This is probably gonna be old news to a lot of you, but I just fell ass backwards down a reactionary rabbit hole I didn't even know existed outside of Tom Cruise and Scientology.
So I was watching the new Some More News and saw the bit where MTG, Tucker, et al insist that SSRIs make you a sexless monster prone to rage. And I didn't think much of it, because like... of course the conspiratorially minded anti-science reactionaries would hate SSRIs, and these ghouls have a lot of air to fill so it'd definitely come up eventually.
But then later that same day I saw this TikTok:
Now, to be clear: SSRIs can caused fucked up side effects. I know: I've been on them! They can do some pretty wild stuff, and finding one that works for you to minimize side effects while maximizing the medicinal benefit can be a big pain! And yeah, impacts to libido and sexual function are among those side effects. So I don't want to dismiss this stuff entirely.
But despite that, especially in the wake of the Some More News video I saw earlier, something about this TikTok rubbed me the wrong way. It felt disingenuous. I had to ask myself: is this reactionary agitprop?
- It's an account that just posts pseudo-anonymous testimonials about how SSRIs have utterly ruined their libido and thus their lives.
- No benefits of SSRIs are mentioned, nor any real scientific data - just story after story of people swearing SSRIs have caused irreversible and undue harm without warning
- The organization that posted it also doesn't offer a support line or community to reach out to. It isn't a support group, but rather exists to simply "raise awareness" about the issue in a vague way.
- Lexapro is mentioned by name in the TikTok I saw, but the general vibe (especially in the comments) is extremely hostile to SSRIs across the board, including encouraging people to not take the drugs by organization itself.
So I did the sort of research one typically does in this scenario: I looked at who they follow on Twitter. And uh... it's not great? Here are their earliest follows:
So right off the bat: They joined in May of 2022 (post-Musk's initial bid) and then immediately followed Musk, Tesla, and SpaceX. That's... suspicious, for a group interested in raising awareness about a drug's side effects. They also followed Joe Rogan and Jordan B. Peterson. Peterson at least makes a modicum of sense here - he's ostensibly a psychologist by trade. But put in context with the other follows and it's clearly a bunch of right wing media darlings. Much of the rest of their follows are people promoting the particular issue of libido loss due to SSRIs, but there's a handful of other standouts:
That's two posters who are obviously there just to promote transphobia, disgraced MTV doctor Drew Pinsky, and "World Tapering Day," an account who serves to promote people just kind of stop taking their meds. Because that's healthy. And then there's a guy that believes in "Biblical Medical Ethics." I started looking into that but that's a whole separate bag of cats I don't want to broach here (check out this piece on Columbine, it's absolutely wild). This is the company the org is keeping, digitally speaking.
At this point I think it's pretty clear given the company they keep and the content they post that they're going about this disingenuously. Even recognizing the potential for SSRIs to cause serious side effects they also help millions of people at a much greater scale. And the goal of this org doesn't seem to be to give solace to those few who had negative reactions to the drug, or even to promote more serious consideration before taking them - it's to assault the idea of SSRIs and medical professionals/expertise more broadly.
