Anhedonia is defined as the inability to feel pleasure. It’s a very common feature of chronic depression.
Many times, I’ve observed that grief reactions are misdiagnosed as depressive disorders. When we encounter major losses in our lives, it’s entirely normal to feel overwhelmingly sad.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that we have a true depressive disorder. In fact, it would be more reflective of psychopathology if we didn’t exhibit sadness in the face of deep loss.
Our society isn’t always so comfortable with the process of grieving. We appear to feel most uncomfortable with adjusting to major losses in our lives. We want our deep pain to simply resolve. It’s truly painful to grieve a major loss.
Unfortunately, grieve is something that we have to go through. We can’t go around it, underneath it, or over it, so to speak. I’m currently grieving the loss of my mother. She passed away just six weeks ago. I miss absolutely everything about her.
