Sudden crash 2 years after quitting Finasteride?

Member Stories
#1

Where are you from (country)?
USA
How did you find this forum (Google search – if so, what search terms? Via link from a forum or website – if so, what page? Other?)
I heard about it a years ago from haircafe dissing it.
What is your current age, height, weight?
21, 155lbs, 5’9
What specific drug did you use (finasteride, dutasteride, saw palmetto, isotretinoin/Accutane, fluoxetine, sertraline, citalopram, leuprorelin, etc…)?
Fiansteride
What dose did you take (eg. 1 mg/day, 1 mg every other day etc.)?
1 mg/day
What condition was being treated with the drug?
Hair loss
For how long did you take the drug (weeks/months/years)?
3 months
Date when you started the drug?
Roughly 7/31/2021
Date when you quit the drug?
Roughly 10/31/2021
Age when you quit?
19
How did you quit (cold turkey or taper off)?
Cold turkey
How long into your usage did you notice the onset of side effects?
Immediately, but it fluctuated and I seemed to be somewhat stable at some point, albeit still diminished.
What side effects did you experience that have yet to resolve since discontinuation?
Loss of libido, gynecomastia, watery semen.

Check the boxes that apply. You can save your post first, then interactively check/uncheck the boxes by clicking on them. If your symptoms change, please update your list.
Sexual
[x] Loss of Libido / Sex Drive
[ ] Erectile Dysfunction
[ ] Complete Impotence
[x] Loss of Morning Erections
[x] Loss of Spontaneous Erections
[ ] Loss of Nocturnal Erections
[x] Watery Ejaculate
[x] Reduced Ejaculate
[ ] Inability or Difficulty to Ejaculate / Orgasm
[likely (not tested yet)] Reduced Sperm Count / Motility

Mental
[x] Emotional Blunting / Emotionally Flat
[x] Difficulty Focusing / Concentrating
[ ] Confusion
[x] Memory Loss / Forgetfulness
[x] Stumbling over Words / Losing Train of Thought
[ ] Slurring of Speech
[x] Lack of Motivation / Feeling Passive / Complacency
[ ] Extreme Anxiety / Panic Attacks
[x] Severe Depression / Melancholy
[x] Suicidal Thoughts

Physical
[ ] Penile Tissue Changes (narrowing, shrinkage, wrinkled)
[ ] Penis curvature / rotation on axis
[ ] Testicular Pain
[ ] Testicular Shrinkage / Loss of Fullness
[x] Genital numbness / sensitivity decrease
[ ] Weight Gain
[x] Gynecomastia (male breasts)
[ ] Muscle Wastage
[ ] Muscle Weakness
[ ] Joint Pain
[ ] Dry / Dark Circles under eyes

Misc
[ ] Prostate pain
[ ] Persistent Fatigue / Exhaustion
[ ] Stomach Pains / Digestion Problems
[ ] Constipation / “Poo Pellets”
[x] Vision - Acuity Decrease / Blurriness
[ ] Tinnitus (ringing or high pitched sound in ears)
[ ] Hearing loss
[ ] Increased hair loss
[ ] Frequent urination
[ ] Lowered body temperature

[ ] Other (please explain)

What (if any) treatments have you undertaken to recover from your side effects since discontinuation of the drug?
Extremely rigorous fitness routine and diet.

If you have pre or post-drug blood tests, what hormonal changes have you encountered since discontinuing the drug (please post your test results in the “Blood Tests” section and link to them in your post)?
I don’t see blood test section? I log all of my bloodwork here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-FAW1TeauRGMb0EuU2Ja69bNfNx8-NIXOBYQBqIiE2s/edit?usp=sharing
Notable values include gradual decrease of testosterone from 630ng/dl to 320ng/dl, as well as elevated prolactin after initial cessation of finasteride.

Tell us your story, in your own words, about your usage and side effects experienced while on/off the drug.
My apologies in advanced if this is a bit rambly/ill-organized. I’ve tried to keep it as brief as possible, but I wanted to be sure to paint a clear picture of my situation and any confounding variables in regards to my symptoms.

I took finasteride from 7/31/2021 to 10/31/2021 (give or take a few days on the dates). Within the first week, I remember my penis feeling lifeless, as if it were a senseless appendage hanging off of me. I read on Tressless that sides often go away after a few weeks, so I continued to tough it out as I did not want to continue losing my hair at only 18/19 years old. The sexual side effects did get more tolerable. I could still have sex everyday or sometimes multiple times a day with little issues initially. However, sex drive was definitely greatly reduced, but tolerable. However, by the end of the treatment, i began to notice very clear, quite painful gynecomastia forming, so I quit the treatment after I ran out of pills. I tested elevated prolactin levels a couple of weeks after cessation of treatment (see blood tests section), which overtime normalized.

