Antidepressants have made me emotionless?

[BurnedOut]

Emotional side-effects of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors: qualitative study | The British Journal of Psychiatry | Cambridge Core

Emotional side-effects of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors: qualitative study - Volume 195 Issue 3

www.cambridge.org

This study properly sums up the whole phenomenon. Lately I have been fiddling with the idea that I might have subclinical psychopathy. However, I also know that I have been a sensitive person since childhood until 2021 when my antidepressants started. They are working wonders for my health because I rapidly improved both academically, emotionally and relationshipwise. However another problem arose is that I stopped feeling as much as I did before insofar I feel that something has severely gone wrong with me in the sense that I turned from passionately emotional to borderline completely apathetic.

Despite sexual dysfunction being one of the symptoms of emotional blunting, my libido is completely unaffected nor I have lost interest in any of the activities that I used to like, I am still engaging in all of those activities with probably more zeal than ever.

Now, here comes the tricky part. My personality has always shown a dialectic of being intensely emotional only when provoked and otherwise being calm, detached and apathetic. As a child, as a teenager and as a young adult, with antidepressants not being in the picture, I have swung from one polar end to another when it comes to emotions and the most dominant emotions are anger, extreme anger, and anguish. Other emotions are difficult to come by me and I always have difficulty figuring out if I am feeling what I am feeling. I don't know if I feel guilty or regret or whether I have the ability to ascertain what emotion I am feeling apart from sadness and anger or whether it is the case that I can feel specific emotion at will. My perception of the past is similarly in question. The aforementioned stanzas also don't make it clear whether antidepressants have caused emotional blunting or simply gotten rid of the extreme emotions that I feel out of nowhere. My current theory is that I have heightened sensitivity to stimuli which has been confirmed by shrink and counselor. Is it that stimuli causes some kind of overload, then there is a phase of interpretation and then I attribute an emotion and then proceed to deliberately feel that emotion? Either ways as I type this, I feel calm and detached. I don't know if I can feel empathy or not. I am a complete social chameleon and extremely adept at adopting any kind of persona from being an alpha male to a jittery anxious boy huddled in a corner to a blabbering extrovert to an uncaring loner. Either ways, I can only carry out these activities as long as there is no overload on my senses. Also, I considered myself as having a sadistic side and a viciously mean streak, I don't feel guilty after hurting people or things for that matter. However, I feel deep sadness from time to time. I don't know how attraction feels like, it is mostly a feeling of possession and territoriality for me and not to mention lust and physical desire. And I don't exactly know what happiness feels like because in all the happy moments of my life, I have been sitting stolidly, however I feel lots of excitement and I am quite energetic. My friendships are based on simple codes that I don't break and people who love me know certain precepts to follow - utter honesty and naked criticism (at least to me because I don't care much about criticism unless it hurts my ego and makes me angry), dependability and reliance. I help people out not out of empathy or genuine goodness but I usually want to earn favours with them. My good relationships are rock solid and stable and they rely on me exclusively to provide rational guidance (This is all what they have told me) and a shoulder to cry on.

What do you guys think? It is really kind of a nonissue for me emotionally but I would still like to make sense of my personality and my past. Is my apathy congenital or is it being engendered by antidepressants? People who have known me for a long time did not report any kind of significant behavioral changes on my part, they are rather happy that my intense side is blunted off and nobody has accused me of changing drastically and yet my existential questioning is considering this. If I am indeed someone with a reduced capacity to feel emotions, the confusion would be less annoying. Do share your opinions freely, I got thick skin

 

[EndogenousRebel]

My weak hypothesis hinges on how well you manage pain. Psychological aching included. If yes, I would direct you to look into the cingulate cortex and the insular cortex which are associated with mediating emotions and self-referencing. Studies show that people with certain abnormalities here have trouble with managing pain. If this is the case then it could be hereditary and would explain your inability to process emotions despite being cognitively aware of them. Certain patterns of cingulate anatomy also is associated with depression.

You're able to suppress impulses and do work, and have healthy social relationships, so it's safer to say your neocortex is just fine, frontal/outer lobe and all that. Not a trait of most psychopaths by the way, especially long term.

So if it it happens to not be a issue with either of those, you'd have assume it would involve other structures in the limbic system like the amygdala, hippocampus , thalamus. Which is unlikely to be a heredity problem and usually becomes an issue from traumatic experiences.

