depression is signaling us to let it die and move on.

and halfway wondered if anhedonia might not be the most intelligent response to God’s fallen world. “Here, after all, is Hell,” the detective idly mused. “Nor are we likely to be out of it, save through death.

Major depression has as much to do with absence of positive emotions, a feature described as anhedonia: the inability to gain pleasure from normally pleasurable experiences, such as food, socializing, or sex.

didn’t know this at the time, of course, but if I was not in the act of searching for excitement, being excited, or drunk, I was incapable of enjoying anything. The fancy word for that is “anhedonia,” a word and feeling I would spend millions in therapy and treatment centers to discover and understand. Maybe that’s why I won tennis matches only when I was a set down and within points of losing. Maybe

Living with akathisia is akin to enduring a relentless storm, where extreme anxiety, distress, and a distorted sense of reality besiege one’s being. The symptoms are multifaceted: dizziness, uncontrollable movements, overwhelming agitation that scorches the soul, leading to a sense of decay that seems to spread from within to the outside world. Fraud, deceit, theft, and abandonment by those who once provided love and protection add layers of torment, fueling an intense remorse. This condition cripples one’s day-to-day functioning, reducing it to a mere shadow of its former state. In our desperate search for any sliver of hope, many find solace in the confines of their beds, foregoing essential self-care or any semblance of self-love. The excruciating ordeal feels like a relentless nightmare, with regular flare-ups and an omnipresent sense of doom.