This Year I’m Turning 30 Years Old, and I Haven’t Felt an Orgasm Since I Was 24

This year I’m turning 30 years old, and I haven’t felt an orgasm since I was 24.

I have suffered from Post-Finasteride Syndrome for 5 years. After taking Finasteride for 3 years without any issues, one day suddenly I awoke with a strange ‘dead’ burning sensation in my genitals. It was like a switch went off, and something felt very wrong. When I got home that night I did some self investigating and I realized I could no longer feel sexual pleasure to any degree. I could get an erection, and I could make myself ejaculate, but I would feel nothing. I had lost 100% of my sensitivity. It felt totally numb, it felt dry, it felt dead.

I was baffled as I would watch myself ejaculate but feel absolutely nothing. I waited a few days to see if this would fluctuate, but it remained exactly the same.

As concerning as this was, I did my best not to panic. I saw my dermatologist, and told him what I had been experiencing. I told him that I didn’t think this issue was caused by Finasteride because of how well I had tolerated it for three years, until this abrupt change that had suddenly happened. He agreed and suggested I titrate the dose to see if this changed anything. A month went by and there was no change, so he recommended I switch to topical Finasteride. After another month, with still no change, I came off the drug entirely as a last resort, hoping this sexual anesthesia I had suddenly developed would rapidly go away after cessation.

For three weeks after stopping the drug, I felt maybe 10% better and thought things might’ve been improving. However, toward the end of that three week period, I noticed that I was beginning to suddenly experience something I had never felt before — I began to feel emotionally numb. I was very emotional my entire life up until this point, so at first this feeling actually felt like a relief. I remember thinking, wow maybe this drug was making me depressed this entire time and I didn’t even know it, and now that I’m coming off of it I’m starting to feel normal again. Then another week went by and I realized I wasn’t just not feeling sad, I wasn’t feeling any emotions at all.

This feeling became more and more intense with each passing day, until it was absolute. It wasn’t mild, it was now a visceral feeling of thorough emptiness. I could no longer feel any kind of happiness, sadness, depression, anxiety, excitement, or even love. At it's peak, I remember thinking distinctly that I had never felt this way in my entire life, not even for one second. I would later learn this feeling had a name: ‘Anhedonia’ and emotional blunting.

Much like the sexual issues, this wasn’t like a reduction in intensity of emotion, it was a 100%, total absence of emotion. It would be like if you woke up one day totally blind after seeing vivid colors your entire life — that’s how I felt with this sudden complete lack of emotion. I didn’t feel depressed, I didn’t feel sad, it was like my entire ability to feel was suddenly gone.

At this point, almost a month had gone by since I had stopped the drug. With each passing day I noticed a lot of things feeling more and more off all throughout my body. The sexual symptoms had resumed that feeling of being completely numb, dry and dead. My entire body began to feel numb. I began to feel this sense of extremely dry skin throughout my entire body, that was so intense it caused me constant physical discomfort. All of my muscles began to feel dead, tight, and painfully constricted, and my joints started to crack painfully at all hours of the day.

I started having hypertensive headaches that felt like my head was going to explode. I began experiencing fatigue that was so intense it felt like a major chore to get from one side of a room to the other. I developed severe digestive issues and functional dyspepsia, leaving me with crippling stomach pain and nausea 24/7. It felt like my entire body had suddenly aged to 100 years old over the course of this month, starting with the day I had stopped Finasteride. These were not subtle changes, they were viscerally painful chronic symptoms that rapidly onset over the course of this month and left me thoroughly debilitated.

The headaches became so intense I would literally be screaming in agony. I had insomnia for nearly three weeks straight, and I don’t mean like I’m sitting up at night because I’m worried and my thoughts were racing, I mean like I’m lying there and the chemicals that make someone sleep just will not come.

After a few more weeks had gone by, the insomnia started to resolve, and the headaches lessened in intensity, but all of these other new symptoms remained. I still had totally numb genitals, a total inability to experience orgasm, severe emotional blunting, viscerally painful stomach issues, severely dry skin, muscular atrophy, and chronic fatigue.

I also noticed the rapid development of many benign but strange symptoms like thick visual snow and constant tinnitus. Cognitively I began to completely fall apart as well. I had heard of brain fog in reference to Finasteride, but what I was experiencing was much more severe than just brain fog — it was like a total disorganization of my thoughts, and I was unable to string one thought to the next, and it was very hard for me to form sentences. I felt completely lost in disorganized thought.

This entire episode happened to me in 2021. Fast forward to today, five years later in 2026, and nothing has changed.

Since I experienced this episode five years ago, I never again was able to feel an orgasm, I never again have felt sexual pleasure of any kind, my emotions are still completely blunted, and my body still feels like it’s 100 years old. My joints crack constantly, the muscles in my back have completely atrophied, and every day I experience chronic pain that is so visceral that it’s genuinely debilitating.

I’ve been going through this emotional blunting for so long now that I don’t even remember what sadness, happiness, anger or even love feels like. I don’t feel anything, I don’t have any romantic feelings for girls that I talk to, I don’t really feel that sense of enjoyment from movies, TV or video games, I don’t really feel pleasure or interest — I feel I’ve been completely hollowed out.

I still carry this constant feeling of mucosal dryness and malaise that seems to affect every part of my body, even the insides of my intestines, resulting in severe chronic digestive pain. My entire back feels totally numb, as well as my peripherals. Every day of my life is not only devoid of any meaning or excitement, due to the sexual and emotional anesthesia, but also extraordinarily physically painful, due to all of the chronic debilitating physical symptoms. I had never experienced any of these symptoms, until the 3 week period I came off of Finasteride, and they have remained constant ever since.

I would later learn that this has been a long observed phenomenon for a subset of people that have come off of not only Finasteride, but also Accutane and SSRIs. I would go on to speak to hundreds of victims I have met with this condition that have spent years experiencing the same form of total genital numbness and emotional blunting after going through the same exact ‘crash’ episode that I experienced when stopping the drug.

This adverse reaction, and the resulting permanent impairment, is what we refer to as Post Finasteride Syndrome, or Post Accutane Syndrome and Post SSRI Sexual Dysfunction, depending on which drug triggered it.

The mechanisms behind why this happens so severely in some people, and not at all in others, are still not fully understood. There are ongoing studies trying to understand what has happened in individuals like me, and these studies are only being funded by victims of this and their affected families. To reiterate, no research arm of the pharmaceutical industry is helping with looking into these adverse outcomes.

Permanent sexual anesthesia and emotional blunting are not acceptable outcomes for trusting regulatory health agencies. I hope that one day, beliefs like this will be common sense, and no longer controversial.