Dr. Judith Joseph

It's like, well, don't we all feel like that?

And I think many of us do feel like that.

I think that many of us process or don't process pain, but many of us process pain by self-soothing and numbing with things like drinking a lot.

excessive buying, excessive use of social media, doom scrolling, busying themselves with work just to get through, just to get things done, just to busy from and distracting from these unpleasant feelings or this emptiness that they feel.

A lot of my patients would say that when they're not busy, when they're not working, they feel empty or they feel restless, so they have to be busy.

And it's a distraction.

So when you don't process these painful emotions, when you don't process the trauma,

then you may start to get numb.

And anhedonia feels like a numbing of pleasure, a numbing of interest in things that you once loved.

When was the last time a doctor said, are you really enjoying life?

Do you get out of bed with like joy?

No, they are in the business of eradicating disease, not cultivating joy.

And that was what was missing.

A lot of patients were not meeting the criteria for depression, but something was off.

And I found that after the pandemic, I was seeing more and more of these cases.

And then I saw a term floating around on the internet, high functioning depression.

You hear about these celebrities who died, who had a mask of happiness, who were performing, who were doing great things, but suddenly they decided to take their lives, right?

They died by suicide.

And a lot of their family members were saying that they were having high functioning depression.

And doctors in very, very important newspapers were saying, that's not even a thing.