When Pleasure Turns to Silence: The Hidden Struggle of a Desensitized Penis and What Every Man Needs to Know

Late last year, I found myself in a bizarre and borderline terrifying situation—nearly passing out in my girlfriend’s bed, gasping for air, aching in places I hadn’t expected, and inches away from an orgasm that just wouldn’t land. Imagine that: trying so hard to feel something, anything, and all you get is numbness. Weirdly enough, this isn’t your typical bedroom hiccup or a plot twist in a rom-com. It’s the unspoken side effect of the miracle pills millions slurp daily—SSRIs, the antidepressants designed to tune down anxiety and depression but often crank the volume way down on something else entirely: pleasure.

As someone who’s spent years dissecting and optimizing content, I’m used to peeling back layers to reveal what’s real beneath the surface. Here’s the kicker—70 percent of men say they finish too quickly, but what if the problem isn’t coming too fast, but feeling nothing at all? What if you have to hold your breath and focus every ounce of willpower just to speed up something that should come naturally? That’s the fight many men on SSRIs face every day, trapped in a world where their own bodies feel foreign, dull, anesthetized.

It’s exhausting, embarrassing, and deeply isolating. The big question—one that haunts me and others like me—is blunt and brutal: Is it worse to be clinically depressed or to have a broken dick? This isn’t just about bedroom blues; it’s about wresting control over your body and your happiness, a struggle tinted with the fear of stigma, misunderstanding, and the unknown.

Stick with me as we dive deep into this tangled web of medicine, mood, and masculinity. Trust me, it’s a wild ride—raw, real, and absolutely necessary.

LEARN MORE

19 min read

Late last year, I nearly passed out in my girlfriend’s bed. I had forgotten to breathe for what felt like a couple of minutes until, finally, I gasped, gulping hot air. My balls ached. My temples throbbed. I had been tantalizingly close to an orgasm. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to come, sorry,” I murmured, burying my face in my girlfriend’s breasts.

As many as 70 percent of men say they finish too quickly. Some master the art of delaying their orgasm. They flex their pelvic muscles, pick next week’s fantasy-football roster, picture their math teacher—not the hot one, obviously. I, on the other hand, must focus all my energy and hold my breath to try to speed up ejaculation. There’s a reason for these fraught anticlimaxes. I hardly feel anything in my penis. Touching it is as unextraordinary as touching the tip of my elbow. It’s like it’s been slathered in lidocaine or injected with anesthetic. My penis doesn’t feel like genitalia, just generic skin.

This intense dullness is, to the best of my knowledge and that of the therapist, doctors, and psychiatrists I’ve seen, caused by SSRIs—selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most common class of antidepressants. When I’ve taken them over the past ten years, my dick has become desensitized. SSRIs, used by nearly 12 percent of Americans, work by blocking the reabsorption of serotonin in the brain, increasing serotonergic activity between nerve cells, with the intended result of easing anxiety and depression.

The specter of the small print, however, is sexual dysfunction. A significant number of patients experience adverse intimate side effects, including erectile dysfunction, vaginal dryness, and low libido. It’s often caveated that many people with depression (around 35 to 50 percent, according to one study) experience sexual dysfunction regardless of the drugs. But before taking SSRIs, I did not have the double whammy of genital numbness and delayed orgasm. The penis, with its four thousand nerve endings, is meant to be the most sensitive part of the male body. Mine is unnervingly numb.

The inability to feel your dick is emasculating, but that’s not the problem. It’s the exhaustion. I can’t enjoy sex the way it’s intended—when the body becomes acutely aware of its edges, skin turning electric, almost hypersensitive. Every brush registering physical pleasure. Instead, I go out-of-body. I dissociate, forcing myself to forget that there is no sensation in my penis. Often that’s impossible. I can’t switch off the obsessive reminders of my condition; they’re like push notifications from my subconscious. Sex, of course, is about the journey, not the destination . . . yada yada yada . . . but if there’s no defined destination, is it even a journey?

The ultimate question I face, the one I’ve been asking myself for the past decade every time I swallow my antidepressants, is the same question many other men on SSRIs suffering from sexual dysfunction turn over in their heads: Is it worse to be clinically depressed or to have a broken dick?

