Aletho News

Your Spouse Started Antidepressants and Became a Stranger

The hidden crisis and why it happens

By Dr. Roger McFillin | Radically Genuine | August 7, 2025

“I don’t know who this person is anymore,” James told me, his voice cracking as he described his wife of fifteen years. “She started Zoloft eight months ago for some mild anxiety about work. Now she’s rewritten our entire history together. According to her new narrative, I’ve been emotionally abusive for years. She’s filed for divorce, moved in with some guy she met at a yoga retreat, and told our kids that daddy was never really there for them.”

He paused, searching for words. “The strangest part? She seems completely unbothered by destroying our family. It’s like she’s watching it happen from outside her own body.”

Welcome to the SSRI marriage apocalypse: a phenomenon so widespread that entire online communities have formed to support its casualties. Spouses gathering in digital refugee camps, comparing notes about partners who transformed into unrecognizable strangers after starting antidepressants. The stories are eerily similar: personality changes, moral compass spinning wildly, empathy evaporating, sexual connection obliterated, and a strange, detached willingness to torch everything they once held sacred.

But here’s what makes my blood boil: The mental health establishment celebrates these relationship demolitions as therapeutic breakthroughs. “The medication lifted their mood enough to finally leave that toxic relationship!” they’ll proclaim, completely ignoring that the “toxicity” might be a drug-induced fabrication. This is my fundamental criticism of the therapy industry: therapists attach to their client’s inner world as if it’s absolute fact, unquestionable truth.

Even without SSRIs, people alter reality and create stories to cope with pain. But add psychiatric drugs to the mix, and you’ve got modern therapists providing unfettered validation to chemically distorted narratives, rarely approaching cases with empirical scrutiny. They jump right on the victim mindset, and in many cases, actively create it. “Yes, you were trapped in an abusive marriage!” they’ll affirm to someone whose brain chemistry has been so altered they couldn’t recognize genuine love if it slapped them in the face.

The Spell-Binding Effect

Dr. Peter Breggin, Harvard-trained psychiatrist and former consultant to the National Institute of Mental Health who’s spent decades exposing the dark underbelly of his own profession, called it “medication spellbinding”: the insidious way psychiatric drugs prevent users from recognizing their own drug-induced dysfunction. (I’m actually traveling to Dr. Breggin’s home next week to interview him, and you can bet your ass I’ll be drilling deep into this spell-binding phenomenon.) It’s not just that SSRIs change you; they rob you of the ability to perceive that you’ve been changed. You become a stranger to yourself while believing you’re finally seeing clearly.

“Lisa” sat across from me six months after stopping Lexapro, tears streaming down her face. “I feel like I’m waking up from a nightmare I created. I had an affair. I told my husband of twenty years that I’d never really loved him. I was prepared to walk away from my children without a second thought. Now I look back and think, ‘Who was that person?’ But at the time, it all made perfect sense. I felt nothing. No guilt, no remorse, no connection to my old life. It was like living in emotional Novocain.”

This is your brain on SSRIs: chemically castrated not just sexually but emotionally, morally, spiritually. The same serotonergic manipulation that’s supposed to lift your mood also severs the invisible threads connecting you to everything that matters. But you won’t realize it’s happening because the drug disables your ability to recognize its own effects.

The psychiatric establishment has convinced millions that flooding the brain with serotonin is as benign as taking vitamin C. They’ve never bothered to mention that serotonin doesn’t just regulate mood; it shapes moral reasoning, empathy, pair bonding, sexual response, and the entire constellation of neurochemical processes that make us capable of authentic human connection.

This is why I have profound concerns about prescribing these drugs during critical developmental periods. When you chemically alter serotonin in a developing adolescent brain, you’re not just tweaking mood; you’re potentially rewiring their capacity for intimacy, identity formation, and even sexual orientation. The explosion of gender dysphoria cases perfectly paralleling the mass prescribing of SSRIs to teenagers? That’s not a coincidence worth ignoring. That’s a red flag the size of Texas that nobody wants to acknowledge because it threatens both Big Pharma profits and progressive orthodoxy.