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So yeah I'm betting you had a brain architecture "abnormality", like the cingulate cortex that made it difficult to manage and decipher emotions. This could've been caused by anything as genes and experience both play factors. Once you started taking an SSRI, which is notorious for creating a calm state, this problem was obliterated, but now the architectural issue in your brain was never addressed because it didn't need to be.

I'm not a neuroscientist btw.

 

[Hadoblado]

What anti-depressant is it?

You almost certainly don't have psychopathy.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

It could be a few things. Drugs do affect your emotions. Other things to consider is that you could have a natural alexithymia, or other tendencies to manifest less emotions or feel less.

The most obvious is probably the fact that you're an intellectual Thinking people feel less and usually don't have the best understanding or grasp on their feelings as they tend to focus on dry logic.

+1 on the 'not a psychopath' front

You might be not realizing when you're happy. All the times when you're sitting alone, zoned in on something and doing your own thing you're most likely happy, but it takes a sort of awareness practice to appreciate that.

We tend to feel strongly when things stray from routine or don't agree with our perfect world plan for what should occur, but we also have a more subdued hum of satisfaction when we don't feel adversity or distraction.

I used to not notice things like that, so nowadays whenever I can just do my work, focus or think deeply without distractions I think to myself "this is amazing", "I'm so happy to be doing this" etc. And I do feel an uptick of happiness and realize that I do feel good about myself.

It's the same with feeling pain, I tend to struggle with migraines or chronic back pain, so when I have a day when I'm not in pain then I really, really feel joy about not feeling anything from my body and I can remember all the pain that I'm not feeling and that boosts my mood for the whole day. At this point after years of working on my awareness that neutral state or numbness is actually a happy state for me, it elevates my mood.

It's sort of like a practice for me. If things aren't bad then they're good and I have positive thoughts as I frequently become aware of these freeing and calm times.

 

[BurnedOut]

What anti-depressant is it?

Cymbalta, Lexapro and Mirtazapine

Interesting food for thoughts. I know for myself that I am not a psychopath myself although my score on Hare's Inventory is quite high but below the cut off for psychopaths. I read up on Alexithymia and the symptoms match really well. After a cursory (non poppsy) research, alexithymia is possibly correlated with Secondary Psychopathy: https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=psy_fac_pub

 

[Hadoblado]

I don't know much about those specific meds, but many do restrict emotional range (including in my experience, SSRIs like lexapro). My personal take on antidepressants is that you should use them to support you when you need them, but try not to become permanently dependent on them. This obviously depends on the individual. My life is a lot better now that I no longer take antidepressants, but that's the result of the long-term improvements I made to myself while on them.

Regarding diagnosis, just remember that most people have something statistically abnormal about them and that does not mean they necessarily have a disorder. Generally, a good way flag to pay attention to is whether it's making you less functional or less fulfilled.

 

[birdsnestfern]

Intensely emotional when provoked, for example you don't like bullies? That sounds normal, nobody likes that. But the part about hurting others is not cool. Somehow you need to control that part of your actions by taking responsability and adopting a policy to treat everything around you like its yourself. Put filters on if necessary.

What I think is you are a highly sensitive person, but you are an INTP which means you don't LIKE to feel things so you've blocked most feelings out. Its a good thing to feel your feelings usually and check in with yourself a lot about how you are feeling to reinforce your connection to them.

I am afraid of those prescriptions and what they might be doing to you honestly. See if you can taper off, three is way too much I think especially. I recommend if you are super emotional to read up on the HSP, or join support groups for this type and learn how to USE those gifts.

For example, starting from the crown chakra, see each chakra spinning and tightening into a smaller version of itself. This will let in LESS overwhelming information and then set an intent to let ONLY love and light come in or go out. But you should work with whatever emotion you have naturally if possible and if not, then continue with meds that aren't so strong. Disregard if this doesn't work for you though, only you really know. I can only see from my own perspective, so this might not work for everyone.

Even if you have a few psychopathic tendencies, you are aware enough that you can work with what you have. If you know its stronger than your filters, just don't have pets, kids or people you CAN hurt nearby and communicate to those close to you so they know.