At this point, I thought I was mostly fine, albeit depressed to some degree from dealing with the hair loss and gynecomastia at such a young age. I began a drastic lifestyle shift in August of 2022 to hopefully make me happier, including a ridiculously clean and nutritious diet, tons of sunshine, rigorous exercise 6 days a week, and unwavering productivity working towards my degree. This helped immensely, and I felt quite good mentally and physically (albeit sex drive still never recovered to baseline). It also helped my hair loss and gyno issues to some degree.

Between Apr-Dec of 2023, I went through a lot of mental framework changes in terms of how I viewed the world. I became quite anti modernity. I feel like this eventually put me in a semi-depressed state, as I would spend almost all of my time thinking and discussing these things and how fucked everything is. Time passed extremely quickly during this period. Weeks felt like days. I mention this at it may be a cofounding variable in what I am about to say.

Jan 1, 2024. This is when everything changed. I think this might be what you guys would call a “crash”. After a period of about 8 months of being quite disillusioned with modernity and spending much of my time passionately thinking, researching, and discussing such issues, I graduated from my university with a degree in CS. I had to prepare for coding interviews. I’ve always been exceptionally good at intense focus for tens of hours straight and had performed extremely well at my university as well as high school. However, I quickly realized I was experiencing severe cognitive issues. I could not aptly perform some of the most basic programming tasks that before were insanely trivial. I could not think. I could not read. I could barely speak at first. This snowballed into an extremely stressful situation. For the first week, I was experiencing 9/10 physical pain from the stress and would pace around while my mind would race, desperately trying to understand why this possibly could be happening. I also lost all motivation and barely ate for weeks. I developed severe depression and anhedonia. I gained no interest or pleasure in anything. I began to experience no emotion at all. No happiness, sadness, excitement, etc. Even physical pain like burns barely hurt at all. I became completely incapable of watching movies or shows, as I would be completely lost. Simple tasks like grocery shopping or doing the dishes became extremely difficult. I’ve also developed severe long-term and short-term memory problems. I went on a week-long trip to North Carolina in January that I forgot even happened and haven’t thought about for months until just now, for example. My mental state is extremely unstable. There are alright days, but most days are extremely bad. My time perception is extremely accelerated. Weeks feel like days, days feel like hours. I could not tell you for the life of me what I did yesterday, or a week ago, and longer term events like last month I would have to think super hard and would only be able to name a few things that happened. I got my blood tested 1 month after the extreme stress (see blood tests section), and my testosterone level has plummeted to 320ng/dl in comparison to 630 ish before and right after completion of treatment.

I have no idea if these mental symptoms are downstream effects from my past finasteride usage. Before finasteride, I had never been depressed, nor did I ever even fathom I would be depressed. I was extremely cool-headed, motivated, and happy, and was very highly performing cognitively speaking (Top 1 percent SAT, Valedictorian of my highschool). I already had felt as if I had become a different person after my initial experiences, but my state of being this past few months is so drastically different that in some ways I don’t feel like a person at all. It’s hard to adequately describe it right now as I am not quite in the state, but the past couple of days it has at times felt extremely hopeless. And, of course, I’ve had basically no sex drive, but that is the least of my worries right now. I just want my brain back.

Does this sound like PFS? What are my options here? Thank you for reading, and sorry if things are disorganized. It is extremely difficult to write in this state. I’ve been awake for 2 hours now, but it has felt quite literally like 20 minutes. This shit is so fucked.

#2

Any advice for recovery, assuming what I am experiencing is indeed from the finasteride? Do you guys think it is the finasteride that is doing this to me?

#3

That is a long time but from what I’ve seen with this stuff it seems anything is possible because what you experienced there is the same things I experienced but my downfall was much sharper. I took saw palmetto for a month and then I over the next handful of months just kept declining till I hit rock bottom. I had a lot more neuropathy symptoms with mine like skin numbness and burning. Some other more physical problems too but not visible besides the genital shrinkage and how it would visibly react to stimulation or what used to be sexual situations.

