Does anyone know the difference between anhedonia and depression, or is it the same thing? Anhedonia is a Greek word which means lack of joy. It is a word used to describe not feeling any joy, for example, if someone with anhedonia found a $100.00 bill, they would feel no joy.
Anhedonia is a symptom of major depression. It’s what people are talking about in this thread when they say they’re in that “feel nothing” phase. Like in the Hyperbole and a Half depression comics that were linked. It’s a very strange feeling, or lack of feeling. Everything kind of just feels like something that happened. It’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t had it. I imagine it’s a lot like it feels like in the Star Wars universe when they describe someone as being “cut off from the Force”.
I’m not sure if anhedonia is required for you to have major depressive disorder, but it’s common. I’m also not sure what other cases one might experience anhedonia, but they’re not completely distinct, anhedonia and depression are (or can be) very much related.
(Becky, Draelin, thanks, I’ll respond to you when I have more time)
Mine did, a bit, last August. Whole sections seemed to open, some for the first time. One result was that Physics thread we were in. But I still don’t enjoy much of anything. I post a lot, but that’s a lot of pointless jabbering that I just have to say or I’ll burst.
I’m not really sure if I miss enjoying things. After a while you forget.
I’ve gotten pretty good about editing myself but don’t have a sense of proportion when I decide not to. Actually that’s not true. I used to be worse but inarticulate. So depending on how you look at it, it’s still an improvement.
Yeah, I guess even I’m not buying that one. 
I’m pretty sure it isn’t.
I was surprisingly happy when the radio announced that Same Sex marriages would begin this afternoon (well now, yesterday), since the decision doesn’t affect me. But I was.
Then a few hours later I was on the verge of tears for no discernible reason, …again.
I hope for the best for everyone, I really do. But I have no support to give. It all sounds hollow to me and I feel like a hypocrite saying that it will get better, because I know it won’t at least for some people. It hasn’t for me and I suspect it’s my fault too.
I could say more, I guess, but why? I’m just tired…
I’ve been trying for some time to hypnotise myself out of depression.
I think that it may take some time but I’m hoping that sheer persistence may work in the end.
Prescription drugs don’t work for me, and I suspect that counselling for anything is like rubbing salt into a wound.
Can I just say to all of the sufferers on this thread that I’m rooting for all of you ,things WILL get better.
Hang on in there, sending good thoughts your way, to each and everyone of you !
YES!!! Normals have no idea. My wife will ask what I want to do. I answer, “Whatever you want to do,” because, after all these decades, she still gets mad if I say, “Nothing.” But she always follows it up with, “Well, what do YOU think is fun?” and I know I can’t answer, "NOTHING! WHY CAN’T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT I ENJOY NOTHING, MOST OF WHAT I DO IS TO PASS THE TIME BEFORE I CAN GO BACK TO SLEEP, AND THAT I’VE BEEN LIKE THIS NEARLY AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER? So I suggest something that I know she likes. It’s usually something that I actively do not enjoy (funny how I can’t enjoy things but I can not enjoy them), so I sit in the car and listen to the radio or nap.
This is the only place I can go to cry (quietly.) [In space nobody can hear you scream.]Since my younger brother died. We shared everything.
Tonight, talking with my husband, a TV show sparked a memory. The only summer camp I ever went to was a religious one. It started out great but I somehow sprained my wrist and only got to swim in the pool the first day. After that, they wouldn’t let me. Remember I made a really neat leather something during that week.
End of the week, camp’s over. Everybody’s going home. We’d all gathered at the main lodge to leave. I waited and waited while girls lugged their duffle bags out to their cars. Finally, they were closing up inside and they told me to wait out on the porch.
Much later a woman came out and said my mother had called and could I find a ride a home?
I was afraid I was going to have to walk. (We were up in the woods.) I didn’t know where I was and didn’t know how to get back home. Luckily, a girl who’d been sick—her mother came to get her—was one of the last ones to leave. I asked them for a ride.
I was eight or nine years old. The ride home was horrible. Apparently the woman knew my mother and bad-mouthed her the whole way. There was nothing I could say
to refute the truth.
Who does that to a child?..I’ll never be “normal” but it’s made me care about others and that’s a good thing.
One more compulsive rumination lived through tonight, as I drink. Cheers.
Like others, I’m pretty terminally bored, and yet I know not what to do. Outside of leaving the house to be with my friends – a too-rare occurrence, unfortunately – nothing gives me any spark of enjoyment. I fucking hate this shit.
Still reading, still struggling a bit with my own depression, but the Wellbutrin takes the edge off and makes it easier to cope with things like stress and anxiety. I also have a bit more energy now to go out and do things in my time off from work (in addition to having the energy to actually work), which is an astounding improvement. It’s a huge leap from going out somewhere and counting the minutes until I can go home and collapse.
