Why does libido decrease with medication for depression? And what to do with it?
When a person suffering from depression is treated with modern antidepressants, gloomy thoughts and a sense of the meaninglessness of life go away, mood improves, activity and hope for the future return, there is a desire to see friends, get new experiences, achieve something. But many patients complain that sexual relations are violated in this case: there is neither craving for them, nor that acute sensation of dissolution in pleasure that was before the depression.
What is going on? How is it that a cure for depression, while in many ways restoring a normal life, at the same time deprives a person of one of the greatest pleasures?
There is an explanation for this. The enjoyment of sex, dissolution in it is associated with the dominance of the right hemisphere in this state. If it is fully functional, it opens us to all the impressions coming from the outside world, and to the sensations coming from our body. This creates ideal conditions for sexual pleasure. Lovers dissolve into each other, merge in ecstasy, and this provides the right hemisphere freed from the boring control of consciousness. It, the right hemisphere, is also connected with the global feeling of harmonious merging with the world.
With depression, this function of the anterior sections of the right hemisphere is impaired – otherwise there would be no depression itself. The cause of the disorder may be organic damage to the brain, a defect in its development during maturation (for example, due to the lack of emotional contact with parents) or severe mental trauma that has overloaded this very sensitive system.
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And what do many antidepressants do? They do not restore this unique function of the right hemisphere – such drugs have not yet been invented. Antidepressants replace the weakened function of the right hemisphere with increased activity of the left, stimulate it. The left is responsible for organizing our goal-directed behavior and ordering our impressions. But such ordering is inevitably connected with the impoverishment of these impressions in order to bring them into a coherent, amenable to analysis system. This function of the left hemisphere is also weakened in depression, and its restoration with the help of antidepressants allows you to return to an active life.
To do this, a person must feel invulnerable to the influences of the world, protected from the world, and not merged with it. Of course, such a sense of security is nice after the huge feeling of helplessness caused by depression. Meanwhile, only the feeling of merging with the world, as well as with a loved one, gives pleasure, including the pleasure of love. But antidepressants do not contribute to immersion in this relaxed state, they all the time help active behavior and analysis of what analysis is contraindicated.
Therefore, treatment with antidepressants must be combined with psychotherapy or meditation, yoga, self-hypnosis – conditions that help restore the function of the right hemisphere and a sense of merging with the world. Then it will be possible to stop taking antidepressants. And the role of intimate relationships in this is also great, if the relationship itself is not limited to sex, but it becomes part of emotional intimacy.
Об этом: Vadim Rotenberg SEXUAL DISORDERS CAUSED BY ANTIDEPRESSANTS: CONSIDERATIONS IN THE CONTEXT OF BRAIN HEMISPHERE FUNCTIONS
Activities Nervous Superior 2010