For decades, the mental health field has operated on a half-truth: that curing depression means removing sadness. A new study argues that the most dangerous part of depression isn’t negative emotion, it’s the absence of positive emotion, known as anhedonia.
I’m a depressed person who has anhedonia, which for those who don’t know, is kind of a persistent emotional neutrality. I’m not often sad, but never happy either, at least 99% of the time. The other 1% is manic episodes of both positive and negative varieties, but I’m not a mental health professional and don’t know if that’s a common thing.
Had I not been living with the depression and anhedonia for more than a decade and developed coping strategies, it would make sense to me to think that this is definitely the worst part of it for most people. It can be very isolating to be around normies and in situations where you know objectively you should be feeling something and you kinda just don’t, and unless you’ve learned how to cope with it and are able to function, life can feel meaningless.
I’ve taken to refering to it as “going grey”. It’s like the chroma on my emotions has been turned down. The shape is still there, but the colour is leached out of it.
It’s particularly nasty when paired with ADHD, since it robs you of drive, which is already in short supply.
What coping mechanisms do you use?
My main one is ‘anchoring’. I have core activities I aim to keep up, no matter what. Otherwise, when what colour I get comes back, I can be left with a ruin of a life (particularly social life) structure to rebuild from. It might not help much in the moment, but it at least speeds up the recovery phase.
I definitely relate to this. I think I’ve used a form of this analogy when explaining it to normies myself.
My biggest one is exercise. I walk my dogs four times a day and make it a point to do some form of activity daily, plus I lift weights three or four times a week. I also do a lot of reading, which in reference to the color analogy, sort of feels like an injection of color into the grey. I also made a YT video earlier this year about activities one can do on those exceedingly grey days, if you’re interested. (No sweat if not.)