”Anhedonia” is the psychiatric term for the inability to derive pleasure from things that are normally pleasurable. It’s the characterizing symptom in major depressive disorder, but it can also be a symptom of substance abuse,schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease. I learned the term in a university lecture hall and immediately felt a shock of recognition. Anhedonia was the feeling of “nothing,” the thing that kept my mother in bed.
Related Quotes
It might be useful to interpret these curious phenomena in the light of current neuroscientific thinking in an attempt to diminish the otherness, the stigmatising pathology, of these altered states. Light is without colour. The redness of the apple is not inherent in the apple. The colour of red is not generated in my mind as an outcome of a series of complex processes beginning with light waves of various frequencies, but without colour, impinging on the rods and cones of my retina. This same apple is without taste or flavour until it enters my mouth and its purgency activates taste buds and olfactory cells. These sensory experiences are complex and intensely subjective.
Describing these phenomena as auditory hallucinations seems inadequate. The aridly objective, notionally academic term gives no indication of the distress associated with the voices or the behavioural consequences. The associated phenomena are closer to the core of what a patient might be experiencing and closer to what might be considered to be the priorities in terms of a therapeutic intervention.
In this state all is noise and chaos and devoid of meaning. It is difficult to imagine: our lives are so much more made up of light and sound and thoughts and feelings that form meaningful patterns and which help us to make sense of our lives and may grant us pleasure. The patient experiencing a psychotic episode is robbed of these harmonies. We cannot know the mind of another, and certainly not the mind of a psychotic other, but we can imagine that such noise, such a dissolution of meaning, would be intolerable. In this context it becomes understandable that a person in such a state should urgently seek to find or construct meanings and, in this process, to employ themes that are culturally or spiritually familiar - albeit often in deeply strange ways, given the disorder of mind.
Suffering is not an illness; it is the normal counterpole to happiness. A complex becomes pathological only when we think we have not got it
More than two thousand years ago Aristotle used a term that is still in wide use in psychology today: eudaimonia. It refers to a state of deep wellbeing in which a person feels that their life has meaning and purpose. It is often contrasted with hedonia (the origin of the word hedonism), which refers to the fleeting happiness of various pleasures. To put it another way, if hedonic happiness is what you mean when you say you’re having a good
time, then eudaimonic happiness is what we mean when we say life is good. It is a sense that, outside of this moment, regardless of how pleasurable or miserable it is, your life is worth something, and valuable to you. It is the kind of well-being that can endure through both the ups and the downs.