- Tension: SSRIs can reduce genuine suffering — and they can also make unbearable emotional conditions feel bearable enough to continue without change, quietly muting the signals that something deeper needed to shift.
- Noise: The conversation collapses into two camps: those who defend antidepressants as life-saving medication and those who dismiss them entirely. Both positions let the harder question go unasked — what does it mean when functioning and healing are not the same thing?
- Direct Message: Relief is real, and it is not the same as recovery. A nervous system that has been quieted is not necessarily a nervous system that has learned anything new.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
This morning, a friend sent me a screenshot. No caption, no context. Just Elon Musk, posting four words to his 240 million followers: “SSRIs are a huge problem.”
SSRIs are a huge problem
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 6, 2026
I stared at it for a moment. I — someone who has spent years studying emotion regulation, who has a complicated and ongoing relationship with nuance, who finds most of what Musk says either exhausting or actively embarrassing — felt something I did not particularly want to feel.
Recognition.
Not because I trust him. Not because the internet’s most chaotic billionaire suddenly became my go-to source on psychopharmacology. But because “a huge problem” or “zombification”, as Musk calls it, was something I had been circling for months. Privately. In a notebook. While sitting in a city I’d moved to in the middle of a breakup, wondering why I could complete every task on my to-do list and feel nothing while doing it.
The discomfort of agreeing with someone you’d rather not agree with is its own kind of data. I’ve started to take it seriously.
What sparked the conversation
Last December, Ella Emhoff — textile artist, model, stepdaughter of former Vice President Kamala Harris — posted a TikTok video. She was crocheting, waiting for a friend, listening to a Wall Street Journal podcast about SSRIs and anti-anxiety medication.
What followed was not a polished take. It was the kind of unguarded observation people make when something they heard keeps sitting with them: that people take these medications for years, come to think of them as simply part of how they function, and gradually stop being able to imagine life without them.
Not because they are doing well. Because the baseline has quietly shifted.
Musk replied with four words. The internet split, as it tends to, into people who agreed too quickly and people who dismissed him before finishing the sentence. What got lost in that split was the thing Emhoff had actually said — which was not a political statement, not an anti-psychiatry manifesto, just a person sitting outside, crocheting, noticing something that had been bothering her. That the conversation around these medications rarely makes room for what long-term use actually feels like from the inside.
That is the part worth staying with.
The normalization nobody talks about
Emhoff’s observation was not about side effects or overprescription in the conventional sense. It was subtler than that. It was about what happens over time when the medicated state becomes the reference point. When people no longer ask whether they are doing better — only whether they can manage without the pill.
This is not a fringe experience. Antidepressant use has risen sharply across most high-income countries over the past two decades, and long-term use now accounts for the majority of prescriptions in several of them. A significant portion of people who begin SSRIs stay on them for years, often beyond what was clinically intended, not because their condition requires it but because the discontinuation process is difficult enough that continuing feels like the path of least resistance.
The medical term for part of what makes stopping hard is oppositional tolerance, a concept developed by psychiatrist Giovanni Fava. His research describes how the brain, in response to a drug that increases serotonin availability, may compensate over time by becoming less sensitive to serotonin. The clinical implication is counterintuitive and underreported: some people feel significantly worse after stopping than they did before starting — not because their original condition returned, but because their brain has reorganized itself around the medication’s presence.
The body learned to outsource its regulation. When the external support is removed, it does not simply return to baseline. It has forgotten what baseline was.
This is the mechanism behind something many long-term users describe but rarely see named clearly: the feeling that the medication is no longer treating a condition so much as preventing a withdrawal state that did not exist before treatment began.
When the anxiety became unlivable
I took antidepressants for eighteen months. I won’t name the specific medication here — partly to avoid medical commentary I’m not qualified to give, and partly because in Georgia these things occupy a peculiar legal grey zone. Officially, you need a prescription. Practically, you can find them without much trouble if you know where to look. Ask a psychiatrist directly and they will, with full professional composure, explain that this is absolutely not how it works. And yet.
By the time I started taking this SSRI, I had run out of other options. My nervous system had become an unreliable narrator. I could not tell what was real perception and what was my body running an old catastrophe loop for no discernible reason. I was not being dramatic about any of it. I was just exhausted in a way that sleep did not fix.
I started during a trip to Prague — which was supposed to be a healing thing. Self-awareness, reconnecting with myself, finding my voice again. I had the whole emotional itinerary. I was also, I can see now, too emotionally stimulated to be starting a psychiatric medication in a foreign country. But I had support there, and my anxiety had reached a level that felt non-negotiable.
So I started. Came back to Georgia. Let my body adjust. Noted that adjusting felt, at first, like nothing — which was itself a kind of relief.
The one person who kept saying no
There was exactly one person in my life who pushed back from the beginning. Not dramatically. Not with a speech. Just a consistent, quiet refusal to think this was a good idea. He knows me very well — not theoretically, but in the particular way of someone who has watched you closely for a long time and has developed, against his will, a kind of expertise in how you specifically fall apart.
He is also medically informed, which, in retrospect, made his concern harder to dismiss and easier to be annoyed by.
