I’m glad someone is studying this. It has always been the defining symptom for me to distinguish between feeling sad or angry about events that should make anyone feel that way, and true depression:
Anhedonia is defined as the reduced interest or pleasure in all – or almost all – activities a person previously enjoyed. If a person has anhedonia for an extended period of time (at least two weeks consistently), they can be diagnosed with depression – even if they may not feel sad or low.
I know when I’m fighting off depression when nothing sounds fun. You could offer me free tickets to see my favorite band and grab dinner in my favorite place with a group of my favorite people, and I won’t be interested. It’s not that I don’t realize that I should enjoy that, but I know I somehow won’t.
That’s depression. That empty feeling that nothing matters and the inability to feel anything because it doesn’t matter. But, it’s hard to express that. It’s difficult to come up with a header image that displays that when we talk about depression. I’ve said before, our default image to use when talking about depression is the young, white woman lying or sitting looking sad.
That’s not what depression looks like for millions of people. It’s not just that we don’t physically look like the person in the image, we also don’t necessarily look sad and weepy. We just look disinterested, because it doesn’t matter.