On Valentine’s Day 2016, my penis went numb for the first time. I was a clinically depressed nineteen-year-old freshman at the University of Birmingham in the UK, standing at the top level of my local mall, leaning against the guardrail, staring at the people below. A few hours earlier, I had taken my second-ever dose of the SSRI citalopram. Gradually, the feeling in my penis faded.

Sex feels like I’m wearing a pack of Durex Extra Safe condoms. It’s possible to orgasm, but incredibly difficult and not particularly pleasurable.

Of course, it’s not like you always feel your penis, but you do notice it chafe against your leg, get hard, or catch in the zip of your fly. After my second pill, these microsensations went away. Imagine your arm falling asleep and then feeling it brush against your body. That was the sensation. My dick was a dead limb, as if the nerve endings had been severed. Later that night, I had sex. I felt nothing.

I had started taking citalopram because of another drug. Before my first year of university, I had only indulged in a few spliffs of street weed. But at a rave on Halloween, I tasted the erogenous bliss of Ecstasy for the first time. “You can do anything you want tonight,” my best friend whispered to me, and I fell in love with getting high.

My second experience a month later was not so sweet. This time, the supposed MDMA I was sold didn’t feel right. I spent two full days in bed without eating or sleeping, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my then-girlfriend’s dormitory ceiling. The comedown didn’t end. For a couple of months, I shambled through life in a state of intense paranoia, taking time away from my studies and obsessing over the belief that I had permanently damaged my brain. I began slicing myself with the serrated blade of a penknife, burning marks into my arm with a cigarette, and fantasizing about methods of suicide. You might say I was a zombie—except zombies are ravenous and stimulated and social. I let my brain eat itself.

Now desperate, I visited my doctor and filled out a psych questionnaire. Within ten minutes, he diagnosed me with depression. The pharmacist next door filled a prescription for citalopram. I didn’t take the pills straightaway. After going down a Reddit hole of SSRI horror stories detailing crashed-out sex drives and flaccid nightmares, I could not summon the courage to start. I kept the unopened box on my bedside table for a few nights and went for an appointment with a second GP. The silver-haired, bespectacled physician eased any concerns. Only one in twenty men experiences some sexual dysfunction, he said, quoting the 5 percent statistic often cited by SSRI clinical trials. Even then, he said, it often clears up. I took my first pill the next morning, and I didn’t feel anything for twenty-four hours.

individual posing in a hallway wearing a patterned tshirt and a suit jacket

Courtesy Author

The author in February 2020, when he was twenty-three and just out of university and had been taking an SSRI for four years. The drug “turned down the volume” of his “incessant negative thoughts, and made it easier to function.”

Then that second pill on Valentine’s Day and the loss of feeling. A litany of other side effects followed, and I still experience them. I have incredibly disturbed sleep, regularly shouting out during vivid nightmares or waking up punching plaster. (The drywall-Kyle meme could be based on me.) I have the amount of saliva you’d expect to have after a night smoking high-grade sativa. My memory isn’t what it used to be. I sometimes feel a fraction sociopathic, struggling to experience emotion in a visceral way.

But after six weeks and upping the dose to 20mg, I began to feel the positive effects. Citalopram turned down the volume of my incessant negative thoughts and made it easier to function. There wasn’t exactly the sun piercing through the clouds of nineties Prozac commercials, but it certainly rained less. Without medication, I don’t think I would have survived. According to a much-cited review in The Lancet, concluded in 2018, twenty-one commonly used antidepressants are all more effective than placebo. Perhaps more pertinently, according to a recent King’s College London study, 74.9 percent of people taking SSRIs believed that the drug helped them feel better—sometimes that’s enough.

Contrary to the assurance of my doctor, my sexual side effects didn’t fade. My penis stayed numb. I felt like I rolled a double zero on the roulette wheel. But Dr. David Healy, a prolific SSRI researcher—and, depending on whom you ask, a hero, a maverick, or a pariah—insists I am far from alone. He says that the 5 percent sexual-dysfunction statistic quoted by doctors greatly underrepresents the true extent of cases. “The reality is, it’s closer to 100 percent,” he tells me.

