And I have begun addressing this at least by starting these discussions here:
Should mentally troubled people stay away from Buddhism?
Is hardship an invalid source of / conduit to insight?
Treating samvega with Western psychotherapy?
And it's not anhedonia; it's about experiencing wordly pleasures as pleasurable, but not seeing them worth of the strife necessary to obtain them; or at least not seeing them as pleasurable enough to devote one's life to them.
For example, I once calculated how much I need to work in order to earn enough to be able to go to the movies. Once I was done with the calculation, I was overcome with a sense "This isn't worth it." When the pleasures don't outweigh the strife of the work needed to earn for those pleasures, those pleasures aren't worth the effort anymore.
I'm sure that for people who don't have all that much trouble to earn enough for a materially comfortable life, the pursuit of worldly pleasures looks vastly different than for someone who despite backbreaking work barely manages to make ends meet, while living in poverty.
Modern psychology is written by and for the (upper) middle class. I'd like to see those people degraded to working hard labor in factories for pennies and living without electricity. I wonder how much they would enjoy their lives then! I wonder if they would still accuse of mental illness those who, living in those poor circumstances, aren't eager to pursue worldly pleasures.
There is this odd idea that a person is or should be willing to invest any amount of work to earn even for the smallest pleasures. But I don't think it works like that. At some point, it seems more feasible to die than to scrape by.
I agree, and I've been trying to identify the difference for quite some time now.The doctor's assessment in the above example is not entirely off the mark (especially if we ditch the pills), at least in some cases. As I've said to you before (I think) I don't believe the existential angst of the philosophers has much to do with what the Buddha was talking about. I know some people see them as the same, but I don't.
To begin with, I think that if my insight into the unsatisfactoriness of worldly pursuits would be Buddhist, in line with the Dhamma, I wouldn't be so miserable about that insight, or Buddhism.