Keltie Knight, 44, Gets Candid on How Prozac Killed Her Sex Drive in a LadyGang Livestream Event
Learn how antidepressants can affect your libido—and the 'little pink pill' that helps restore desire
Key Takeaways
- Keltie Knight, 44, says Prozac affected her sex drive while helping her emotionally.
- Antidepressants can affect sexual function, so changes in desire are worth discussing.
- Persistent, distressing low desire can have multiple causes and deserves medical attention.
If you’ve ever whispered a worry about your libido to a friend—or wanted to, but couldn’t quite get the words out—you’re going to love what Keltie Knight just did on a very public stage. The LadyGang podcast cohost and three-time award-winning TV personality opened up about a side effect of her antidepressant that millions of women experience but rarely discuss out loud: a vanishing sex drive. Her honesty is a reminder that you’re not alone, and that there are more options than you might think to help treat low desire.
How antidepressants can affect your libido
Knight, 44, says her Prozac helped her feel like herself again emotionally—but it came at a cost she wasn’t warned about.
“I just have been lowering my Prozac, and one of the main reasons I’ve wanted to is because I know that it has been killing my sex drive,” she shared during a recent Facebook livestream “pillow talk” event hosted by The LadyGang. “I then went down and I started to feel not so bananas, and I was like, ‘Oh, I guess I can’t have both.'”
If that feels familiar, you’re in good company. Knight and cohosts Becca Tobin and Jac Vanek created the livestream event specifically to normalize the kinds of conversations women tend to have in whispers.
“We really wanted to use this as an opportunity to have an actual conversation where we can talk about things we’re embarrassed to talk about,” Knight said.
Wondering where your desire went? Our Desire Hub has expert answers and ways to get your spark back.
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Why speaking up about low desire matters so much
The moment that cracked things open came when a listener called in with a question Knight herself had been too nervous to ask. The caller said her SSRIs had helped her mental health, but a higher dose had tanked her libido.
“I was going to ask that question, but I wasn’t brave enough because I don’t want the whole world to know that,” Knight admitted, thanking the caller “for being brave enough to do that.”
That kind of vulnerability is becoming a personal mantra for Knight as she heads into what she calls her “radical honesty era” ahead of her new book, The F*ck Them Theory, out November 24.
The gap in women’s sexual health care
Joining Knight on the stream were two women leading real change: Sprout Pharmaceuticals founder Cindy Eckert and ob-gyn Sasha Davenport, MD, of Atrium Health.
Knight laid out the eye-opening disparity that drove Eckert’s decade-long fight to bring Addyi, an FDA-approved once-daily pill to treat hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) in women under 65, to consumers: There had been “26 FDA-approved drugs for men’s sexual health, and exactly zero for women.”
“Then Cindy called bulls***,” Knight said. “She did something about it.”
Eckert brought Addyi (flibanserin) to market as the first FDA-approved treatment for HSDD, or persistent, distressing low desire. Her story is at the center of the documentary The Pink Pill: Sex, Drugs & Who Has Control. “What matters to women should matter to medicine,” Eckert said. “That’s the revolution that we’re having right now. You don’t have to show up and ask for their permission about whether or not it should matter to you.”
How Addyi treats low desire
Low sexual desire is a real medical condition that affects around 50 percent of women, experts explained during the discussion. Addyi works on brain chemistry to treat it.
And if you’ve been told your bloodwork looks “normal,” Dr. Davenport wants you to know that doesn’t necessarily mean nothing is wrong. “Your blood work is all over the place in perimenopause,” she said. “Your levels are going up and down and up and down, and so if I get a snapshot somewhere in that up and down in the normal range, it doesn’t change any of the things you’re going through.”
Instead, she listens when patients say, “I don’t feel like myself.” If your desire has shifted from your baseline, that’s the signal to speak up. “The whole thing with ‘we need alcohol to have sex to power through it.’ We’ve got better tools now!”
What to do if your doctor isn’t listening
Most ob-gyns aren’t trained in perimenopause, menopause or low desire—but that’s starting to change. “There’s a reason that the people who do this are screaming about it as loud as we can, because we need everyone to provide this care,” Dr. Davenport said. “We’ll keep screaming till somebody hears us.”
If switching doctors feels overwhelming, Knight has a simple tip: “If you don’t want to switch doctors because that seems like a very stressful thing, you have Addyi.com,” where you can privately fill out a telehealth screening form to see if you might have HSDD.
As Eckert put it, the shift is finally happening thanks to women willing to say the hard thing out loud—the ones who “know if I don’t say it, it never changes!”
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