It is a devastating condition that afflicts many.
After coming off of antidepressants like Prozac, Zoloft and Trintellix, PSSD sufferers, among other symptoms, endure genital anesthesia and complete loss of libido—and with them, often, the inability to feel anything at all, physically or emotionally, a despair that tragically drives many to suicide.
“With PSSD,” Carmen writes, “all that is left is a body that can no longer be stimulated and a soul that no longer sings—an empty shell of what we once were.”
“Losing the ability to feel desire or pleasure when touched by another, or losing that tingling feeling in one’s stomach when your lover gazes at you—losing the warmth of their embrace—is devastating,” she continues. “It is not only a dysfunction; it is a form of living death. It’s as if a whole dimension of what it means to be human has been erased.”
The condition is permanent. There is no known cure.
Who in their right mind would deny PSSD exists and expect to be taken seriously?
PSSD affects tens of thousands—potentially hundreds of thousands. The persistent sexual dysfunction they endure in the wake of SSRIs has been raised in peer-reviewed academic papers dating back to 2006, as well as in an interview this summer with psychiatrist Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, viewed by 5 million people on X alone.
Yet there are those who categorically deny that PSSD even exists. Dr. Irwin Goldstein, the founder of the field of sexual medicine, compares them to flat-earthers or Holocaust deniers.
Dr. Goldstein has spent half a century studying sexual dysfunction in all its forms and has accumulated a wealth of information, research and case studies, all pointing to the very real, very present danger of PSSD.
So who in their right mind would deny PSSD exists and expect to be taken seriously?
And why would they do it?
The answer is the new president of the American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology (ASCP), Anita Clayton.
And the reason is money.
Clayton is what is called a “key opinion leader” for Big Pharma, also known as a paid shill. The British Medical Journal sums her duties up this way: “Being on a [pharmaceutical company’s] speakers bureau or being a key opinion leader is widely recognized as an egregious financial conflict of interest because the role of the key opinion leader is essentially a marketing one.”
Such an “expert,” in other words, is a glorified spokesperson for pharmaceutical companies. And Anita Clayton is just that.
Clayton chairs the University of Virginia’s Department of Psychiatry. She is past president of the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health. She has authored books. Her name is associated with all kinds of “studies” and “research.” In short, she has all the trimmings to make her a worth-her-weight-in-gold asset in the pharmaceutical world.
By way of example, she stepped in for drug manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline on behalf of its antidepressant, Wellbutrin (bupropion hydrochloride). The company needed the gravitas of Clayton’s name and résumé to market Wellbutrin as a libido-booster, dubbing it the “Happy, Horny, Skinny Drug.”
But the FDA had never approved marketing it as a have-great-sex drug, prompting the US government to sue the company in 2012 for marketing Wellbutrin “off-label” illegally.
The lawsuit read: “GSK provided significant compensation to physicians in exchange for their promotion of GSK’s prescription drug products. These national speakers include … Anita Clayton, MD, Charlottesville, VA.”
From 2018 to 2024, Clayton pocketed more than a quarter of a million dollars from more than a dozen pharmaceutical companies.
The Wellbutrin affair was no one-off for Clayton. Possibly as a reward for serving her masters faithfully, she was ultimately bestowed her presidency of the ASCP.
Shocking, you say? Unethical? Conflict of interest? Anita is way ahead of you. She knows all about conflicts of interest, seated as she is on the board of the Conflict of Interest Committee of the International Society for Sexual Medicine (ISSM)—while maintaining many herself.
From 2018 to 2024, Clayton pocketed more than a quarter of a million dollars from more than a dozen pharmaceutical companies.
Among Clayton’s pharma chums are Lundbeck and Takeda, co-makers and marketers of the drug vortioxetine, known in the US by its brand name, Trintellix.