 

[BurnedOut]

Somehow you need to control that part of your actions by taking responsability and adopting a policy to treat everything around you like its yourself. Put filters on if necessary.

I avoid getting into skirmishes and usually warn people when they start crossing their boundaries. It works in 99% cases but there is a significant 1% population of the people I know who end up being on the wrong side of the fence. I enjoy hurting people but I am not motivated towards it so it is usually retaliatory in nature. My social persona is that of a caring and gentle person but that perception quickly crumbles and resettles to apathetic, rational and protective. Either ways, both work in my favor, loved ones are fine with both aspects and I ensure that I don't bite the hand that feeds until the hand attempts to shove its fingers down my throat

Secondly, there seems to be quite some overlap with alexithymia and Dark Triad traits. Given the fact that I also have aphantasia, it makes empathizing and understanding emotions of others via pure intuition even more difficult, however, I have bypassed that entire problem more or less by just learning to assess situations as scientifically as possible and that usually pays off huge dividends

 

[Puffy]

I'm not an expert on the topic, but my understanding is that psychopathy is on the far end of the narcissistic spectrum. Which means that psychopaths also have narcissistic personality disorder.

I think it's unlikely you have this. As a general rule of thumb if someone has enough self-awareness to contemplate if they're narcissistic they probably don't have the disorder.

It's possible that you have some narcissistic traits (which is a part of dark triad as you say), but these could be rounded out with some self-work on them.

 

[Hadoblado]

Just FYI the science on this stuff is mostly pretty iffy. I heard from a psychologist the other day that the construct of narcissism itself is somewhat in doubt due to most of the evidence for it being tied to a single author citing themselves.

I've never heard of psychopathy being on the narcissism spectrum from anyone with credentials. My understanding is that they are both constructs within the dark triad with some overlapping traits but which are conceptually distinct.

Regarding self-awareness, I've read at least one study implying that narcissists are capable of high self-awareness. IIRC they reframe narcissism as a good thing because they have it and so it must be good.

 

[Puffy]

Just FYI the science on this stuff is mostly pretty iffy. I heard from a psychologist the other day that the construct of narcissism itself is somewhat in doubt due to most of the evidence for it being tied to a single author citing themselves.

I've never heard of psychopathy being on the narcissism spectrum from anyone with credentials. My understanding is that they are both constructs within the dark triad with some overlapping traits but which are conceptually distinct.

Regarding self-awareness, I've read at least one study implying that narcissists are capable of high self-awareness. IIRC they reframe narcissism as a good thing because they have it and so it must be good.

Yeah I’d need to dig up source to support where that comes from. My understanding was that was psychiatry’s perspective but maybe im wrong.

I agree that a lot of psychiatry is shaky. From what I’ve understood of its critiques the methodology by which the DSM was put together seems pretty shaky and that’s the reference for most psychiatric constructs.

In my experience I’ve met people who seem to meet certain tick boxes for certain disorders but it’s usually complex with them overlapping with traits across different disorders, so it doesn’t seem as neat as you have x. I think it’s primarily a question of whether it causes them dysfunction or not.

On self-awareness I mean people I’ve met who come across as narcissistic will tend to not have self-awareness of these behaviours as narcissistic. Say if you can imagine saying to Lyra he’s narcissistic he’d probably have gotten angry and blown-up. If Lyra didn’t have NPD then I’m inclined towards agreeing with you that it doesn’t exist as he’s the closest thing to a caricature of the construct I’ve met.

 

[Hadoblado]

TBH my lived experience suggests it's real, and I agree Lyra probably fell into that category.

 

[Puffy]

TBH my lived experience suggests it's real, and I agree Lyra probably fell into that category.

Yeah regardless of the criticisms laid against psychiatry I'm inclined towards believing in the construct having known him. You could just pull up the wikipedia page on narcissistic personality disorder and it basically describes him lol. And at the very least with him it was clearly a dysfunctional thing.

I mean look at this shit, from DSM-5, makes me laugh hahaha:

• A grandiose sense of self-importance
• Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
• Believing that they are "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
• Requiring excessive admiration
• A sense of entitlement (unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with their expectations)
• Being interpersonally exploitative (taking advantage of others to achieve their own ends)
• Lacking empathy (unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others)
• Often being envious of others or believing that others are envious of them
• Showing arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes