Depression, Anxiety and Your Sex Life

Why this guide exists

One of you is struggling, the other feels rejected, and nobody has connected the dots.

Depression and anxiety change sex in specific, understandable ways. Depression turns desire down along with almost everything else. Anxiety keeps the body on guard, and a body on guard has a hard time relaxing into arousal. Medication can lift the fog and take orgasm with it. Most of this is treatable or workable. But the couples who struggle most are rarely the ones with the worst symptoms. They are the ones where one spouse took it as rejection, and sex became one more thing to feel guilty about.

We asked our readers about it in 2026. Here is some of what came back.

From the 2026 Mental Health and Marriage survey, 524 married respondents. Hurt sex life: n=427 (n=360 where it applied). Hopelessness: n=98 at once a month or less, n=355 above. Felt unwanted: n=54 where only the spouse struggles, n=169 where neither does. Our readers are not a random sample, and these are associations, not proof of cause; the guide explains the caveats.

What it is not

Not “pray harder.” Not “put sex on hold until you feel better.”

Depression is not a lack of faith, and anxiety is not a failure to trust God. This guide will not tell you to snap out of it, and it will not ask the struggling spouse to grit their teeth through sex they do not want. It also will not tell you to shelve your sex life indefinitely. It shows you how to change what sex looks like so it can survive the season. In our survey, 48% of households where someone takes mental health medication said it had hurt their sex life (n=124), so the guide gives you the vocabulary to raise that with a prescriber, and then deals with the part no prescriber will cover: how the two of you talk about it and what you do in bed now.

This guide is education, not medical care. It describes what exists so you can discuss it with your own doctor or prescriber; it does not diagnose or prescribe. Never stop or change a medication on your own. If you are in crisis, call or text 988 in Canada or the US, or find a local line at findahelpline.com.