Last Updated on April 28, 2023

Depression drains the color from life’s happiness, robs enthusiasm, and makes everything feel dull and flat — including your sex life. About 35 to 47 percent of men and women dealing with depression find the mood disorder interferes with their sexuality. That percentage jumps even higher based on the level of the state — more than 60 percent of patients with acute depression report sexual issues.

Why Sex and Depression Don’t Mix

The old adage about the way the brain is the biggest sex organ in the body is a more accurate statement than you might realize. The brain controls sexual drive, arousal, and sexual function through the release of hormones and nerve impulses.

Depression comes from a chemical imbalance in the brain, and that imbalance can cause interference with a man’s capability to enjoy sex or perform sexually. Depression has been connected to:

• A drop in libido. A study of depressed patients showed that more than two-thirds of respondents reported a loss of interest in sex. The decline in their libido developed worse as their melancholy grew more severe.
• Erectile dysfunction. Depression and stress are leading mental variables interfering in a person ‘s ability to have and keep up an erection.
• Inability to appreciate sex. Melancholy can limit or eliminate the happiness typically attracted from sex, says David MacIsaac, PhD, an authorized psychologist in New York and New Jersey and a faculty member of the New York Institute for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. Depressed guys, he says, “feel disconnected from any sexual encounter. It’s a dehumanization sort of scenario.”

Another adage holds that the cure might be worse than the disorder, when it involves sexuality and melancholy, and this also can not be false. Antidepressants are part of the mood disorder of the first-line treatment, but one of their main side effects can be sexual dysfunction. Decrease in libido is frequently reported, but patients have found that antidepressants inhibit sexual pleasure and could cause erectile dysfunction. Some people taking antidepressants also report a loss of sexual desire or trouble attaining orgasm.

Reconnecting With Your Sexuality

Heal and the best means to eliminate sexual difficulties linked with depression will be to treat the illness. They start to see their lives improving in a variety of manner, including their love lives, MacIsaac says as patients begin to feel much better about themselves.

While receiving treatment, it is possible to better make do with your sex problems if you discuss your depression and its particular effect in your sexuality by means of your physician and your partner. It can be very difficult to open up about these sorts of problems, but he may be better able to support you through treatment, if your partner understands that the dilemma lies with an illness rather than the relationship.

Your physician can switch your prescription to another drug, in case is interfering with your sexuality. There are numerous antidepressants out there and each has distinct effects on various people. Your doctor as well as you can work together to find the best treatment for your depression together with the least impact on your own love life.