Today we are living in an age of antidepressants. The shame has faded, and people discuss their SSRIs over dinner and post memes about the shared experience. But in the late eighties, the introduction of fluoxetine—otherwise known as Prozac—was the start of a chemical revolution. Prozac was the first widely marketed SSRI, with a name meant to sound positive (pro), zippy (z), and active (ac). By 1989, doctors had prescribed the drug to 21 percent of patients with depression. A year later, it was the fastest-selling psychiatric drug ever and soon generated $2 billion in annual sales. In 1994, the drug lodged itself in pop culture with Elizabeth Wurtzel’s best-selling memoir, Prozac Nation. Throughout the 1990s, a slew of other new SSRIs followed: sertraline, paroxetine, citalopram, escitalopram. Unlike the older tricyclic antidepressants, these new pills promised, as Listening to Prozac author Dr. Peter Kramer put it, the possibility of feeling “better than well.”

But reports of sexual dysfunction began to surface as early as the 1990s. “Of the first sixty patients treated at our clinic with the antidepressant fluoxetine (Prozac), five (8.3 percent) developed treatment-emergent sexual dysfunction,” noted one 1990 paper. “Estimates of sexual dysfunction vary from a small percentage to more than 80 percent,” reads a critical review published in February 1999 in the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology. “The impacts of sexual side effects of SSRIs on treatment compliance and on patients’ quality of life are important clinical considerations.”

The full extent of these side effects was rarely communicated to most patients. Doctors stuck to the lower end of the official statistics. And patients were often reluctant to report potentially embarrassing sexual side effects. Access to Internet forums, where people on the drugs could swap notes about sexual side effects, was limited.

By the early 2000s, the narrative that antidepressants are relatively harmless wonder drugs began to shift. In 2004, the FDA forced pharmaceutical companies to include a warning with SSRIs of the risk of increased suicidality for adolescents under eighteen. The gradual collapse of the popularly accepted idea that low serotonin equals depression has put SSRIs further under the microscope. Recently, they’ve become the target of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has suggested they cause violent tendencies. (Like many of RFK Jr.’s claims, this is not based in actual science.)

Last year, Chemically Imbalanced, a book published by seasoned antidepressant critic and psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff, made headlines for comparing SSRIs to alcohol because both “drown our sorrows” temporarily. I wish antidepressants felt as good as booze.

With these new appraisals—some valid, some blindingly myopic—has come a greater understanding of SSRI-induced sexual dysfunction. Now most studies shoot far higher than the 5 percent mark. Estimates vary considerably, but one major review concluded that up to 73 percent of people on SSRIs reported adverse sexual side effects. For the millions of people on antidepressants across the world, it’s now accepted that they are more likely than not to experience some form of impairment in their most intimate moments.

But there’s still some uncertainty on exactly why SSRIs cause sexual dysfunction. The drugs work by simultaneously increasing serotonin, decreasing dopamine, and inhibiting nitric oxide synthase, all of which are involved in orgasm. Higher levels of serotonin can also elevate the threshold to trigger ejaculation, making it harder to come.

Healy has his own hypothesis on the numbness. In a 2020 paper for the journal Bioelectricity, he made the provocative claim that “up to 100 percent of takers of a SSRI have a degree of genital sensory change within 30 min of taking.” He believes that “the genital numbing and the emotional numbing go hand in hand” and that this numbing is the main therapeutic mechanism of SSRIs. It’s become common to describe this “emotional blunting” as a side effect, but the inability to feel much pleasure on SSRIs is likely caused by the same beneficial process that stops you from feeling too much emotional pain, according to Healy.

Now this numbing effect is used to treat other problems. SSRIs are prescribed to treat premature ejaculation by delaying orgasm. Dapoxetine, marketed as Priligy, is a fast-acting SSRI specifically for PE that’s available in some countries. (The FDA has not approved its use in the U. S.) It follows studies in the 1990s showing the efficacy of antidepressants for PE: 80 percent of patients reported “fair” satisfaction with intercourse due to their ejaculation taking longer.

Meanwhile, some psychiatrists are prescribing SSRIs off-label to manage deviant sexual behaviors through reducing sex drive and pleasure. Most strikingly, in the UK, SSRIs are part of a trial to chemically castrate sexual offenders in prisons. It points to the powerful, anaphrodisiac effects of the medication. As Healy notes, “If God made these drugs for anything in particular, it was for effects on your sexuality.”

