Psychology
What does Anhedonia mean?
Loss of the ability to feel pleasure in things that used to yield taste.
Definition
Anhedonia — Greek an- + hēdonē, pleasure — is the volume of taste dropping: food, sex, the game, the friend are still there and the pleasure does not arrive. It is a symptom, common in depression and in other pictures. DSM-5 asks for depressed mood or anhedonia for a major depressive episode, and the name covers the symptom, not the whole illness.
Apathy is a missing start; here the start can exist and the taste does not. On social media it becomes a void pose. Weeks with life stalled is the picture Ribot described.
Origin
Greek arrived via French anhédonie. Théodule-Armand Ribot coined the term in La Psychologie des Sentiments (Félix Alcan, Paris, 1896), by analogy with analgesia: the disappearance of physical and psychic pleasure in melancholia. The English translation The Psychology of the Emotions came out in 1897; William James picked up the word later.
History
From Ribot and James the term entered twentieth-century psychiatric English. Abraham Myerson gave a lecture on anhedonia at the APA meeting in 1922. In DSM-5 the criterion became “markedly diminished interest or pleasure.” Depression TikTok repeated the nickname for the plate with no taste.
How it emerged
Ordinary speech lacked a name for pleasure that does not arrive. Sadness already covered mood; Ribot stuck the Greek prefix onto pleasure and the manual kept a symptom apart from the name of the illness.
Usage examples
The plate arrived and the taste did not.
The game is still open; the volume of pleasure dropped.
Translations
- pt anedonia
- en anhedonia
- es anedonia
Synonyms
- anhedonia
- loss of pleasure
- Ribot