By A Midwestern Doctor - February 7, 2025

Story At-A-Glance:

- SSRI antidepressants are some of the most harmful and overused medications on the market

- Common side effects of SSRIs (and SNRIs) include emotional numbness, severe agitation, bipolar disorder, cognitive decline, sexual dysfunction, and birth defects

- Psychiatry’s denial of SSRI-related issues often leads to misinterpretation of side effects as signs of pre-existing mental illness, resulting in more medication and catastrophic consequences

- SSRIs, like stimulant drugs (e.g., cocaine), are highly addictive, leading to severe illness during withdrawal, which affects approximately half of users

- Withdrawal from SSRIs is often extremely difficult, with very few resources available for those trying to stop

Whenever I ask a holistic physician which commonly used medication classes they believe cause the most harm to society, SSRIs always are one of the top five.

Note: Statins (discussed here), NSAIDS like ibuprofen (discussed here), and PPI acid reflux medications (discussed here) frequently make the top five as well.

This is because SSRIs rarely benefit patients (only a minority of depressed patients have a metabolic type that responds to SSRIs) and the drugs have a large number of severe and often life-changing side effects. For example, in a survey of 1,829 patients on antidepressants in New Zealand:

- 62% reported sexual difficulties
- 60% felt emotionally numb
- 52% felt not like themselves
- 39% cared less about others
- 47% had experienced agitation
- 39% had experienced suicidal ideation

Many of these can be immensely impactful for individuals (e.g., SSRI sexual dysfunction is often permanent and frequently causes severe depression, while emotional anesthesia takes away the joy of life and can cause people to spend years, if not decades, in emotionally toxic situations).

Worse still, the SSRIs are . . .