AlwaysMyselfSenior Contributor
Recovering from severe chronic anhedonia
I've been having chats with @AuntGlow @Jynx and @rav3n about my experience of chronic severe anhedonia and how the traditional 'behavioural activation' has not produced the pleasure/reward stimulation (even when sustained for 20 years of doing!).
So I decided to start a thread because I've come to realise this is a bit more common with complex/chronic depression that I realised, and a discussion around it at a general level might be interesting & helpful to others too -- both intellectually and/or practically 😊.
I invite people to share their personal experiences (postive and negative; what has and has not worked for them or people they know), as well as interesting articles or research, or treatment perspectives that relate to the topic. 😊. I am very much a believer that "one size does not fit all" and hence welcome the diversity of experience and advice without judgement.
To kick it off, a link that @AuntGlow shared to me which I found resonated with me a lot when explaining the challenge with severe anhedonia (as opposed to 'traditional' anhedonia which does respond to standard behavioural activations techniques), and some ideas on what might help people to start that process of being able to recognise and experience neutral and progressively positive things again.
I found it very interesting also to read in a research article (https://www.clinicalkey.com.au/#!/content/playContent/1-s2.0-S2213158222000559) about the link between what is clinically termed 'treatment-resistant-depression' and a higher activity level in the part of the brain that processes/encodes adverse or negative stimuli and a diminished sensitivity to the reward-stimuli (this is when compared to "treatment-sensitive-depression" and 'healthy control' patients). So potentially it could be physiological, and "trying harder" may not work if our brain is literally not processing the positive/reward stimuli!
