Living with SSRI Antidepressants

Product Name and Strength

SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors) antidepressants like Prozac, Zoloft, and Lexapro are the most prescribed antidepressants, including millions worldwide, yet their lived realities extend far beyond the language of medical institutions, pharmaceutical leaflets, or science communication websites. While biomedical research frames antidepressants in terms of "efficacy rates" and "adverse events," there are profound, often contradictory ways SSRIs reshape selves, relationships, and daily existence.

My research emerges from a critical gap: the disconnect between how SSRIs are understood in medical sciences and how they are experienced.

Researcher and Witness

I write as both social researcher and someone who has SSRI use.

Like many in my study, I’ve faced the dilemma of weighing multiple embodied experiences when taking SSRI antidepressants.

This perspective informs my commitment to situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988), to understand an SSRI is to know it from a body embedded in a specific sociocultural context, marked by lived symptoms and embodied transformations.

Research questions

• How do people who take SSRI antidepressants understand them? And how do these understandings change over time? How do they make these inquiries to reach these understandings?
• What does it mean to live with SSRI antidepressants, to expect them, to experience them, to embody them, to become with them? What changes do SSRI antidepressants make to our minds, our bodies and our human own beings? What are the temporalities of these changes (i.e. temporary, cyclical, everlasting…)?
• How does living and becoming with SSRI antidepressants reverberate across our daily lives beyond ourselves? How does it impact our relationships with family, friends, peers and partners? How does it change our relationships with our health, work, studies, hobbies, goals, life expectations…?

Disciplinary Foundations

• Medical Anthropology: Explores SSRIs as cultural objects that have a life of their own (Van der Geest & Whyte, 1989).
• Science and Technology Studies (STS): Treats SSRIs as "actants" with agency of their own (Latour, 2005) that co-produce realities.
• Care Studies: Examines medication routines as improvisational and relational forms of care, including how users adjust doses, swap drugs, or quit.