I totally understand your predicament and I’m glad you reached out to me for sex advice. You are really caught between a rock and a hard place (in more ways than one!). Your depression caused you to lose your libido and now the Zoloft is lowering your libido even further, which is really depressing.
There are many different schools of thought regarding how to treat depression. In my view, psychotropic medication is a last resort, when all other treatment options have failed. This is because taking medication may diminish your depression, but it doesn’t address the thoughts, feelings and issues that caused it. So, I think you need to decide how active you want to be in beating the problem.
Are you willing to go into therapy? According to research, people who do therapy have a much better rate of success than those who only take medication. In therapy, you will probably discover that there are many reasons why you became depressed.
The most common cause is unrecognized, or suppressed, anger. Since women have been socialized to be nice, it is easy for them to swallow their feelings and become depressed. Also, women have been socialized to caretake, which means that they will often tend to others before themselves. This leads to feeling used and abused, which also triggers angry feelings. And, if a person doesn’t own the anger, it’s easy to see how depression can result.
On top of buried anger, there are all kinds of ways that our thoughts can cause depression. Identifying the cognitive distortions that may be getting you down is also key. It sounds to me like Zoloft was the first and only intervention that has been made. And, the medication will do nothing for helping you to identify and solve the underlying causes of your depression. Plus, the meds. have side effects.
At this point, you need to decide if you want to take a more holistic, drug free approach. As you will discover, many people have beat depression with psychotherapy, exercise, and diet.
And, while we are on the subject of diet, there is much research that indicates that hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) is a major cause of depression. Food allergies have also been implicated along with essential fatty acid deficiencies.
I’ll never forget the boy that I treated 15 years ago. He was a young man of 19 who had been on antidepressants for years. I had the sense that he was lacking in essential fatty acids (the omega oils you’ve been hearing so much about). I told him to eat eggs and nuts for a week.
When I saw him the following week, his depression had lifted and he was able to get off the drug. So, you have a lot of options. Keep in mind that most people can beat depression by taking a multi-pronged, nondrug approach. Lots of luck.
