Intrusive thoughts and panic attacks plagued Tinelle Windham throughout her first three pregnancies. During her second, a doctor recommended she start taking Zoloft, a type of antidepressant called a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI. But she was wary. What about side effects? What if it harmed her baby?
“I really was leery of getting it treated that way, and I saw a therapist for a small amount of time, but mostly I just toughed it out,” said Windham, a lawyer living in southern Maryland. “It was a very terrible experience trying to tough it out.”
Toughing it out is a common approach among pregnant people with anxiety and depression. Many choose to avoid or go off antidepressants out of fear that the medications will harm their developing babies.
But the risks of untreated mental illness, especially during pregnancy, are serious, and tend to outweigh the small and uncertain risk of antidepressants harming unborn babies, experts told STAT. Mental health conditions, including suicides and drug overdoses, are now the leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths, according to a 2024 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
If you tuned into a recent discussion hosted by the Food and Drug Administration on the effects of SSRIs during pregnancy, however, you would have heard a different story, one overwhelmingly focused on the treatments’ risks. That seemed to be by design. Rather than recruiting a wide range of experts to discuss the best data available, the administration mainly invited clinicians and researchers who have a record of deep skepticism of antidepressants, including some who financially benefit from that skepticism.
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