Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio, Hey brain Stuff Lauren bog Obam here. Even as the general public has gained a better understanding of mental health issues like depression and anxiety over recent years, some psychological symptoms remain a mystery to many. For today's example, and hadonia. This is a condition in which a person finds themselves unable to experience pleasure from acts that are generally pleasurable
or that they once enjoyed. That can include the absence of good feelings someone might expect from things and activities like friendship, food, sex, or music. The term was originally coined in by a French psychologist, stemming from the Greek words and meaning without an heat own, meaning pleasure. We spoke via email with Los Angeles based psychotherapist Alyssa Mass m f T. She said, an adonia is the lack
of experiencing joy or pleasure. It's typically thought of as a symptom of depression, though it can also exist separately. In addition to depression, antadonia can accompany other mental health issues like schizophrenia and orexia nervosa and substance use disorders.
You can also signal issues like Parkinson's disease. For some people, antadonia can be social or emotional, meaning that they no longer feel joy being around people, or it can be physical, meaning sensations like touch can feel empty or food can taste bland. The causes of antidonia can vary, and while it's associated with depression, a person doesn't necessarily have to have depression to have antadonia. Experts believed antadonia may be linked to changes in brain activity and an inability to
produce or respond to the feel good hormone dopamine. Some preliminary research that's been performed on rats indicates that antadonia may be tied to an overactive prefrontal cortex, impacting the dopamine neurons and interfering with the path is the control how and why we seek out and experience desire and rewards.
Other research indicates that other brain areas and structures could also be involved, like the amygdala, which processes emotion, the striatum associated with the reward system, and the insula, connected to self awareness and consciousness. While there's no single way to treat antadonia, many mental health experts lean on strategies prescribed for depression, including talk therapy, and in some cases,
medications like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSR eyes. There is, however, evidence to suggest that while s SR eyes can work great with some symptoms of depression, they may not help much with the lack of motivation and deficits and reward processing that often accompany depression, which means they may not help much with antadonia. For now, mental health experts are continuing to incorporate antidonia assessment into their work with clients
and working with them to help find coping strategies. Mass said, in cases of depression long or short term, I always screen for antadonia. If a client screens positive for it, then it's really about looking at everything that's going on and treating the depression as a whole until there's relief from that. It's impossible to tell if the antidonia is part of the depression or something that exists on its own.
If someone's case history tells me they never had antidonia until the depression hit, in that case, it's likely more treatable than if it had always existed and is more of a baseline. Today's episode was written by Michelle Constant Anoski and produced by Tyler Klang. For more on this and lots of other curious topics, visit how stuffworks dot com.
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