Alas, the proposition was too good to be true. There is no free lunch. Both women and men report about the same incidence of dysfunction when they take SSRIs. But the incidence of dysfunction while on SSRIs probably is even greater than reported. The underlying problem is that physicians and patients often are too uptight to talk about the sexual side effects of antidepressants.
Some patients are too embarrassed to fess up.
Many are so happy that they're not depressed any longer that the dip in their sex lives becomes secondary to their spectacularly upturned mood. It's a price, but one that most SSRI-users happily pay. Leave it to the world of fluorescent-tanned scientists to study just why SSRIs dampen sexual ardor. Fellows at the Department of Psychiatry and Neurosexology concocted another pioneering study at the Hague's Leyenburg Hospital. While having sex with their partners, volunteers equipped with stopwatches timed how long it took them to ejaculate while on SSRIs.