Trintellix is an antidepressant associated with sexual dysfunction and weight gain (along with a host of other side effects), but none of the Trintellix commercials reviewed by this writer warn of either. On the contrary, in more than one ad, a happy former depression sufferer confides: “With—get this—no significant impact on weight in clinical trials.” And neither the happy former depression sufferer nor any of her fellow happy former depression sufferers open up about how Trintellix may have laid waste to any sexual part of their lives.
That omission may soon end. The FDA just announced the closing of a loophole that previously allowed drug companies to downplay or omit risk factors. Some 100 cease-and-desist letters were fired off, warning pharmaceutical companies to practice full disclosure—or face consequences.
Clayton, for her part, poo-poos the weight gain, dismissing it as a good sign that indicates the return of a healthy appetite to the now-cured-of-depression person. Cheerily, she corrects her patients, who are certain they gained weight from the drug: “No, I think it’s the fork going into your mouth.”
As for sexual difficulties? “We also do need to reassure them that we’re tracking it.”
SSRI patients will need more and more “reassurance” as scientific evidence mounts concerning the dangers of Clayton’s pet drug, Trintellix, and others like it. Expectant mothers on antidepressants may also expect miscarriages, preterm births and excessively small newborns, in addition to impaired brain development and anxiety and depression in their child later in life.
That’s why, this July, an FDA panel debated whether pregnant women should avoid Trintellix, Prozac, Zoloft and other such drugs.
“I have been robbed of my humanity.”
“Never before in human history have we chemically altered developing babies like this, especially the developing fetal brain, and this is happening without any real public warning, and that must end,” said Dr. Adam Urato, chief of maternal and fetal medicine at the MetroWest Medical Center in Massachusetts.
And what is Clayton’s position on the dangers of SSRIs in pregnancy? As relayed by podcaster Kellie Newsome—who took detailed notes on Clayton’s talk at the 9th Annual Mood Disorders Summit—“we don’t know of any major risks with them.”
That statement, however, rings hollow, given that Clayton’s Trintellix, along with its sister SSRIs, is under constant fire for bringing about PSSD.
And rather than confront its own disaster, the psychiatric industry, ever dutiful to its prime motivation—money—continues to deny PSSD’s very existence. Freedom exposed psychiatry’s collusion with Big Pharma to conceal the affliction using media pressure, suppression of negative data, selective reporting of clinical trials and other deceptive tactics—tactics like those employed by Dr. Anita Clayton.
In an ISSM video, Clayton brushes PSSD off as a mere “complaint” of those who have taken antidepressants, rather than an incurable medical illness that wrecks lives. “It would be very hard to prove … that this condition exists,” she declares blithely.
Toward the end of the video, Clayton tells a story of a patient whose sexual function improved when they were switched from an SSRI she doesn’t name to vortioxetine, which she characterizes as “one of the antidepressants that doesn’t cause sexual dysfunction.” But Clayton’s denial that vortioxetine causes temporary sexual dysfunction is contradicted by the product’s own drug label, approved by the FDA. She also conveniently neglects to divulge her funding from the companies marketing the drug. (The ISSM’s Conflict of Interest Committee, of which Clayton herself sits on the board, didn’t seem too concerned.)
Clayton should go out and meet some people outside of her friendly pharma echo chamber. She might learn something from those for whom PSSD most certainly does exist—those who say: “I have been robbed of my humanity.” “No more love, no more sex, no more feelings. I loved my life. Since PSSD it’s over.” “I do not feel like an entire human being anymore.” “I lost the connection to my personality and my feelings.” “Every aspect of the person I once was has been stripped away. I am living a fate worse than death.”
Thousands of such individuals live through the very real hell that Clayton writes off as imaginary.
But what is real to Clayton is that, at a list price of up to $552 for a month’s prescription—compared to generic Prozac (fluoxetine) at a mere nine bucks—Trintellix’s profits and good name must be preserved no matter the sacrifice—beginning with honesty and ending with lives.
“Science, by definition, should start from a position of neutrality.”
