The Hidden Epidemic of Sexual Dysfunction Experts Are Blaming on SSRI Antidepressants

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From The Daily Mail: “Patients on antidepressants are not being warned of the risk that the pills could permanently ruin their sex lives, experts say.

The Mail on Sunday has been contacted by a number of patients who claim to have been left with ‘life-changing’ sexual problems after taking a class of the drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) to ease symptoms of depression and anxiety.

In the past year, about one in eight people in the UK were prescribed antidepressants, which includes SSRIs, according to the latest official figures – a number that has soared since the pandemic.

. . . [It has long been known] that those taking them, both men and women, can experience a drop in libido.

But some patients claim the effects have been more persistent and have continued, or even worsened, years after they stopped taking the drugs. Some have had problems for decades.

The symptoms they describe are strikingly similar. Genital numbness – a total lack of sensation around the groin – and for men, erectile dysfunction. Both men and women experience a condition known as anorgasmia – a difficulty in reaching orgasm, and if they do climax, it is weak or without pleasure. As one woman put it: ‘It’s like a sneeze.’

Many report they no longer experience sexual or romantic attraction at all, and have been left with an emotional numbness. Most have seen relationships collapse as a result, while others have missed out on the chance to have children. Some have never experienced pleasure during sex – called anhedonia – and worry they never will.

Significantly, all have found their symptoms repeatedly dismissed by medical professionals, who insist they are linked to their underlying depression and not the pills.”

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3 COMMENTS

  1. This is pathetic. You’ll certainly find anxious individuals if you start with indiscriminately medicating people on a flimsy basis and get them strung out on benzos (while simultaneously denying that they’re addictive).
    They’ll be coming out of the woodwork.

  2. In as much as it’s appalling that mainstream doctors, and the psychiatrists, are handing out drugs that destroy sexual function, like candy … to children … and have been doing so, for decades.

    I will mention that the SNRI antidepressants, like Wellbutrin, were “illegally” marketed by big Pharma as the “happy, horny, skinny” drug … for good reason. Since Wellbutrin can have the opposite effect. Wellbutrin can make a person orgasm, without even touching themselves … but this is also a bizarre sexual side effect of an antidepressant.

    Either way, the doctors should NOT be messing with people’s sex lives, while denying knowledge they are doing so. And I do know all doctors, including the psychiatrists, are taught in med school about anticholinergic toxidrome.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxidrome

    So a lot of the medical – particularly psychiatric – denial of the common adverse, bizarre, and withdrawal effects of the antidepressants and antipsychotics … both anticholinergic drugs … are just down right medical lies to patients.