When “Treatment” Becomes Home-Wrecking

Here’s what the hundreds of stories flooding my inbox and online communities reveal: SSRIs create a spectrum of personality destruction, and we’re essentially playing Russian roulette with human consciousness. The response varies wildly because we’re experimenting with pharmaceutical compounds that fundamentally alter human nature itself.

For some, there’s an almost immediate activation syndrome (conveniently buried in the clinical trial data). Within days or weeks, they experience impulsivity that would make a teenager blush. Reckless spending, sexual promiscuity, acting without any consideration of consequences. One woman described it perfectly: “It was like someone disconnected the brake pedal in my brain. I was all accelerator, no caution.” Affairs happen in this state. Life-destroying decisions get made. Families implode while the person feels euphoric about the destruction.

For others, it’s the slow slide into emotional death. The detachment creeps in gradually: first, colors seem less vibrant. Music loses its emotional pull. Then comes the relationship anesthesia. “I just don’t feel anything for him anymore,” becomes the refrain, as if discussing a roommate rather than a life partner. The sexual dysfunction arrives not just as decreased libido but complete genital numbness, the physical capacity for intimate bonding chemically severed. But instead of recognizing this as drug-induced castration, it gets reframed: “I guess I was never really attracted to them.”

The empathy erosion is perhaps the most chilling. The person who once cried at commercials now watches their partner’s pain with scientific detachment. Children become logistical problems to solve. Love transforms into a word they remember but can’t feel. It’s not cruelty; it’s worse. It’s the presence of absence where humanity used to live.

The therapy industrial complex, thoroughly indoctrinated in the chemical imbalance mythology, validates every drug-distorted thought. Your couples therapist, who hasn’t bothered to research SSRIs beyond pharmaceutical marketing materials, encourages your drugged spouse to “trust their feelings” and “honor their truth,” never once considering that their feelings are chemically manufactured and their truth is pharmaceutical fiction.

Post SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD)

Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD) is the dirty secret of psychiatry that could bring down the entire house of cards if people truly understood its implications. We’re not talking about temporary side effects here. We’re talking about permanent sexual castration that persists, even after stopping the drugs.

But PSSD isn’t just about sex. It’s about the complete severing of the embodied experience of human connection. The neurochemical pathways that create sexual arousal are the same ones involved in emotional bonding, passionate engagement with life, and the felt sense of love itself. When SSRIs nuke these systems, they don’t just steal orgasms; they steal the capacity for embodied intimacy altogether.

And now we have hard scientific evidence for what these communities have been screaming into the void. A 2019 study published in Translational Psychiatry by Rütgen and colleagues finally confirmed what Big Pharma has desperately tried to suppress: SSRIs don’t improve empathy in depression; they systematically destroy it.

The researchers found that after just three months of antidepressant treatment, patients showed significant decreases in both emotional empathy and brain activity in regions crucial for empathic responding. The more their depression “improved,” the less they could feel others’ pain. They literally measured the chemical assassination of human compassion.

But here’s what nobody wants to admit: the pharmaceutical industry measures “improvement” in depression by how much less you feel. Can’t cry at your mother’s funeral? Success! Don’t feel devastated when your child is hurting? Treatment is working! Unable to empathize with your spouse’s pain? Congratulations, your depression is in remission! They’ve redefined mental health as emotional lobotomy and convinced us to celebrate our numbness as recovery.

Think about what this means for marriages: Your depressed spouse starts SSRIs, and within months they’re neurologically incapable of feeling your emotional pain. The researchers called this a “protective function,” but let’s call it what it really is: chemically-induced sociopathy. The study showed decreased connectivity between brain regions responsible for emotional and cognitive empathy. Translation: the drug literally disconnects the wiring that allows us to feel for each other.

The Anti-Human Agenda

Let’s call this what it is: an anti-human movement masquerading as mental health care. When you create drugs that systematically disable the neurochemical foundations of human bonding, empathy, and moral reasoning, you’re not treating illness; you’re engineering the dissolution of the social fabric itself.

