Antidepressants Make it Harder to Empathize, Harder to Climax, and Harder to Cry. | Julie Holland

Antidepressants Make it Harder to Empathize, Harder to Climax, and Harder to Cry.
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Dr. Julie Holland argues that women are designed by nature to be dynamic and sensitive — women are moody and that is a good thing. Yet millions of women are medicating away their emotions because we are out of sync with our own bodies and we are told that moodiness is a problem to be fixed. One in four women takes a psychiatric drug. If you add sleeping pills to the mix, the statistics become higher. Overprescribed medications can have far-reaching consequences for women in many areas of our lives: sex, relationships, sleep, eating, focus, balance, and aging. Dr. Holland's newest book is titled Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs You’re Taking, the Sleep You’re Missing, the Sex You’re Not Having and What’s Really Making You Crazy.
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JULIE HOLLAND:

Dr. Julie Holland is a board-certified psychiatrist in New York City. From 1996 to 2005, Dr. Holland ran the psychiatric emergency room of Bellevue Hospital on Saturday and Sunday nights. A liaison to the hospital's medical emergency room and toxicology department, she is considered an expert on street drugs and intoxication states, and lectures widely on this topic. She published a paper in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, describing a resurgence of the drug phenomenon smoking marijuana soaked in embalming fluid, which may be a carrier for PCP. She is available for forensic consultations involving embalming fluid intoxication.

During her college years, Dr. Holland grew interested in a new drug being used as a psychotherapeutic catalyst, and authored an extensive research paper on MDMA (ecstasy), resulting in multiple television appearances, forensic consultations, and a book, Ecstasy: The Complete Guide.

Her other books include The Pot Book: A Complete Guide to Cannabis, Weekends at Bellevue: Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psych ER, and her latest release Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs You're Taking, the Sleep You're Missing, the Sex You're Not Having, and What's Really Making You Crazy.

Dr. Holland has been quoted as an authority on MDMA in magazine, newspaper and website articles (Harper's, Slate, SF Chronicle, LA Times, Wall Street Journal).

Dr. Holland runs a private psychiatry practice in Manhattan, established in 1996.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Julie Holland: The main kind of antidepressant that is the most popularly prescribed are the SSRIs and these are medicines that increase serotonin transmission. And when you start to push on the doses of these SSRIs, you start to lose some sort of quintessential feminine things. First of all it becomes much hard to climax and it becomes much, much harder to cry. But you also see decreases in empathy, in sensitivity, in passion.

The simple way of thinking about an SSRI is that you have two brain cells and one is a pitcher and one is a catcher. So pitch, catch. Pitch, catch. So this nerve cell is throwing serotonin across and this one is catching it. What the medicines do is they block the recycling back into the pitcher. So, you know, I’m throwing; I’m throwing. Some of this gets caught; some of it gets dropped. It just doesn’t get over there, but I’ll suck it back in and try again. So if you block the recycling, more is in the middle to get across. So there’s more, you know, the space between the nerve cells is called the synapse. If you block the recycling of the serotonin into the releasing cell, more is available for the catching cell. So it ends up enhancing the transmission. How enhanced serotonergic transmission translates into feeling better and feeling less anxious is much more complicated. But, you know, the simplistic way to think about it is that if you have higher levels of serotonin, if your transmission is better, you will be more relaxed and more happy. It’s a little easier to smile. It’s a little harder to cry.

So, you know, I’ve had patients come to me and say, you know, I’ve tried antidepressants before, but they always made me feel like a zombie or they didn’t make me feel like myself. Or I had a patient who said like I cut my finger and I looked down and I saw that it was bleeding and I saw that it was my blood, but I didn’t really feel like connected to my finger or the blood. You know, things like that that are really, really worrisome. Or I’ve had patients say, you know, I was in this situation where I knew I should be crying and I couldn’t cry. And, you know, I felt terrible that I couldn’t express that emotion to bond with ...

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