Kinsanity

Imagine for a moment that I took away your ability to enjoy sex. It’s just gone. Now in order to get it back, you would have to declare that you belong to two categories of people who are regularly stigmatized in pop culture. While you are dealing with this, you may also be experiencing feelings of worthlessness, guilt, hopelessness, lethargy, anxiety, and the inability to concentrate. If you can get past all that and reach out for help, there’s a big chance no one will do anything. They may not even believe you.

Welcome to the world of a woman dealing with the sexual side effects of depression and its treatment.

When you’re depressed, anxious, abused, and/or have been isolated your whole life, it’s easy to feel like other people can’t really ever get close. Socializing is really hard for people who’ve had nothing but abuse. And we keep waiting for someone healthy to save us. But they can’t. So how can we fight this process and end the cycle? Well, there are three options that I’ve seen.

But here’s the thing, when someone calls and asks if I want to have coffee, saying I’m too depressed isn’t seen as acceptable. That’s seen as weakness. That’s seen as something wrong with me. Whereas, if I said I was sick with a cold, that would be alright, because, after all, everyone gets colds and when they get them, it’s okay not to feel like socializing.

A recent study by scientists at Imperial College London found that the psychedelic compound in shrooms, psilocybin, can help ease depression by reducing the activity of certain parts of the brain that are overactive in individuals with the illness. A 2011 study by Johns Hopkins School of Medicine had similar findings, Time reported.