In a very widely marketed ad for the anti-depressant Zoloft, a melancholy, yet adorable, anthropomorphized cartoon egg is stuck underneath a rain cloud. A voiceover laments that:
“You know when you feel the weight of sadness. You may feel exhausted, hopeless and anxious. Whatever you do, you feel lonely and don’t enjoy the things you once loved. Things just don’t feel like they used to. These are some symptoms of depression.”
The voiceover than goes on to explain that Zoloft can help, turning the morose egg into a joyous egg that bounces about the screen like all the other chemically balanced eggs. However, while the egg is frolicking on his Zoloft high, the voiceover man takes about 10 seconds to describe the side effects of Zoloft in little detail. What are these side effects, you ask? They’re nothing to write home about. It’s just that you may experience nausea, insomnia, diarrhea, drowsiness, dizziness, dry mouth, tremors, Akathisia (an inability to sit still or remain motionless), increased risk of birth defects if taken while pregnant, increased suicidal tendencies in people under 25, and the piece de resistance, a general sexual dysfunction which can manifest itself in the form of decreased libido, sexual arousal disorder (the inability of women to become lubricated and men to get wood) and orgasm dysfunction. Well, shucks, that’s enough to make someone, I don’t know, depressed.
The Zoloft Egg used to have an active sex life. Now it looks at butterflies
It’s a bit of a catch-22 when it comes to anti-depressants. Neurologically speaking, they do increase the amount of serotonin and norepinephrine in your system, which is thought to stabilize one’s mood. However, once you take this medication you might spend your days on the toilet, feeling like you’re going to chunder, drinking unhealthy amounts of water to get rid of your cotton mouth, and finding yourself unable to have sex because the only way you can become erect is to wrap a splint around your cock. Now for men, there is, and has for quite some time, been a logical solution to relieving the depression of one’s sexual organs: take more drugs. Just pop a couple of Viagra and you’re good to go. However, there is the little caveat of having an unwanted boner for about 3 hours post-coitus, which would leave you under voluntary house arrest if you’re not comfortable walking around your local IGA with a raging hard-on showing through your slacks.
On the other hand, women who take anti-depressants have been left to suffer from sexual malaise while their male counterparts prance about the apartment, seeing how many coat hangers they can fit on their erection, which, for your information, is totally normal and in no way perverted or distressing as my girlfriend and my therapist claim. But now women too have the ability to offset the sexual side effects of anti-depressants with…Viagra.
How physicians and researchers discovered this gem of a cure is truly beyond me. The idea that a drug that cures male impotence would work with female impotence is so far-fetched that you’d have to be a true pharmacological visionary to come up with it. According to a study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association regarding women experiencing sexual dysfunction due to anti-depressants, three times as many women taking Viagra had orgasms compared with women who were given a placebo.
Huzzah! Men and women are now cured of at least one of the side effects of anti-depression medications so that the drugs can work as they were intended to. Oh, hold on. It appears Viagra has its share of side effects too. The quicker, picker upper can cause sneezing, headache, flushing (redness of the skin), dyspepsia, palpitations, increased sensitivity to light, and, in rare cases, priapism (the never-ending hard-on), heart attack, severe hypotension, ventricular arrythmias and stroke. So, if you take some Afrin, a couple Advil, go to a dermatologist, down some Pepto Bismol, wear light clothing, stay in darkened areas, and have no history of heart problems, then you’re good to go, depending on the side effects of all the medicine you just took.
Right, or trying to see how much clothing you can put on the coat hangers. Totally normal man, I don’t know what those crazy people are talking about.
Aw, you left out the most hilarious complication of priapism: gangrene leading to amputation. Hooray science!