During a period of casual sex in my early twenties, I had a catchphrase: “Sorry about this—I take a while.” Not the sexiest dirty talk, but it helped explain why I would try to either finish myself off or call it a night without climaxing. I felt I needed to address it. Around 95 percent of heterosexual men orgasm during sex, so I wanted to assure the other person that it’s not them, it’s me. For the most part, my partners have been deeply understanding. For heterosexual women suffering from SSRI-induced sexual dysfunction, I imagine this is not always the case.

I was chasing what it felt like to have sex before I started taking SSRIs. The memory became a mirage. During periods of being single, I plunged myself into hookups, both to satiate my addictive personality and to prove to myself that I was still sexually functional. I wasn’t. Climax during penetrative sex is extremely difficult for me. It’s why I have prioritized different forms of intimacy, like finding ecstasy from giving oral sex. Hopefully it’s made me a slightly more well-rounded sexual partner. There are other silver linings. Pregnancy scares are almost nonexistent. And according to the PornHub search term “FIGHTING SSRI to cum SHAKING male orgasm,” I’m a niche kink. My friends joke about me being able to go on forever, which I guess can be a good thing.

Now I have a girlfriend who, fortunately, is incredibly understanding about my condition (and perhaps benefits in some small way from my prioritizing her, rather than myself, reaching orgasm). Here’s how our sex usually goes: Erections aren’t an issue for me because I still get turned on as much as I did before I started taking the drugs. After foreplay, if we choose to have proper sex, there’s an unspoken acceptance that I’m not really feeling anything but enjoying the sensory inputs other than touch. It’s like wearing a pack of Durex Extra Safe condoms. It’s possible to orgasm, but incredibly difficult and not particularly pleasurable. Which is where my balls come into play.

Over the years, I’ve found that my perineum (or gooch, if we’re going less florid) is far more sensitive than my penis, meaning I need to use it to orgasm. Strangely, being out of breath makes me more likely to come. I’m not into breath play, but it’s likely the case that the temporary hypoxia increases blood flow to my genitals, making them just about sensitive enough to reach climax. Sex will finish with her stimulating the areas around my penis while I touch very exact points—usually the tip of my penis—and work in tandem to come. Less intense anorgasmia is also a thing on SSRIs, so sometimes it’s more a feeling of relief than ecstasy. But it still feels good. We’ve talked about pegging, though I don’t love the physical sensation of anal penetration. (Ironic, I suppose, that the one place I can feel something—my ass—is not among my sexual desires.) But I’m trying to get there.

There are other work-arounds, like drug holidays. They sound fun—the kind of thing Hunter S. Thompson might have been into. In reality, it involves skipping a couple pills in order to have less SSRI in your system, meaning that the genital numbing is less pronounced. “Depending on how long the drug usually remains in your body, you might stop taking it for a few days—for example, before a weekend, if that’s when you hope to have sex,” suggests Harvard Health.

Drug holidays have proved effective. And it’s something I would need to do if I ever wanted to try for a baby with my partner. But it’s not without risk. The number-one warning that any doctor will give you is to never, ever skip an SSRI. When I have, I’m back in zombie mode for a few days. Also, it’s not particularly hot to block out time in your Google Calendar for spontaneous throes of passion, even if Esquire did once endorse scheduling sex.

Despite these remedies to my sexual dysfunction, I still ruminate on how my numbness affects my girlfriend. In the past, she has worried that my lack of pleasure means I’m not attracted to her or that she’s not performing well enough. I emphasize that this is not the case, but it’s always a painful conversation.

The best solution is to come off the SSRIs altogether. It’s what I did in 2024, after eight years on citalopram, when my sexual ennui had begun to outweigh the positive effects of the pills. Guidelines suggest a few weeks of tapering, even though evidence is mounting that SSRI withdrawal can be catastrophic. To be on the safe side, I disregarded my doctor’s advice to taper over a month and weaned myself off the drug for six months. By February 2025, I was SSRI clean.

For the first few months, I threw myself into soccer, therapy, and socializing, adamant that I was off them for good. But my OCD, something I hadn’t experienced for the better part of a decade, quickly returned with a vengeance. I would spend hours a day measuring my shoes and feeling every step I walked. Thanks to either SSRI withdrawal or a recurrence of depression, I felt like I had woken up groggy from a nap for every waking minute. (I haven’t taken recreational drugs since 2020.)