Also sympathising with depression in a loved one, and hoping they can get some effective help. Wish them luck.
{{{{{{Dopers}}}}}}
Dunkelheit: Did you get any ringing in your ears with Wellbutrin? I have tinnitus and when I was taking it the ringing I got was at a different frequency so it was like having a continuous pre-concert sound check in my head. Better than hearing other sorts of thing though I suppose. :eek: 
The past week and a half has been especially weird and hard.
On the one (very good!) hand, I got a promotion at work. It’s something I’ve been working towards for about a year, and it’s more in line with my skill level. It’s invigorating to actually be having to try at work again. If it weren’t for the floor presence, I could have done my previous job in about a day and a half.
But… my second day at the job, my boss had to terminate one of my supervisors for a policy violation. On my third day, one of my agents informed me she was reporting another agent to HR for sexual harassment. So, suddenly, I’m training my replacement, training the fired sup’s replacement, ramping up for six training classes (that we found out about two days before my previous boss left… I was tentatively planned as his replacement at the time, but was only partially trained, and with the assumption that we were getting one training class), managing training three other leadership folks, and learning to do my job. It’s overwhelming.
So… suddenly I can’t focus at home. Hell, even at my downtime at work, I feel like I’m just drifting. I can’t fall asleep, and I’m not even thinking about work. I’m thinking about my marriage and it’s crumbling state. I find myself angry, really really angry, about it (which is a big step up from the sad or nothing I had felt a year ago). In some ways, this kind of sucks about not being depressed - ugh, not being suicidal means I actually have to figure out how to deal with this shit. And feeling things means I feel HURT and ANGRY. And those feeling suck. I mean, sure, I feel happy sometimes, but… I’m not always sure it’s worth it. And I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed of some of the poor decisions I made, but I’m really ashamed of how I’ve let my husband treat me over the years. My friend who’s a social worker has pointed out to me how some of the behaviors he and I have exhibited have bordered on abusive, and thinking back on some of the things he’s said and done in private that I haven’t shared with her… Hm, it wasn’t so healthy. He’s manipulative, self-victimizing, and kinda mean. And I don’t know if I’m more ashamed that I’ve accepted that so long, apologized and justified for so long… Or that if he asked to move home, I would take him. I still miss him, I still think he CAN be better, he just… doesn’t. I’m just lying awake lately, just thinking over it, over and over. And this is a terrible time for this to be happening.
My councilor said these feelings were normal for this kind of situation, and that I’m, in general, dealing with things really well. Work, for one, is going great. My boss approved a backfill into my role today, which means he’s approving my promotion - with my old salary, I was going to just barely be able to keep my house in the (likely) divorce. The new one isn’t too much better, but… any better is better. My friends, while flakey, are largely supportive. (Except my former best friend, who’s now more or less dating my husband, but that’s a story for another night. I know this sounds abnormal, but I seriously wouldn’t care if they were sleeping together if he’d just go back to being in a relationship with me. Them being in a relationship without sleeping together hurts worse than if they were.).
I’m working hard to choose to focus on the positives. It’s not bad 9-5, it’s a bit of a struggle 5-10, but once bedtime rolls around… it’s like I’ve lost all my energy for that over the course of the day.
I haven’t noticed a difference in my usual tinnitus, which is pretty bad to begin with.
I don’t know, I mean, I don’t even see her in person. If there’s one thing I’ve heard repeated all the time forever it’s that you never ask somebody out over email, text, whatever (dating sites excluded). Always in person.
Even so, I don’t think asking her out is a good idea. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to date her. I can’t come up with a logical reason not to, which I’m sure means I’m wrong, but it just doesn’t seem right.
Either way, right now I’m trying really hard to convince myself I don’t have a crush on her, by pinching myself any time I have vaguely romantic thoughts. I’m not sure if it will work, but I’m hoping it does and then it will be moot.
I don’t know, maybe I’m colored by friend in high school. She was great, and people were always asking her out and she turned them down. She told me once how much it meant to her that I never asked her out, because she was tired of people doing it all the time. I figure since this person is great too, she might get asked out all the time as well – and I don’t want to add to the cacophonous symphony of suitors, I’d prefer her be happy and me not have a date than her be annoyed at having to reject another person and me still not have a date. I don’t want to be just another annoying person in an endless sea of faces trying to romance her. Besides, she’s here to earn her PhD, not date. I don’t want to distract her from that. It’s like hitting on a cashier, they’re there to take your money, not entertain dating requests. I see it as fundamentally the same, she’s in this city to earn a degree, not be hit on by people who met her at her place of education.
A suggestion, maybe ask her to do something class related, like a group study. Or strike up a conversation with her that’s class related and ask for her opinion on a certain topic. It might not exactly be romantic as you had in mind but it would be a good icebreaker.