But SSRIs are just one weapon in a much larger war against human flourishing. Look around: We’re poisoning masculinity as “toxic,” redefining female hormonal cycles as psychiatric disorders, and severing our children from nature itself, replacing dirt, sunlight, and real play with screens and synthetic environments. We’re feeding them processed poison disguised as food, then wondering why their bodies and minds rebel. We’re replacing human connection with digital interfaces, substituting virtual “friends” for real relationships, and celebrating isolation as “self-care.” Every institution that once fostered genuine human bonds (family, community, spiritual fellowship) is under systematic attack.

The gender confusion epidemic perfectly paralleling mass SSRI prescribing to adolescents? The explosion of young people who suddenly can’t recognize their own bodies, can’t connect to their biological reality? When you chemically sever a developing mind from its capacity to feel authentic connection to self and others, is it any wonder they become strangers in their own skin?

This anti-human agenda operates through multiple vectors: Seed oils inflaming our brains, endocrine disruptors scrambling our hormones, screens hijacking our attention, pornography replacing intimacy, and yes, psychiatric drugs severing our souls. Each element reinforces the others, creating a perfect storm of disconnection. The SSRIs ensure you won’t feel the horror of what’s being done to you. They’re the anesthesia for the operation that’s removing our humanity.

Every marriage destroyed by SSRI-induced apathy, every parent who stops feeling love for their children, every affair justified by chemically-induced emotional numbness: these aren’t unfortunate side effects. They’re features, not bugs, of a system designed to atomize human connection and create perpetual patients.

The online communities tracking this phenomenon aren’t conspiracy theorists or anti-medication extremists. They’re regular people sharing strikingly similar stories: My spouse started antidepressants and became someone else. They lost the ability to feel love. They rewrote our history. They destroyed our family with cold efficiency. And when they finally stopped the drugs (if they stopped) they woke up horrified at what they’d done.

One woman in these forums wrote something that haunts me: “The drug didn’t just steal my husband. It stole the person he was during our children’s most formative years. Even though he’s himself again now, off the drugs, our kids don’t know who he really is. They only know the emotionally absent stranger who lived in our house for three years.”

The Revolution We Need

The psychiatric establishment won’t save us from this; they created it. The therapists validating drug-distorted realities won’t help; they’re complicit. The only solution is brutal honesty about what these drugs actually do to human consciousness and connection.

If you’re on SSRIs and your marriage is falling apart, consider this: Maybe it’s not your marriage that’s broken. Maybe it’s your capacity to feel it.

If your partner started antidepressants and became a stranger, you’re not imagining it. You’re witnessing a chemically-induced personality transplant.

If you’re a therapist reading this and getting defensive, ask yourself: How many marriages have you helped validate into destruction because you couldn’t question the sacred cow of psychiatric medication?

We need to stop pretending that chemically altering the foundation of human emotion and connection is neutral. We need to stop acting like SSRIs are precision instruments when they’re actually neurochemical sledgehammers. We need to acknowledge that when you interfere with serotonin, you’re not just adjusting mood; you’re rewiring the capacity for love itself.

The families destroyed by SSRIs aren’t collateral damage; they’re casualties of an undeclared chemical war on human connection. And until we’re willing to name this war and fight back, the casualties will keep mounting, one numbed-out divorce at a time.

Your depression might be real. Your anxiety might be valid. Hell, in this toxic wasteland of a culture we’ve created, feeling depressed and anxious might be the only sane response. But look at how we’ve been programmed to address these legitimate feelings: Rush to the doctor. Get the diagnosis. Take the pill. Never once questioning whether numbing the pain is the same as healing it.

We’ve been brainwashed to believe that feeling less is the same as feeling better, that chemical numbness equals mental health. But is addressing your struggle this way worth sacrificing your capacity to love and be loved? Is it worth becoming a stranger to yourself and everyone who matters to you? Is a life without authentic emotional connection really better than a life with difficult emotions?

This more than a medical question. It’s a spiritual one. And the answer might just save your marriage and your soul.

RESIST

August 18, 2025 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science | SSRIs | Leave a comment