Then I entered my worst episode of depression, spinning out into dissociation and paranoia. I stopped working, socializing, eating, talking. Suicide once again felt acutely logical. “I keep wanting to sleep, entering dreams just to escape reality,” I wrote in a Google Doc that moonlighted as a diary before I noted the shittiness of my writing.

As I tapered off my meds, the feeling in my penis did return. But my libido was destroyed because of how awful I felt, so it didn’t make a huge difference in my life. I had little desire for sex—in fact, I didn’t feel like doing anything at all. So I went back on SSRIs. In July 2025, I started 10mg of a new, shinier model: escitalopram (marketed as Lexapro). Thus far, it’s kept me relatively stable, and I am back to being a functioning depressive. But I’m numb again.

The easing of my sexual dysfunction after stopping my SSRIs seems like a given. You don’t need to be a psychopharmacologist to know that when we stop medications, the side effects generally go away. For a small group of people across the globe, though, something horrifying and illogical is happening. Days, months, and years after completely coming off their SSRIs, their sexual dysfunction persists like a phantom numbness.

Stephen had few issues on Lexapro, aside from a dry mouth and slightly delayed ejaculation, which wasn’t all that bad. “I was a twenty-year-old college kid and I could have sex for longer with the girls I was dating,” the now-forty-year-old filmmaker says over Zoom. (He asked that I withhold his last name.) “I was like, this is fine.” After college, with his anxiety disorder stable, he stayed on the medication until 2023, not thinking much of taking it each day. But after his anxiety spiked in February 2023, he met with a nurse practitioner who suggested he try coming off the medication because it wasn’t helping him anymore. He took the advice, weaned himself off SSRIs, and embraced wellness, combining jujitsu, sobriety, and cold exposure.

In September 2023, Stephen went through a stressful time and reluctantly accepted a doctor’s advice to start a low dose of Lexapro. Six days of night sweats and insomnia followed, so he stopped after less than a week. Two weeks later, something strange happened. His sexual function went from “one hundred to zero.” He could no longer get an erection or feel anything in his penis; when he was able to come, his semen trickled out and he felt no sexual pleasure. “I can’t feel any attraction,” he says. “I can look at pornography and feel nothing. It’s like staring at a brick wall.” Stephen was admitted to a psychiatric facility. Now out, he feels no brighter. “My life has been completely destroyed. I’m basically disabled.”

The question I face is the one I’ve been asking myself for the past decade: Is it worse to be clinically depressed or to have a broken dick?

Stephen suffers from Post SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD), technically defined as genital numbness that persists for at least three months after coming off SSRIs. It’s extremely difficult to determine the prevalence, but one medical paper estimates that one in 216 people who take SSRIs suffers from PSSD. It’s still an eyebrow archer for some doctors, but the ailment is finally becoming more widely acknowledged.

PSSD isn’t exactly new. It was first reported in the 1990s, and Healy remembers coming across a case in 2000 when a female patient complained of not being able to orgasm several months after stopping her SSRIs. Healy assured her it would clear up. “She looked at me and she said, ‘I can take a hard-bristle brush and rub it up and down my genitals. And I feel nothing,’ ” Healy tells me.

But it wasn’t until 2006 that a case report was published in medical literature and PSSD was formally named. In 2011, Eli Lilly added a warning to its SSRI that “occasional persistence of sexual dysfunction following discontinuation of fluoxetine treatment” could occur. In 2019, thanks to the work of Healy, the European Medicines Agency formally recognized PSSD. (“Patients can rub chili paste into their genitals and not feel it,” Healy wrote in one letter to the EMA.) In 2022, the PSSD Network was founded, stemming from the subreddit “r/PSSD,” which now has more than eighteen thousand subscribers. The organization’s work has led to a high-profile story in The New York Times Magazine and myriad podcast appearances spreading awareness of the issue.

But there’s still a marked stigma. Friends and family members often have a hard time understanding. For twenty-five-year-old PSSD sufferer Sean, this is particularly pronounced. After a four-month stint on an SSRI during the height of the Covid pandemic, he later took a single pill of another SSRI and experienced emotional and sexual numbing. He threw the packet away.

