After antidepressants, a loss of pleasure
Experts starting to see how widespread post-SSRI sexual dysfunction may be
Doctors and patients have long known that antidepressants can cause sexual problems. No libido. Pleasureless orgasms. Numb genitals. Well over half of people taking the drugs report such side effects.
Now, a small but vocal group of patients is speaking out about severe sexual problems that have endured even long after they stopped taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most popular type of antidepressants. The drugs’ effects have been devastating, they said, leaving them unable to enjoy sex or sustain romantic relationships.
“My clitoris feels like a knuckle,” said Emily Grey, 27, from Vancouver, British Columbia, who took one such drug, Celexa, for depression from age 17 to 23. “It’s not a normal thing to have to come to terms with.”
The safety label on Prozac, one of the most widely prescribed SSRIs, warns that sexual problems may persist after the drug is discontinued. And health authorities in Europe and Canada recently acknowledged that the medications can lead to lasting sexual issues.
But researchers are only just beginning to quantify how many people have these long-term problems, known as post-SSRI sexual dysfunction. And the chronic condition remains contested among some psychiatrists, who point out that depression itself can curb sexual desire. Clinical trials have not followed people after they
Dr. Audrey Bahrick, a former psychologist at the University of Iowa seen Nov. 1, started taking Prozac in 1993, which led to numbness in her genitals.
stop the drugs to determine whether such sexual problems stem from the medications.
“I think it’s depression recurring. Until proven otherwise, that’s what it is,” said Dr. Anita Clayton, the chief of psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and a leader of an expert group that will meet in Spain next year to formally define the condition.
Clayton published some of the earliest research showing that SSRIs come with widespread sexual side effects. She said patients with these problems should talk to their doctors about switching to a different antidepressant or a combination of drugs.
She worries that too much attention on seemingly rare cases of sexual dysfunction after SSRIs are stopped could dissuade
suicidal patients from trying the medications. “I have a really big fear about this,” she said.
By the mid-2000s, the sexual effects of SSRIs were well recognized. In fact, the drugs so reliably dulled sexual responses that doctors began prescribing them for men with premature ejaculation.
But sexual symptoms that endure after stopping the drugs haven’t received much attention in the medical literature.
In 2006, a handful of cases of persistent genital numbness were reported in Canada and the United States. That same year, a newsletter for the American Psychological Association described emerging data on the lasting sexual effects of the drugs.
“I believe that we have barely begun to appreciate the pervasiveness and complexity of the impact on sexuality of these medications,” Audrey Bahrick, then a psychologist at the University of Iowa, wrote in the article.
In an interview, Bahrick said she felt an ethical obligation to call attention to the condition because she had experienced it herself.
She started taking Prozac in 1993, when she was 37 and struggling with a difficult job in a new city. Within one day of taking the pill, her clitoris and vagina felt numb. “It was like there was a glove over them — a very, very muffled sensation,” she recalled.
For a while, she said, the trade-off was worth it: The antidepressant made her feel energized and more resilient. But after two years, she stopped taking it for the sake of her relationship. The sexual symptoms persisted, however, and the relationship ended.
“It never occurred to me that this would be something that would in fact, in my life, never resolve,” said Bahrick, now 67.
In the decades since, the use of SSRIs has soared, especially among teenagers. They are prescribed not only for depression and anxiety, but for a range of other conditions, including irritable bowel syndrome, eating disorders and premenstrual symptoms. Yet experts still struggle to understand how SSRIs work, and why the sexual problems are so pervasive.
The drugs target serotonin, an important chemical messenger in the brain as well as other parts of the body. The molecule is involved in blunting sexual responses, including the orgasm reflex that originates in the spinal cord. Serotonin also affects estrogen levels, which in turn can affect arousal.
But depression, too, dulls sex drive. Among unmedicated men with depression, 40% report a loss of sexual arousal and desire, and 20% struggle to reach orgasm. Common conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease can also cause sexual problems.
Drug trials rarely look at what happens when medications are stopped. And studying what happens after people get off SSRIs is particularly challenging because many people never stop taking them.
Given the lack of data, “persistent sexual dysfunction caused by SSRIs is a hypothesis, not a proven phenomena,” said Dr. Robert Taylor Segraves, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine who has studied the effects of antidepressants on sexuality.
Still, some researchers have found ways to estimate the prevalence of the condition. A recent study in Israel reported that about 1 in 216 men who discontinued SSRIs were subsequently prescribed medications for erectile dysfunction, a rate at least three times as high as that among the general population.
For Bahrick, who continues to publish research on the topic, the recent recognition of her condition is cold comfort, considering the unknown number of people who have lost a core experience of being human.
“It’s not just numb genitals,” Bahrick said. “It’s a reorientation to being in the world.”