By all appearances, we live in a sex-saturated society, one that has thrown out taboos on premarital sex, pornography, and, increasingly, polyamory. Explicit sexual content permeates our TV shows, our advertisements, and even our schools. Though our mainstream culture denies the sanctity of sex (or of anything at all, really), it still holds sexual liberation, especially women’s sexual liberation, as the pinnacle of the human experience.
You’d think, then, that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent efforts to clamp down on antidepressant overprescription would be welcome in this climate. After all, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)—which, per many studies, don’t perform much better against depression than placebos—cause sexual dysfunction in around 40% to 65% of those who take them. Moreover, around one in ten girls as of 2019 were taking antidepressants, twice as the percentage of boys. These numbers have only increased since March 2020, when teen girls’ antidepressant usage rose around 130% faster than it had prior to the pandemic.
Taken together, these facts imply that a large number of teenage girls—the vast majority of whom don’t have serious depression or suicidality—are being chemically suppressed not only from experiencing the fullness of their sexuality, but from growing into their sexuality in the first place.
Unsurprisingly, RFK Jr. gets no praise from the mainstream medical associations or the mainstream media, which have called his recent efforts a “dangerous crusade” that has “shaken psychiatry.” Modern medicine rarely stops to consider what a given medication is actually doing on a fundamental level, typical for a broader culture that has lost sight of the fact that the human body is not some Frankenstein’s monster, with a bunch of parts glued together.
Our bodies and souls are inseparably intertwined, any medication we take affecting the whole system. For example, many chemotherapies cause hair loss because they attack not only rapidly dividing cancer cells, but all rapidly dividing cells, including hair cells. SSRIs act similarly with the brain: they reduce the intensity of pain a patient feels, yes, but for many patients, they can only do so by reducing the intensity of any feeling at all, including joy, desire, curiosity, connection to other people, and, yes, sexual desire.
Take 23-year-old Lauren Friedman’s experience with Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD). At a recent summit on the overmedicalization of mental health in Washington, D.C., in a clip that went viral, she told an audience that her genitals are “completely numb, as if it’s the back of my elbow. I have no sensation internally… Sufferers also lose the ability to orgasm permanently… and their libido entirely, which for me and what a lot of other people experience is a sudden onset, like chemical asexuality that just never goes away.”
Friedman continued, “PSSD is not just a loss of sexual function, but a loss for some people of emotional function as well… Before this, I was a super emotional, empathetic, loving, caring, Sylvia-Plath-reading-and-resonating girl. And the day I woke up with this injury, I quite literally felt my soul leave my body… It was the most unbelievable, inorganic thing I’ve ever experienced and it’s a common symptom of people who have this condition… I can’t feel love for my own mother, which It’s the hardest thing on earth. I can’t feel a connection or love for my friends, or even music.”
Girls even younger might not even realize there’s a problem they’re facing. SSRIs can legally be prescribed to children as young as eight. A girl who is prescribed SSRIs at that age may have no real pre-medication baseline to compare her experience against. Her flattened state of being simply becomes her “normal” as she continues from childhood into adolescence and eventually adulthood. There literally isn’t any way for her to know what she’s missing.
After all, identity doesn’t form in a vacuum, but in the context of our experiences, both good and bad. Adolescence is a particularly important time because it’s the transition period in which children become adults. The information we learn during those years, including our romantic preferences, defines much of our adult lives.
A teenager who’s sad because her old friend group is growing apart, or because she’s comparing herself to other girls on Instagram, or because she’s uncomfortable in her changing body, isn’t malfunctioning. A healthy society and medical establishment would recognize that all of this is the emotional equivalent of growing pains. Healthy adults would tell her, “this too shall pass,” not “you’re medically broken and need prescription drugs to get better.” There are serious psychiatric cases out there, to be clear, but the vast majority of girls who are being diagnosed with depression and medicated for it today don’t fit into that category.
The thing is, using medication to blunt the necessary, if difficult, parts of growing up doesn’t mean you don’t get older, it just means you get older without having to process your experiences in their totality. This is another basic fact our mainstream culture and medical establishment have forgotten: time doesn’t stop for anyone.
The idea that you can just hit pause on the process of growing up and restart it when you want, or avoid it altogether, with absolutely no consequences isn’t limited to the way we treat SSRIs. Think about how, six years after “two weeks to stop the spread,” we’re still dealing with the social and economic fallout from pandemic-era lockdowns. Or about how many lawsuits are now being filed against doctors who told kids and their parents that they could just “pause” puberty with puberty blockers and “decide” their “gender” later (turns out, that’s not possible, and these kids live with the lifelong medical harm to prove it).
It’s funny, if slightly sad, that a children’s book offers more wisdom than our current crop of elites when it comes to how we should think about putting our time and energy into things we don’t immediately see the value of. In The Little Prince, the main character, the prince, takes care of a rose that he thinks is the only rose in the world. Feeling like the rose is taking advantage of him by demanding constant care, he leaves her and eventually finds out other roses exist, too. As he’s feeling down about this, a fox tells him, “It is the time you’ve wasted on your rose that makes your rose so important.” The prince decides then and there that he must move heaven and earth to return to his rose. She’s his and no one else’s. She’s worth the effort.
The same is true of sexuality, which takes shape over a lifetime of emotional and physical development: it’s worth the effort, even when it’s inconvenient and difficult. No matter what the culture says, sex isn’t the moral equivalent of a handshake: it is how we continue the human race; it is how we express love. Our message to those who are sad, especially those in their most formative years, shouldn’t be that they’re abnormal and need to risk drugs that may numb them out of something sacred and human. Rather, we should encourage them to work through their feelings, to waste time on their roses day after day so that they can eventually experience the full joy of what blooms.