That is why, in 2019, Clayton co-authored a controlled trial contrasting Trintellix (vortioxetine) with Paxil (paroxetine), both of which can cause PSSD, among other devastating harms.
Clayton, of course, knew where her loyalty lay, so, while her “study” appeared objective on paper, she ensured it favored her PSSD-inducing drug.
Consider:
- Loaded framing: From page one of the published trial comparing vortioxetine with paroxetine, paroxetine (the drug Clayton doesn’t hawk) is immediately labeled “an antidepressant known to cause sexual dysfunction”—a biased characterization no neutral researcher would condone.
- Unequal dosing: Patients were given 20 mg of paroxetine daily, but only “10 or 20 mg” of vortioxetine.
- Patient noncompliance: Even Clayton, one of the authors of the trial, admitted the results were undermined by patients who didn’t adhere to their instructions for dosing, resulting in inconsistencies in the “data”—“data” that was nevertheless used to prop up vortioxetine.
- Biased measurement tool: Sexual side effects were tracked (or avoided) using a questionnaire that Clayton herself designed. For example, a patient who answered “rarely” or “never” to “Do you enjoy books, movies, music or artwork with sexual content?” was scored just as heavily for sexual dysfunction as if they had answered “rarely” or “never” to “Are you able to have an orgasm when you want to?” Worse, notably absent from the questionnaire were queries on hallmark symptoms of antidepressant-induced sexual dysfunction—genital numbness or genital anesthesia, reduced nipple sensitivity and flaccid glans penis during erection. You can’t answer what you aren’t asked.
- Misleading title: The study’s title paints an entirely false picture. “Paroxetine, But Not Vortioxetine, Impairs Sexual Functioning Compared With Placebo in Healthy Adults: A Randomized, Controlled Trial” is invalidated by the authors’ own admission, buried low down in the results, that 20 mg of vortioxetine showed no “statistically significant” advantage over 20 mg of paroxetine in terms of sexual dysfunction, while demonstrating greater sexual dysfunction than placebo.
As a devout PSSD denier, Clayton is determined (and paid) to discourage, snuff out, ridicule and otherwise stop all discussion, debate and dialogue on the subject of PSSD. As recently as November 2023, she told The New York Times, “I think it’s depression recurring. Until proven otherwise, that’s what it is.”
But though Clayton may have slowed the conversation, she has utterly failed to stop it. Study after study has confirmed PSSD’s existence. Study after study has acknowledged that no single, fully confirmed mechanism has been found as to why drugs like Trintellix can cause persistent genital numbness and other sexual side effects long after they are discontinued.
Trintellix was developed before the public outcry on PSSD became audible. Its makers never endeavored to solve that or any of the other sexually catastrophic effects of SSRIs. They simply produced a new shiny object in the crowded antidepressant bazaar—one which, they argued, was “better” than the other sexual-dysfunction-inducing SSRIs because, well, it was new.
Chatting at the camera in a promotional video, Anita Clayton smiles, “I hope my research will impact human health.”
Her “research” already has—and with devastating consequences.
“Science, by definition, should start from a position of neutrality,” declares a blog on a wellness website that pictures Clayton buried beneath enough pharmaceutical company logos to cover several NASCARs.
In a neutral scientific world, no drug would be shielded from scrutiny by biased trials and conflicted “experts.”
In a neutral scientific world, devastating conditions like PSSD would be acknowledged, researched and prevented, because the aim is to safeguard lives and bring real help.
In a neutral world, science would serve patients—not profits.
In such a world, there would be no rigged studies, no lives permanently devastated by drugs, no carousel of prescriptions spinning misery into markets.
But ours is not a neutral world.
Ours is a world where millions that could be spent on research to fix the pharmaceutical carnage that is PSSD are wasted on corrupt studies to deny or minimize it. And while patients’ lives are ruined, often to the point of suicide, Anita Clayton counts her money.
PSSD has robbed millions of their humanity.
Anita Clayton has yet to find hers.
