As the use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants has become widespread, so too have the reports of a lingering and devastating side effect—Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD). Unlike the well-known sexual side effects experienced during treatment, PSSD continues to affect patients long after they have stopped taking the medication, leaving many with a permanent loss of libido, genital numbness, and other forms of sexual dysfunction. Despite these severe and enduring impacts, PSSD remains under-recognized and poorly understood, a new study in Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences reveals.
Authored by David Healy of Data Based Medicine and Dee Mangin of McMaster University, the study underscores the formidable barriers in accurately quantifying the incidence and prevalence of PSSD. These include the ethical challenges of designing studies that might induce such a condition, the lack of specific measurement tools, and the dismissive attitudes of many healthcare professionals toward patients’ sexual health concerns.
“It is not known how many patients, if any, fully regain their original genital sensation, orgasm intensity, and other domains of sexual functioning after using a serotonin reuptake inhibiting antidepressant,” Healy and Mangin write. “This has never been properly investigated and described, and there is an urgent need to understand the incidence, prevalence, and natural history of PSSD, with a focus on informing prevention as well as investigating treatments.”
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True, but sexual dysfunction, which has only one unnatural cause – thought, can also cause depression. And depression caused anti-depressants. So everything caused everything else. That’s why it’s always best to look at the whole, even when considering parts, and then when you consider those parts, you may discover the true cause of depression. And no, it’s not in your pants or in your bra, despite what your spouses might say.
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Sure…
If someone becomes suicidal and takes his life due to antidepressant side effects you’re also the kind of guy that will state ‘antidepressants give a person more energy, when depressed he did lack energy to act on his thoughts but after antidepressants he had the energy to act on his thoughts’
Rather blaming the victim then acknowledging that the mind altering garbage is the problem that makes a non suicidal person end it’s life out of the blue.
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I’m amazed anyone gets away with making that argument. They systematically RULE OUT suicidal people before doing these studies. Anyone who is suicidal during the study period became that way AFTER starting the study. If more on antidepressants are suicidal, it’s caused by antidepressants. That’s what double blind studies are for!
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Reading boring pharmacological research on Mad In America is giving all of us lasting sexual dysfunction, brain finds.
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Lol, No-one.
“Having the risk of developing PSSD as an outcome is a breach of research ethics, so using randomized controlled trials to study the condition is not possible.”
Does this mean you may not do testing on people with antidepressants for PSSD, since it is – of course – morally reprehensible to create PSSD with the antidepressants?
Or did I misunderstand this comment? … and the antidepressants have already been passed out like candy to everyone the mainstream doctors and psychiatrists can possibly get to take them …. so haven’t all those doctors who’ve already been pushing and forcing the antidepressants on people, for decades, already behaved in a morally reprehensible manner?
“When service users recognize PSSD and bring it to the attention of healthcare professionals, they are often treated poorly.” Based upon my experience, anyone who has ever dealt with any kind of malpractice, gets put on an antidepressant, then all the common adverse and withdrawal symptoms of the antidepressants get “… incorrectly attributed to some mental health issue.”
As to “prevention,” it’s not complex, but it’s also not profitable for the doctors … get the doctors to stop covering up their easily recognized iatrogenesis, with the complex iatrogenesis of the psychiatric drugs. And eventually make prescribing the antidepressants illegal.
But, of course that would take time, since everyone dealing with today’s psychiatric industries’ “complex iatrogenesis” would need to be properly weaned off the psychiatric neurotoxins, if they so desire. And, in as much as that’s what should happen, it’d be very hard for the psychiatric industry and mainstream medical industry, to even clean up the iatrogenic living nightmare they’ve created … albeit, due to their avarice.
Aren’t we all a bunch of psychopharmacology researcher geeks here, No-one?
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Is there any evidence of SSRIs impacting sex hormone levels post cessation of treatment?
As a female, I can clearly state from personal experience, that hormonal changes clearly affect sexual sensitivity and libido – linked to ovulation (increased sexual sensitively and libido), lactation – that is breast-feeding an infant ( decreased sexual sensitivity and libido) and post-menopause (decreased sexual sensitive and libido). Also forms of contraception which stop ovulation decrease libido, eg most oral contraceptive pills and implanon.
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Quelle pagialle! Yet, the idea that the symptoms occur many months after cessation of the drug should horrify many.
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Well, that is exactly what makes psychiatric drug withdrawal so confusing to most, including also the mainstream doctors … if they were NOT taught about anticholinergic toxidrome poisoning in med school … which they all were.
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