A psychiatrist named Jan Fawcett tracked 954 depressed patients. He found that one symptom predicted who would die by suicide within a year, no matter how bad their depression was otherwise: losing interest in everything. Doctors call it anhedonia.
It shows up on brain scans. A small region deep in the brain called the reward center quietly stops working, and the brain releases less dopamine, the chemical that makes things feel good. Around 70 percent of people diagnosed with major depression report this loss of interest. A 2024 review in the International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology found that patients with anhedonia are much more likely to end up with depression that doesn't respond to medication.
The most prescribed antidepressants often fall short on anhedonia. SSRIs like Prozac, Zoloft, and Lexapro mainly raise serotonin, but anhedonia is mostly a dopamine problem, so the standard prescription is aimed at the wrong chemical.
Four treatments have actual evidence. Ketamine, and a nasal spray version called esketamine approved for stubborn depression, can lift anhedonia in hours. Standard antidepressants take weeks. A 2025 paper in the journal Neuron traced this to specific changes inside the brain's reward center. Behavioral activation therapy, where patients schedule small pleasurable activities and force themselves to do them even when they don't feel like it, slowly teaches the reward center to fire again. Exercise releases a brain-repair protein called BDNF that helps rebuild dopamine pathways over weeks. And a treatment called TMS, which uses magnetic pulses on the front of the brain, has shown strong results in recent trials for anhedonia specifically.
There is also a newer research area called digital anhedonia. Brain scans of heavy social media users show the reward center lights up strongly for notifications and feeds but stays quiet for ordinary pleasures like food, conversations, and walks. The reward bar gets reset so high that normal life cannot reach it.
The brain heals. With proper treatment, many people improve within weeks, and the reward system can rebuild over months. So losing interest in everything is treatable. And the first medication doctors usually prescribe is rarely the one that fixes it.
If I had been taught in primary school that Amelia Earhart died because men ignored dozens of distress calls from her, that would've been a lot more helpful to my life than growing up scared of the Bermuda Triangle. smh
Ai-generated artwork officially is ineligible for copyright protection as the US Supreme Court declined to review a appeal case.
The court rules that artwork needs to have a human creator in order to be eligible.
(Source: https://t.co/WnYEKs7IcB)
A weeb slices three quarters of the way through my body but fails to completely cut me in half.
Me, chuckling - "A Katana is useless without proper technique"
My classmate was raped on her way back home from university and got pregnant, but couldn’t get an abortion due to the laws. She had to drop out of university where she was studying medicine. Because of pregnancy and childbirth expenses, she couldn’t continue her studies, left college, started working at a coffee shop, lost the fun of her early twenties, and lost the chance to attend international medical conferences she once dreamt of… all just to give birth to a child she never wanted.
People say, “What if the baby you abort grows up and cures cancer?”
Okay — but what if the 19-year-old you deny an abortion to grows up and cures cancer?
Now she can’t afford to get an education. Instead, she has to take care of a baby. What about her? An actual living human being???
“Abortion ends potential life”… So do property disputes, war, and genocide. You only seem to care about lives when women don’t give birth to them.