Feeling numb on antidepressants

[Newnanny12]

I've been on antidepressants on and off for years, I'm now at the menopause age where my anxiety hit the roof, I also had the death of my mum and other stressful situations to deal with. My Dr put me on to sertraline, 50mg did nothing, 100mg I felt nothing as in no emotions, so went for 75mg, although I feel better in myself I still 'feel' nothing, no emotions of love of hate. I'm going to speak to my GP but just wondering if anyone else has been like this?

It can take a while to find the correct dosage and the correct antidepressant. I was on one for a while where the higher dose made me swing wildly from terrible depression to zombie mode and back (thankfully I wasn’t on it for long). Now I’m on Sertraline and it seems to work for me, but I’m on 200mg daily, which is quite high.

Keep going back to your GP and discuss how you feel. There are different things they can try. Maybe adding in an anti-anxiety med would help you, or HRT or something like that.

Sometimes you need to give it time as well; it might be worth being on the higher dose for a bit, even if you don’t “feel” anything while on it, and then dropping it down once things are steadier (I used to think of this as taking emotions out of the way while everything else stabilised, and then reintroducing them when I was ready for them).

Be gentle with yourself, and try to take care of yourself. Sending you a virtual hug.

It’s a well known side effect of ADs. It’s called “emotional blunting”.
I have it at the moment. I had gone off meds and now back on. When I first came off, it was awesome. I could feel things again and the feeling was unreal. Unfortunately then I relapsed and eventually went back on the meds. It was a relief at first. I had really bad anxiety, insomnia and intrusive thoughts without meds. When they were gone, I was so relieved. Now a year in, I have gained so much weight, want to sleep all the time, no motivation, can’t concentrate and don’t have the capacity to worry about anything other than getting through the day and it’s getting frustrating.
My (long) experience of ADs has been that they don’t seem to work in the ideal way you would want them to. You kind of have to accept what they do actually do and decide whether on balance that makes your life/ health better or worse.
In your case, it may be possible to tweak them a bit though - change to a different type/ change dose/ add in a second type of AD.
Good Luck

Agree with pp about 'emotional blunting' I've been on and off anti depressants for years, and for me this is usually the sign that I either have to change which ADs or (hopefully this time) start titration down and coming off them. Usually the emotional bluntness is a complete relief at the beginning but not when you realise you have no other feelings either.
I'd go back to the doctor and ask about either changing dose or trying something else.

Thank you everyone, with the drs advice I'm going to try and go back down to 50mg again.