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In an auditorium full of family doctors, when psychiatrist Ángel Luis Montejo asked them how many of them asked their patients about their sex life, barely one in five raised their hands. Due to shame, taboos, lack of training or knowledge, very little is said about sex in health centers. And, what's worse, many times the prescriptions will make their intimate life worse. "We are the biggest providers of sexual dysfunction," Montejo says.
More than 300 commonly used drugs have sex-related problems as a side effect: lack of appetite, impotence, difficulty reaching orgasm, vaginal dryness. "If you prescribe more than two a day to a patient, it's wrong, that's not done," this psychiatrist specializing in sexuality scolded them at a talk at the national congress of the Spanish Society of Primary Care Physicians (Semergen), which EL PAÍS attended at the invitation of the organization.
The title of the conference was explicit: Sex, drugs and depression. Because drugs to treat some mental health problems are among those that cause the most sexual dysfunctions. Antidepressants can cause this type of side effects in more than half of the users, although the proportion varies greatly depending on the active ingredient. And Spain is the fourth largest consumer of these drugs among developed countries, with 98.4 daily doses of antidepressants per 1,000 inhabitants. It is only surpassed by Portugal (150), Canada (134) and Sweden (114), according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
A study by the Ministry of Health reveals that 15% of women and 6% of men have at least one bottle of antidepressants at home (more than four million people), which coincides with the estimates of the prevalence of this pathology: three times more frequent in women than in men.
The side effects, beyond the peculiarities of each sex, are similar in both: a third of the patients who notice sexual problems with the treatment abandon it, which is not advisable in this type of pharmacological therapy. And these dysfunctions can feed back into the mental pathology.
Carlos - a fictitious name of a 43-year-old man - has experienced these side effects twice in his life. The first one, when he was about 25 years old: he began to feel panic attacks,...