<strong>I’m A Sex Therapist Who ‘Lost’ Her Orgasm. Here’s How I Found It Again and What I Want Other Women to Know.</strong>

Reported by Women's Health Magazine.

When a sex therapist loses her orgasm, it tends to get her attention. Laurie Mintz, PhD — licensed sex therapist, author of Becoming Cliterate, and someone who has spent decades helping women reclaim their pleasure — suddenly couldn't climax. Not during partnered sex. Not alone with a vibrator. Nothing. She knew her body, she knew the research, and still: a hard biological wall every single time.

The culprit, according to Women's Health Magazine, turned out to be an SSRI she'd recently started for long-term anxiety. It's a frustratingly common story — up to 73 percent of SSRI users may experience sexual side effects, including diminished libido, reduced arousal, and yes, lost orgasms — yet it's rarely the first thing a prescribing doctor mentions. Mintz knew immediately this wasn't psychological. "It was the difference between knowing you have a stomachache because you're anxious and because you ate something that's giving you pain," she explains. Her brain wasn't the problem. Her body's blood flow was.

The Cream Nobody's Talking About

After digging through notes from a sexual medicine presentation she'd attended months earlier, Mintz landed on something called Scream Cream — a compounded topical containing sildenafil (yes, the active ingredient in Viagra) and other vasodilators that drive blood flow directly to the clitoris. She called her gynecologist and close friend Dr. Suzette Johnson, MD, got a prescription, and the first time she used it, she had what she describes as one of the best orgasms she'd had in years. Johnson had been prescribing the cream for three decades — and when she surveyed her gynecology colleagues, not one of them had ever heard of it. That knowledge gap is the real scandal here.

What Mintz is careful to stress: biology alone doesn't fix everything. Even when the cause is physiological, the psychological fallout is real. The spiral of will it happen this time is its own obstacle. What helped her, beyond the cream, was mindfulness during intimacy — staying in sensation rather than in her head — and frank conversations with her husband of 40 years that, counterintuitively, deepened their emotional connection. Together, she and Johnson have since built a five-part course for women navigating lost orgasms, combining clinical consultation for Scream Cream with sex therapy tools: mindfulness, communication strategies, sex-positive reframing, and evidence-backed support like vibrators and lube.

The larger point Mintz wants women to internalize: you should not have to choose between mental health and sexual pleasure. If your orgasm disappears after starting an antidepressant, that is a medical issue with potential medical solutions — solutions that exist, work, and are simply not being passed along. Ask louder, look further, and know the path is there.

Read the original at Women's Health Magazine.