Four years later, he says this single dose ruined his life. “It’s something very hard to talk about because of how long I took it for”—one day. As improbable as it seems, many other people with PSSD similarly say a handful of pills triggered it. Sean says his doctor laughed in his face when he told him about it; other PSSD sufferers share stories of being dismissed or humiliated by their GPs. Healthy, compassionate, scientific skepticism is of course essential—but thousands of accounts shouldn’t be instantly rejected without further study.

At the University of Milan, a team led by professor of neuroendocrinology Roberto Cosimo Melcangi is conducting research funded in part by more than $300,000 in donations from the PSSD Network. But it’s a drop in the ocean. “The reality is, to make a dent in this thing, you need millions and millions,” Stephen says. Elsewhere, there are hopes that preventive tests can be created. Healy, for instance, thinks the answer is screening patients for a gene linked to piezo proteins to assess who is at risk of PSSD.

There’s other cause for optimism. Sometimes PSSD resolves itself for no apparent reason. “There are people who get the problem and for reasons that we don’t understand, they recover,” Healy says. “There are some people who have windows” where it eases. He notes that some people suffering from PSSD find it goes away after a bout of illness or an entirely different course of medication. It’s why many of those in the PSSD community become obsessed—sometimes, understandably, to the point of monomania—with finding a cure, ranging from saffron to Cialis to testosterone. (The PSSD Network “highly discourage[s] against self-experimentation with any medications.”)

Others have become involuntarily celibate. “I hate to say, but at this point, I kind of feel like a virgin, because it’s been years without doing anything,” says Sean. “It literally feels like someone else’s penis.”

“I never in my life thought that having your ability to feel and make love taken away from you was possible,” one anonymous testimonial on the PSSD Network website reads. Many also struggle with what they say is persistent emotional numbness—not just muting or blunting but a total vacuum of feeling. “I have a blank mind, and I lost all my feelings of love,” Stephen says.

Tragically, PSSD can have grave consequences: Everyone in the community with whom I spoke shared stories of suicide. It’s a harrowing disorder that has no prognosis and a prolonged dysmorphia. It reminds me how relatively lucky I am. When I came off my citalopram back in 2024, I didn’t suffer from PSSD and my sexual function returned.

But a discovery throughout my discussions with those suffering from PSSD brings the issue far closer to home. It seems the condition often occurs after coming off a second course of SSRIs, not the first. “There are a lot of people who took the medication the first time and they were fine” Stephen says. “Then they take a different medication and, bam, they get it.” It’s then I realize that he could be describing me.

On a bitterly frigid day in late January, I visited a shrink for the first time. Here in the UK, it’s far more common to see a therapist than a psychiatrist, mainly as most of us don’t have medical insurance. But I saved up the eye-watering fee to discuss my SSRIs with another bespectacled expert.

Over an hour, charged at $500, which is quite painful to write, he tried to understand my entire life. He told me I should not accept a baseline level of feeling okay and that he was there to cure people rather than manage conditions. He said I probably have ADHD. And he suggested I try vortioxetine, a newish antidepressant with a different profile that, he says, his patients have found doesn’t cause sexual side effects (even though, he added, Google would say otherwise). There potentially would be a couple of weeks of crippling dizziness that I might not be able to get past.

On the ride home—as I finished Sartre’s Nausea—I faced the usual mindfuck. I must choose between depression and feeling my penis. I’m keen to try to come off SSRIs again, to enjoy the full spectrum of sexual pleasure. I have become acutely aware of the malaise it must cause my girlfriend and am desperate to stop meds and end the ménage à trois between her and me and escitalopram. But coming off them again risks depression, withdrawal, or, perhaps, PSSD. And rolling the dice with another medication like vortioxetine is genuinely terrifying.

But something sublime happened a week later. After a couple weeks apart, I decided to take a drug holiday for a night while staying at my girlfriend’s house, delaying taking my escitalopram until late morning. When we woke up, we had sex, and, while in the act, I felt more than I had for a long time: the ache of skin-on-skin contact, the shudders of warmth, the point of no return. We came simultaneously.

The comedown from the drug holiday would arrive the next day. But in that moment, I was gifted a new tactile memory, a true moment of clarity. I had somehow cheated the no-win situation and found a third way. The burning question of SSRI or sex may never be extinguished. That’s something I have to make peace with. But as I lay in my girlfriend’s bed, before punching out another pill, I was, for a precious few minutes, in an impossible, liminal world: I was neither numb nor depressed. I guess I felt happy.