"I went, but I didn't feel any of it"
A 45-year-old woman with a several-month history of low mood describes attending her granddaughter's birthday party the previous weekend, an event she says she would normally have loved. "I went. I smiled, I sang the song, I had a slice of cake. But none of it felt like anything. It wasn't that I didn't want to be there, exactly — I still went, and I still did all the things I'd normally do. I just felt completely flat through the whole thing, like I was watching myself go through it rather than actually enjoying it." She adds that this is different from simply losing interest in things: "I still want to go to things, I still make the effort. I just don't get anything back from it anymore."
This is anhedonia: a marked loss of the capacity to feel pleasure from an activity that would previously have been rewarding, present even while she goes through the motions of the activity itself (attending, smiling, eating cake). Her own distinction — that she still wants to go and still makes the effort, but simply gets nothing back from it — is exactly the recognition feature that separates anhedonia (loss of pleasure specifically) from apathy or a general loss of interest and motivation, which the phenomenon's own distinguishing features flag as the most easily confused alternative.
References
- Casey, P. & Kelly, B. (2019). Fish's Clinical Psychopathology, 4th ed. Ch. 6, 'Disorders of Emotion'.