alt Hacker News> The most common side effects reported by patients in the study by Hu et al1 of 401 outpatients taking SSRIs were drowsiness (38%), dry mouth (34%), and sexual dysfunction (34%)
> which was conducted in 1999-2000, questioned patients about side effects via phone interviews within 75 to 105 days of starting antidepressant therapy. The side effects deemed most bothersome were sexual dysfunction (17%)
It's no where near those numbers.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3181894/
You notice how the scientific numbers get inflated in anecdotes from 17-34% to 50-70%?
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> phone interviews within 75 to 105 days of starting antidepressant therapy.
Different thing entirely from long-term effects.
Do you think the one 25 year old short-term study that you found by yourself is the only study that has been done, and that anything that deviates from it is a distortion?
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“It's no where near those numbers”
“get inflated in anecdotes”
Just because one study has the number 34% in it, does not prove the numbers I gave were wrong and does not mean they are anecdotal.
This is something that’s been studied from many angles and there’s more than one number that’s defensible based on the context and dataset.
For example, even the study you cited says: “In a study of 344 patients by Montejo-Gonzalez et al, 58% of patients reported sexual dysfunction when physicians directly inquired”, and “14% with spontaneous reporting”.
In another example, a 1,000 patient study found 57.7–72.7% for common SSRIs. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11229449/
The “scientific numbers” you allude to are not one value. It’s a body of research not one definitive number.
Taken a whole I don’t think anyone is being that mislead when it’s suggested more than half of people may experience these side effects.