The thing was, it was difficult to explain the severity of what I was experiencing to anyone, including him. When you genuinely cannot tell whether what you are perceiving is real, and everything feels simultaneously flat and terrifying, and your sense of continuity with yourself has become unstable — that is not easy to communicate over dinner. I tried. I probably sounded, from the outside, like someone who was anxious but functioning. Because I was also, technically, functioning. That’s the cruelty of it.
So I went ahead. He kept saying no. I told myself he didn’t fully understand. Both things were probably true.
What the medication actually did
It helped. I want to stay with that for a moment before I complicate it, because the complication is only honest in the context of genuine relief.
It quieted the alarm. It made space between me and the worst of it. I could sleep. I could move through a day without feeling like my body was running an emergency protocol in response to ordinary stimuli. The medication did what it was supposed to do, and I am not going to flatten that into a cautionary tale, because it wasn’t only that.
But slowly — not dramatically, not in a single moment I can point to — something else happened.
I became functional in a way that felt slightly inhuman. Organized. Responsive. Capable of completing tasks and answering messages and appearing, to anyone watching, like a person who was doing well. Which was true in the same way that a well-maintained machine is doing well: technically, yes.
But I was not fully present in my own life. Music passed through me without catching on anything. I remember noticing something genuinely beautiful once and thinking: that is beautiful. Noted. And moving on.
It was not dramatic numbness. It was quieter than that. It was the feeling of being a competent administrator of my own experience. Zombified, if you want to use Musk’s language.
The research has its own uncomfortable complications
The debate around SSRI efficacy is more honest than it used to be, though it rarely reaches the public in its full complexity.
Irving Kirsch’s research, published as The Emperor’s New Drugs, argued that for mild to moderate depression, antidepressants perform little better than placebo once you account for publication bias and active placebo effects — the fact that people who feel side effects often believe they are receiving the real drug, which itself influences outcome. His findings were, predictably, controversial.
Then there’s annother study published in 2018 in The Lancet — 522 trials, over 116,000 patients — which found that antidepressants do outperform placebo. But the effect sizes are modest. The authors were careful to say this matters clinically, and it does. But modest effect sizes in aggregate data tell you very little about what is happening in any individual body, including mine.
What both bodies of research leave largely unaddressed is the question Emhoff was circling: not whether SSRIs work in the short term, but what their long-term relationship with the person taking them actually looks like. Whether the improvement they produce is a step toward something, or a plateau that becomes permanent by default.
I did not know this when I decided to taper off. I know it now.
What stopping actually looks like
I tapered off over three months, starting in October, finishing in mid-December. I did it carefully, following my psychiatrist’s guidance. I was also, at that point, three months into a relocation to Dresden, in the aftermath of the breakup that had preceded all of this, in a city where nothing was familiar, no routine existed, and I barely knew anyone.
My daily life had been picked up and placed somewhere slightly wrong. Which, objectively, it had been. The taper ended and I felt, if anything, less than expected.
Fine, I thought. Manageable.
Then March arrived.
The relapse was worse than anything before it. My body had spent eighteen months outsourcing its regulation to a chemical, and when the chemical was gone, it genuinely did not know what to do. The anxiety it returned with was not the original anxiety. It had become something bigger and stranger and more total.
I had essentially trained my nervous system to depend on external management. And then I removed that management. My body’s response was not gradual adjustment. It was: we have forgotten how to do this ourselves.
I did not go back on medication. I am still in that process. What has helped — genuinely, not as a platitude — has been human connection, therapy, movement, yoga, even dancing, speaking about it instead of managing it into silence. Feeling my body again as something that belongs to me rather than something I need to control or override.
There is an irony here that is not lost on me. My doctoral research is on suppression — specifically on what happens when people chronically push difficult emotional experience away rather than processing it. I have spent years developing theoretical frameworks around this exact pattern. And I have also, quietly and consistently, been doing it to myself the entire time.
It’s fine. I’m sure that’s not common among researchers at all.
What I am left with
I do not think SSRIs are a conspiracy or evidence of some pharmaceutical plot against human emotional life. The research is genuinely complicated, which means it is more honest than most of the confident positions taken about it.
What I do think is that “it reduces symptoms” and “it is helping you” are not always the same sentence. Sometimes the symptoms were the last honest signal something needed to change. And when you quiet the signal, the thing that needed changing just continues, more quietly, while you remain functional and slightly absent from your own experience.
I am not recommending anything to anyone. I am not a doctor. I am a person who took a medication that helped me survive a period of my life, and who is still, not entirely neatly, figuring out what it means to be well without it.
Final thoughts
Musk’s four words touched something real. But “SSRIs are a huge problem” is the beginning of a sentence, not a complete thought. The fuller version is harder: SSRIs become a problem inside a culture that treats emotional numbing as recovery, that rewards functioning over feeling, that finds it easier to adjust the individual than to examine what is producing so much distress in the first place.
The conversation Emhoff accidentally started is worth having at length. The question is whether we are willing to follow it somewhere more uncomfortable than four words.
Yes, SSRIs are a huge problem in the same way a painkiller is a problem when you take it for eighteen months without asking what is causing the pain. Not because the relief was fake. Because relief and recovery are not the same thing, and a culture that cannot tell the difference will keep producing people who are functional and quietly falling apart.
That’s why I believe the four-word version of this conversation is not enough. But it is, apparently, where we are starting. That sentence is still unfinished. But it did get 18,000 likes. Make of that what you will.
