Earlier this year, Simon Wright was sitting on a roof terrace in Rome, drinking wine with a new girlfriend. “On every level, this should have been a feast for the senses,” he says. “But I couldn’t feel the romance of the evening – I felt dead inside.” When the couple returned to their Airbnb and started to have sex, Simon felt a familiar devastation. “I felt a complete lack of sensation, of erotic enjoyment,” he says. “So, in the end, in sadness and frustration, I simply didn’t continue.”
For the past 11 years, Wright, 33, a marketing executive from Nottingham, has suffered from a condition known as post-SSRI sexual dysfunction, or PSSD. SSRI stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. These pills are the “first-line” antidepressants you’ll get when you go to a doctor, and include the drugs citalopram and sertraline.
Simon’s experience adds to an increasing body of research that seems to show that although millions of people take SSRIs with no ill-effects, the pills aren’t always the harmless panacea doctors have been making them out to be. The Panorama investigation examines whether these drugs have lived up to their promises, following patients who have suffered serious side effects – among them, PSSD. Simon Wright helped the programme makers with their research.
Then, Wright received the news that his uncle had committed suicide. “I was devastated,” he says. “Then I started to worry there might be some sort of dysfunction that ran in the family,” he says. “I had heard talk of ‘low serotonin levels’, and thought this might apply to me.” “I was able to get an erection and would love kissing, but was never able to feel anything during penetrative sex, and my desire soon died,” he says. “I did try to discuss it, but didn’t link my lack of sensation to the antidepressants. Sex almost felt like ticking a box. At one point, I even started questioning my sexuality.
“When I saw some people had found their symptoms became permanent, I went through a lot of anger and denial, at times I even felt suicidal,” says Wright. “Then I began to realise I wasn’t on my own, that there was something I could do, and joined the PSSD Network as a volunteer, helping to grow its Twitter and TikTok following.” During this period, Wright came across the work of Prof David Healy, one of the world’s experts in SSRIs and the harm they can cause some people.
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