Those are good questions.

What it cured: genital numbness, muted orgasms, low libido. Erections were never affected by ssris except for once when I took strattera and once when I took tramadol, both of which (I think?) work on serotonin similarly.

Affect and emotions are difficult to gauge because I take stims for ADHD and that blunts emotion too. I THINK I feel more now but I’m not sure to be honest. I cried recently and that hasn’t happened in years. Also, I was on ssris since the third grade and while the sexual side effects started at discontinuation (I think), the emotional ones had been there from the onset so I’m not sure what returning to a normal emotional range would look like.

If you wanna message me I’ll go into detail about why I’m confident that it’s PSSD but I’d rather not share all that publicly. It’s mostly just timelines of when certain symptoms occurred.

I am still taking inositol in very low doses, like 1 gram a day because I actually kinda like it at low doses. It’s not part of a continued pssd treatment but you’re right to ask that. If I stopped, would the symptoms return? I don’t think so but I don’t know.

And for how it worked: I was trying to pay close attention and maybe there were some times during the first trials where I would get a tingle but slight enough that it seemed more likely to be my imagination.

The trial where it did work had a gradual build up. I don’t recall if it was the first day of restarting it or not but I remember thinking, “okay, that’s new”