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"Antidepressants allow most people to experience more normal emotions again," says Dr. John M. Plewes, medical adviser for Eli Lilly, maker of Prozac, though, he concedes, "Certainly some people may have more difficulty than others." Even Vellotti says that while she wants a solution to her sex problems, overall, she credits her much happier relationship to her antidepressant. Before Zoloft, she felt short-fused, resentful—and nearly broke things off with her boyfriend. "Now, I’m hopeful about a future with him," Vellotti says. "It's not an option to go back to how I was. It would be horrible."

Fisher, too, makes a distinction between "people who literally couldn't get out of bed in the morning and need the drugs in order to find love" and those who hit a trouble spot but may stay on the drug indefinitely. They’re the ones she believes may be at risk for what she points to as the true danger: “emotional blunting.”

COMFORTABLY NUMB?
Blunting is an effect described in a recent study by University of Arizona researchers, who found that SSRIs can make it harder for people to cry, worry, or feel anger, surprise, or compassion. Thomson has heard these same complaints from patients. "People describe it like this: 'I just don't have the same range of feelings, and stuff that used to upset me doesn't upset me anymore,'" he says. But, on the flip side: What used to make them really happy now barely moves the needle—they feel indifferent. To most everything.

Maybe even someone they once loved? For Ticas, that was the case. She and Julio even considered divorce: At one point he packed a bag and left—but returned the same night. They resolved to stick it out and now, four years later, Ticas is off antidepressants and treating her depression by different means (a pacemaker-like device that sends short bursts of electrical energy to her brain every few minutes). "When you're depressed, you're in a darkness," Ticas says. "Taking antidepressants takes you to a kind of dawn. There's light, but it's not bright."

While pills work wonders for some, for her, being off her medication means the light is brighter. The romance is back. And when the lights go out, and she's cuddling with Julio in the darkness, there’s no place she'd rather be.