Betty Dodson with Carlin Ross

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Thanks goes to Dr. David Hersh for sending this along. I get questions about lack of sexual interest from far too many people taking anti-depressants. Personally I'd rather see people take advantage of the cannabis plant either smoked or made into a tea. But of course, the big pharmaceutical companies would lose a lot of money. Boo Hoo!

The front page of this morning's *Boston Globe* includes an article: "Antidepressants may damage more sex lives" by Carey Goldberg. Here are some excerpts:

Sexual "numbness." Lack of libido. Arousal that stalls.

Such sexual symptoms have long been known side effects of the popular Prozac class of antidepressants, but a growing body of research suggests that they are far more common than previously thought, perhaps affecting half or more of patients.

And a handful of recent medical and psychological journal articles document a small number of cases in which sexual problems remain even after a patient goes off the drugs.

"This is such an upsetting issue," said Aline Zoldbrod, a Lexington psychologist and sex therapist. "There are people for whom SSRIs are really life-saving, I think, but the idea that someone would have to choose between getting out of the darkness of depression and having a good sex life is horrible."

But more recent studies, in which patients were more likely to be asked about specific sexual side effects and thus more likely to report them, suggest that the ballpark range of those affected by SSRIs is between 30 percent and 50 percent, said researchers including Dr. Richard Balon, a psychiatry professor at Wayne State University who studies the symptoms.

That would translate into millions of affected sex lives among the estimated 1 in 8 American adults who have tried these antidepressants in the past decade or so. Some studies have found the range still higher.

In fact, the dampening sexual effects can be so dramatic that in recent years, the antidepressants have become the leading treatment for premature ejaculation, a study last year found, though they are not approved for that use by the FDA.

For example, Dr. Cigdem Tanrikut a Massachusetts General Hospital urologist, reported last month at the annual meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine that when 35 normal, healthy men were put on Paxil for five weeks, up to 35 percent of them reported new problems with erections and up to 47 percent reported difficulty ejaculating while on the medication.

Psychologist Audrey Bahrick at the University of Iowa said she became concerned when she observed that several clients whom she followed went off SSRIs and "very, very credibly to me, they did not recover" sexually.

GlaxoSmithKline, which makes Paxil, "has not identified sexual
dysfunction post-treatment as a safety signal," spokeswoman Sarah
Alspach said in an e-mail.