What is not being able to feel emotional responses called in psychology?

January 1, 2018 9:50 AM

In writing about bereavement, people often describe not caring about anything after someone they love dies, everything else becomes meaningless and pointless. Old people have described this to me after being widowed too. Is there a name for this specific phenomenon eg in psychiatry, psychology, bereavement literature or counselling?

Specifically, the loss of the most emotionally important thing causes the loss of feeling responses to things people care less about, for instance they were enjoying planning a new garden, their partner dies, they can't care about the garden any more. Not from anger or refusing to try, but it just can't provoke any feeling response in them - their pain drowns it out, or wipes out other feelings, or like hypothermia, the mind concentrates on one 'important, crisis' feeling and 'cuts off the flow of blood to less important extremities' but emotions, not blood.

posted by maiamaia to Health & Fitness (9 answers total)

I would call it hopelessness. When what means everything to you is gone, you feel hopelessness and despair and so who cares about anything else. I think part of living again after a loss like that is finding some way to rekindle hope and an interest in life.
posted by machinecraig at 10:02 AM on January 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

Anhedonia?
posted by soren_lorensen at 10:05 AM on January 1, 2018 [17 favorites]

Best answer: flat affect or apathy, depending on the inner experience.
posted by j_curiouser at 10:10 AM on January 1, 2018 [15 favorites]

Numb
posted by St. Peepsburg at 10:37 AM on January 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

Anhedonia, which is the inability to derive pleasure from activities that had previously been pleasurable - such as the gardening.
posted by floweredfish at 10:47 AM on January 1, 2018

Anhedonia would be the standard diagnostic name.
posted by Making You Bored For Science at 1:08 PM on January 1, 2018

Someone I know once referred to that as suppression of affect, but I'm not a psychologist.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 3:51 PM on January 1, 2018

As others have said, anhedonia is the inability to find pleasure in formerly pleasurable activities.
posted by lazuli at 8:24 PM on January 1, 2018

Response by poster: I think it must be apathy not anhedonia, as it's seeing everything as pointless, not just not getting pleasure; but as answer 1 had it, that's an internal, logical distinction we all understand but that in psychology is never represented in the description, so it's very hard to tell what an internal experience is in psychological terms...
posted by maiamaia at 3:05 AM on January 11, 2018