Hope your class goes well.
Starting a new box for my issue because I don’t know how to gracefully steer the topic to my own issue.
I just got back from support group. I am a bit ashamed that I don’t have more control over my emotions.
I have to stop getting mad at people for calling on my inappropriate behavior.
I have to stop being jealous of people who have better futures than I do. The reason they have better futures is because they had a better work ethic at age five than I do now in my peak adult years.
I have to stop sitting on my ass and letting time pass by. I have to do something productive and meaningful so that I can earn the things I want.
I have to stop taking more than I need. I have to stop whining and crying because my life is not that bad, or at least it wouldn’t be if I stopped whining and crying and started doing something useful.
I have to stop acting like an entitled princess. I have to stop pretending that I am so great that I can act obnoxious without repercussions.
I have to face reality. Unfortunately, I’m like a certain former president: I treat reality as if it’s out to get me.
I have to stop doing selfish and greedy things if I don’t want to face the consequences of them in the future.
I have to accept that as much as I wish I could blame my problems on somebody else, I can’t. It’s my fault my life sucks. I should give up my childish urge to duck out of responsibility and do something to fix my life before it’s too late.
It’s a bit more complex than that. I just graduated college with a Bachelor’s in December. She’s at the same place I graduated from as a PhD ABD. We met when doing a camp to get kids interested in computer science a little over a year ago; she was running it, I was volunteering. We met again when we taught a seminar together, and the most recent time we met (except for the movie) was when she was TAing for a class I was grading for (the distinction is a bit arbitrary, I picked up a tiny bit of TA slack when she was busy with a paper or when a question was more in my area of expertise than hers). That class is over with, so there’s really no “excuse” to see her. I don’t really even have an excuse to go to campus (except for the odd Japanese lesson I take). It’s not like we’re both in similar classes or anything like that.
I might try contacting her to help get an idea I have off the ground, since it’s CS education related. Especially since she might be familiar with my inspiration for the format, but I’m not really far along enough in the project to think it’s worth contacting her.
I might get recruited by the professor for the class we were both in to work on the project she’s doing her diss on, but that’s speculation. He wants me on some project, but it may be a different project entirely. We’ll see I guess.
I think it’s great that you’re trying to find your flaws and work on them, but I think you’re being a bit hard on yourself. I don’t know, a lot of people seem to have gotten over their mental problems by effectively treating themselves like shit until they improved (“god get over yourself, me, you’re so fucking selfish” and the like), but for me it’s always just made me slip even deeper.
I think the best advice I can give is to focus on what little, simple things you can do, rather than framing it as things you shouldn’t do. For “not sitting around doing nothing” the best thing I’ve ever learned is how to trick myself. I don’t know what your profession is, but for programming I’ve learned the magic of “I wonder how to do <x>” and I trick myself into writing a 4-second program. Of course, once you get invested in testing out some silly thing, it usually snowballs and suddenly you’re contributing to three related open source projects four hours later. Not because you have initiative, but because you tricked yourself into taking that initial “eh, I’ll just take four seconds to satiate my curiosity” step.
I had decided this weekend to give myself a month to unwind from the stresses of the last several weeks (seriously, I had a lot to do, and then some more stress on top of that) and then take stock of my mental state and decide if it was time to see somebody. But then today I realized that I spend ninety percent of my time at work and at least seventy percent of my time not at work trying to decide if I’m going to scream, or cry, or both. That’s not healthy. So I think giving myself a month is unnecessary and probably nothing but detrimental.
The good news is that according to my trusty internet, my old psychiatrist is still in practice. I adored her. I felt like she truly listened and understood, even when I wasn’t fully coherent. She isn’t really a therapist, but she’ll recommend somebody for me and maybe I’ll find a counselor I really feel like I can talk with. The last therapist I tried … I dunno, I guess I felt that she didn’t get me at all. I really do hate therapy, just an hour every week of sitting there and complaining about shit I should be fixing but somehow can’t get off my ass and take care of. It makes me feel useless and entitled, when I know it’s supposed to improve my mood and my outlook.
I’m probably just peri-menopausal and have many years ahead of me of feeling like this, but it’s worth a shot to find out if my brain has gone all wonky on its own again. I don’t remember this feeling of … impotent rage, I suppose, the last time I got depressed. I hate everything–possibly including myself–and I want to hide in my house and not speak to anyone and do nothing for as long as I possibly can. That I remember, and so after the holiday weekend, it will be back to the doctor for me.
Bad couple of days. I’ve been on the edge of a panic attack since Monday. Just have to hang on until my appointment Monday and a week off. Even my coworkers are worried about me.
Oh god, I just sent an email asking them to hang out with me. I probably should have omitted the paragraph about me having social anxiety and apologizing for that probably causing the email to be awkward, but oh well. I am in full-on panic attack mode right now.