Mental Health

4191 readers

4 users here now

Welcome!

This is a safe place to discuss, vent, support, and share information about mental health, illness, and wellness.

Thank you for being here. We appreciate who you are today. Please show respect and empathy when making or replying to posts.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules

1-Posts promoting paid products and services of any kind are not allowed here.

2-All posts and comments must be helpful and supportive. Do not put vulnerable people at risk.

3-Do not DM or ask to speak privately to any of our members unless they specifically request it.

If a person from this community disturbs you in a comment, please report the comment. If you receive a DM you did not request, send a screenshot of the DM in a message to a moderator. This is a bannable offense.

4-Suicide, Self-Harm, Death-- Extended discussions are STRONGLY DISCOURAGED here. First, mods and community members are caring people, but not experts in crisis situations. Second, we want to avoid Lemmy becoming like many commercial social media platforms, where comments can snowball into counterproductive talk.

If you or someone you know needs more help than can be found here, please refer to the pinned resources.

If BRIEF mention of these topics is an important part of your post, please flag your post as NSFW and include a (trigger warning: suicide, self-harm, death, etc.)in the title so that other readers who may feel triggered can avoid it. Please also include a trigger warning on all comments mentioning these topics in a post that was not already tagged as such.

Partner Communities

- Therapy

Neurodegenerative Disease Support

Avoidant Personality Disorder

Friends and Family of People with Addiction

To partner with our community and be included here, you are free to message the current moderators or comment on our pinned post.

Community Moderation

Some moderators are mental health professionals and some are not. All are carefully selected by the moderation team and will be actively monitoring posts and comments. If you are interested in joining the team, you can send a message to ZenGrammy for more information.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Do you think SSRIs are a good idea? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

NSFW 27 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Mild NSFW warning: this post mentions sexual side effects of medication.

SSRIs are the most common type of antidepressant (examples are Prozac/fluoxetine, Zoloft/sertraline, Paxil/paroxetine).

If you have experience with them, do you think they're a good idea?

I came across a paper about side effects which I haven't heard discussed before. Many people know that SSRIs have sexual effects, but apparently they also affect fertility.

This paper describes SSRIs as "gonadotoxic", leading to effects like "decreased sperm concentration and motility, increased [DNA] fragmentation, and decreased reproductive organ weights".

The paper does say "this effect does seem to be reversible", so if you stop SSRIs, your sex organs should apparently go back to normal. But still, some people are on SSRIs for long periods of time, right?

I would be interested to hear others' thoughts, if you have any.

Edit: Thanks for the replies to this post, they're interesting.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Personally, I was very resistant to try antidepressents until about a year ago (because I wanted to solve it myself and not be dependent on drugs), but tried them at a low point and they really helped. I'd recommend anyone curious about them to give them ago. If they don't work then at least you'll know, and as far as I'm aware, the side effects aren't permanent*.

However, I think there needs to be some other support in place, like therapy. It's not going to magically change your outlook and make you happy or give you the tools to deal with challenges. It just lifts your mood enough to be able to push yourself to make those changes. For me, it made me less stressed and anxious about everything, which means I can try and enjoy things more rather than worrying about things changing.

I know there are (or at least, I think there are) a lot of places out there which will prescribe just antidepressants and treat them as a magical cure-all. IMO that's not the best way of doing it. I think taking antidepressants should be normalized, but at the same time, for the love of god, actually try to treat the underlying issues.

Oh, and don't force people to take antidepressants without informed consent. I don't know why I have to clarify this, but I have a friend online who thinks people don't know what's best for them and it's appropriate for them to be forced to take meds. Stop that. People need to find what works for them and be engaged in the treatment process.

I have sadly noticed a reduction in, uh, "friskiness" since taking the meds. Not sure how much of that is because of the meds, and how much of it is because I psyched myself up so much thinking that I'd never orgasm again. Biggest sex organ is the mind and all that. Still, it's not as bad as I worried it would be, and there are plenty of people out there living with low libedos naturally anyway.

I also feel a bit... Fatigued? Tired? Not really sure how to describe it. Don't know if that's the meds or just as a result of bad habits I picked up while being in a bad spot.

* I am not a doctor. This may be false. Don't use the ramblings of some guy online as medical advice.