Time for me when all that was happening was also a complete blur which is probably how I made it out without too much trauma, days would just blend together and I’d do nothing at all. Didn’t have any drive anymore either, I barely even cared about good food. It’s almost like the level of anhedonia I had actually ended up protecting me from some of the damage. I wasn’t exactly happy with my life and at the time was going through a lot of changes but I had hope and am generally a positive person. This was completely forced against my will, I knew I had no reason to feel any of what I was feeling when I got sick but nothing I could do was able to stop it. That’s how I know I wasn’t just depressed and last time I checked just being depressed doesn’t completely numb your body and mind, shrink your thing, and turn you into a zombie. I’ve had periods where I was depressed like after a breakup, I was still hypersexual and was able to feel everything I was feeling with extreme intensity.

I just did research all day long much earlier on and kept trying different things that made educated sense to me. Sometimes I got worse, sometimes they did nothing, and occasionally I’d actually make progress or get a brief window to go off of. Though when you get small windows now and then you will get more drive to keep going because you’ll learn that you are still there but your brain just isn’t functioning correctly. I can only speak for myself because things that have permanently helped me have crashed others, there are thing you can do that may be generally safer but that’s about it. I didn’t take too many risks and stayed away from things that were very volatile in the community I had no experience with supplementing. I these days tend to go by the logic of “Based on what I’ve read across multiple reports from multiple forums and supplement reviews, can I afford what this might do to me if this goes south?”. If there answer is no at the time I just don’t do it. Like for example there is things with food I want to try integrating again to widen my diet to pre-saw palmetto days again that I months earlier on was not ready to attempt again but now my system is stronger again so I feel I could test this or that to see how my body responds to it. It’s a real individual game you gotta get a feel for with this but you’ll get a hang of it eventually.

#4

Your description of anhedonia is extremely relatable. I remember telling my parents at the start, before I even knew what anhedonia was, that nothing was pleasurable, including food. Are/were your symptoms unstable? I feel like every single day I wake up is a roll of the dice in terms of how I feel. Overall quite shitty, but some days are much worse than others.

#5

Yeah they are extremely unstable even this far out, I have better and worse days. When I first crashed and had the most severe symptoms they would alternate constantly by the hour, the further out I got the less wavy things got. I have never before this experienced anhedonia before so I didn’t even know what I was experiencing. I would constantly try to make myself feel anything but there was just this very vague creepy sense of dread all the time. How I describe it is imagine the entire world became a haunted house that you can’t feel scared of and that’s what the world felt like early on with no breaks for months in a row before it gradually started to lift in layers. I’d say after those initial four months was actually the hardest because I’d get very brief moments randomly of the echos of feelings or have a brief sexual window with feelings but then less than an hour later it’d just be ripped away like I was being teased with my own humanity. This is one of the cruelest conditions I ever had the absence of pleasure of dealing with.

Currently I’m just under what I’d consider normal often, things still arern’t really working right and every day I’ll now have random points where everything is just that much closer with better or worse days. The next thing I’m gonna try is L-histidine though since apparently some people around have gotten improvements from it. Even if it doesn’t work I’m far enough out though where I can bounce back quicker as long as I don’t do anything entirely reckless. I’ll update my own thread on how that goes, will try it the day after tomorrow.

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#6

The time thing certainly sounds like fin, I’m experiencing it now
Hours become days, days become weeks.

If our hypothalamus is damaged then an area in here controls the circadian rhythm. Or it feels linked to a lack of dopamine, no drive or purpose or zest for life so everything is just the same

Hope it improves for both of us naturally or other means :pray:

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#7

Yes man. Exactly this. I remember just a few weeks ago I was analyzing my thoughts and actually got sad for a second. It felt good. Being able to feel, just for a moment. But, things almost immediately go right back to feeling absolutely and utterly nothing. But, at the same time, it is extremely painful, in a strange way. Your haunted house analogy is great.

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#8

Most of the first emotions I started to feel were sadness and teerror, largely because my life had completely fallen apart and I had no idea where to begin with getting back on track with anything and the andhedonia was still so strong that personally I couldn’t do much. I in the past month have just gotten started on a new project I’m doing and started keeping up to date on music again coming out. IT also helped to have a digital notebook where during my brief moments of clarity since when I had them I was usually flooded with observations and thoughts where I’d get my feelings, directions I wanted to move in life, and various noted for my project down since I wouldn’t be able to remember when I was back under the anhedonia wave. I just need a lot more space now as I try to get everything organized and back on track with my life and almost retrain my brain to being human again.

#9

Oh man I had a crash 3 years after quitting finasteride. This is a slow poison killing us.