Do SSRI sexual side effects ever go away?

For some people, SSRI sexual side effects go away. For some people they do not. Nobody can tell you which of those you are, because nobody has counted properly. What is not in doubt is that this happens: the European Medicines Agency accepted in 2019 that sexual side effects can carry on after an SSRI is stopped.

What does “not going away” actually mean?

Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD) is the name for sexual and emotional effects that carry on after an SSRI or SNRI antidepressant has been stopped. SSRIs include sertraline (Zoloft), fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Paxil, Seroxat) and citalopram (Celexa). SNRIs are close relatives, such as venlafaxine (Effexor) and duloxetine (Cymbalta).

What people describe is specific. It is worth naming plainly, because vague wording is part of why this gets dismissed.

• No libido. Not reduced desire. Desire that is absent, with no wanting behind it.
• Genital numbness. Reduced or missing sensation, often described as touching skin that does not feel like your own.
• Orgasm that is weak, muted or absent. The mechanics can still work while the feeling does not.
• Emotional blunting. Muted feeling towards people and things, not only in bed.

These can start while you are still taking the tablets and stay after you stop, or they can appear once you stop. If you are still working out whether this describes you, read what PSSD is.

Am I imagining it, or is this recognised?

It is recognised, and that is the strongest fact on this page.

In 2019 the European Medicines Agency, the body that licenses medicines across the EU, recommended that SSRI and SNRI product labels carry information about sexual dysfunction persisting after treatment stops. Health Canada did the same in 2021. Both steps are set out by Healy and Mangin in Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences, 2024.

A label is the leaflet inside the box, and regulators decide what goes in it. So if you were told this always settles within a few weeks, that is not what the regulators wrote.

It has also been on national television. BBC Panorama broadcast The Antidepressant Story on 19 June 2023, with patients describing exactly this. It is on BBC iPlayer, in the UK only. If someone has told you that you made this up, that programme is a useful thing to point at.

How common is it?

Here the honest answer is a gap rather than a number, and the gap is the whole story.

• A 2019 survey by Lüning found that 52.6% of former antidepressant users reported sexual dysfunction that persisted, as cited by Healy and Mangin, 2024.
• Ben-Sheetrit and colleagues in 2023 put the risk of irreversible sexual dysfunction at 0.46%, and said themselves that this is probably an underestimate, also cited in the same review.

One in two hundred, or one in two. Those are not two rival findings that more reading on your part will settle. That is what the published record looks like when nobody is counting.

Healy and Mangin set out why nobody is. None of their reasons is that the symptoms are hard to see.

• The study that would settle it cannot ethically be run. It would mean giving antidepressants to volunteers while knowing you might cause the condition.
• There is no validated way to measure it. No agreed questionnaire exists, so no two studies count quite the same thing.
• People do not say. Some are embarrassed. Others say it once, are dismissed, and do not raise it again.
• It is not written down in a form anyone can search. Even when a doctor is told, the note usually cannot be found again by anyone counting cases.

So if a prescriber tells you how likely this is to last, it is fair to ask what the figure is based on. The published range runs from 0.46% to 52.6% in that one review. Neither end of it comes from anybody systematically following people up after they stop.

What did the genital numbness study find?

In 2024, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology published a study of 2,179 people with a history of psychiatric treatment, asking whether genital numbness had persisted after treatment ended.

Among people who had taken antidepressants in the past, 13.2% said yes, 93 out of 707. Among people who had taken other psychiatric medicines, 0.9% said yes, one person out of 102. Adjusted for other factors, the odds were 14.2 times higher in the antidepressant group.

That number carries a limit, and the limit belongs in the same breath as the number. This was a subsample of UnACoRN, a survey of sexual and gender minority young people aged 15 to 29 in the United States and Canada. It is not a general-population figure and must not be used as one. What it does show is a large difference between two groups answering the same question inside one survey.

Why has nothing been counted?

MedDRA is the dictionary that every medicines regulator files side effect reports in. Your words are not what gets stored. A code is. If a report is coded to a general term such as “sexual dysfunction”, nobody looking for this pattern will ever pull it back out.

A specific term does exist: Post-SSRI sexual dysfunction, code 10086208. Healy and Mangin report that it “does not appear to have been adopted by regulators”.

Read that twice. The dictionary has the word. The systems doing the counting are not using it. That is a large part of why the range above is as wide as it is, and it is also the part a single report can push against.

What you can do now

1. Report it. Our reporting guide walks through the form for your country. You do not need a doctor to agree with you, you do not need proof, and you can report years after stopping.
2. Add yourself to the PSSD and PFS registry. A side effect report captures one reaction at one moment. The registry records a person over time, which is what a researcher needs and what a regulator’s database was never built to hold.
3. See that you are not the first. Benjamin, in the film at the top of this page, is fourteen years into this. That is not a forecast for you. It is evidence that being told it will settle shortly is not always true.

Nobody can promise you recovery, and nobody can tell you this is fixed either. People do recover. People do not. Both of those are true, and anyone giving you a percentage is going beyond what has been published.

What can change is the record. The distance between 0.46% and 52.6% in Healy and Mangin’s review will stay that wide until reports exist under a term that can actually be counted. Yours is one of them.

If you are struggling with your mental health, the Samaritans are on 116 123, free, at any hour.