SSRIs may help women with depression tolerate extreme heat, with responses more like those without depression, a laboratory study suggests.

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, are medicines commonly used to treat mental health conditions including depression and anxiety.

Media reports, social media posts and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have suggested SSRIs may increase vulnerability to heat-related illness.

However, researchers found that women with clinical depression who took an SSRI may withstand extreme heat better than those not treating their depression with medication.

The study was carried out by researchers in the Penn State Department of Kinesiology.

Kathleen Fisher, first author of the study, said: “The human body primarily cools itself in two ways, by sweating and by increasing blood flow to the skin so that heat can be released to the environment.

“This study showed that depression interferes with how women’s bodies regulate their temperatures in the heat. Fortunately, SSRIs seem to largely restore the body’s ability to respond to increases in internal temperature.”

The team compared women without depression with those diagnosed with the condition, including women taking different types of antidepressants.

When their body temperatures rose, women with untreated depression were slower to begin sweating and increasing blood flow to the skin.

Their bodies were also less efficient at pumping blood to the skin than those of women without depression and women taking an SSRI.

Depression affects about 10 per cent of the US population and is twice as common among women, the researchers said.

SSRIs, including sertraline and fluoxetine, and serotonin and noradrenaline reuptake inhibitors, or SNRIs, including duloxetine and venlafaxine, are commonly prescribed alongside counselling to treat depression.

Previous research suggests depression disrupts the body’s ability to regulate temperature.

Penn State researchers had previously found that blood vessels dilated less effectively in women with depression. Dilation allows blood vessels to widen, helping more blood reach the skin to cool the body.

Women taking SSRIs showed improved blood vessel dilation similar to that seen among people without depression.

The latest study examined whether the same improvement occurred during heat stress.

Researchers recruited 64 women, almost all in their 20s. The group included 16 without depression and 16 with depression who were not taking medication.

A further 16 had depression and were taking an SSRI, while 16 had depression and were taking an SNRI.

Participants swallowed a small capsule that transmitted their internal body temperature throughout the experiment.

They then wore a suit fitted with tubes that allowed researchers to pump heated water through it.

After 10 minutes of adjusting to water at 91°F, around 33°C, the temperature was raised to 125°F, around 52°C.

The experiment ended when each participant’s internal temperature had risen by 1.8°F, or 1°C. This took an average of 45 minutes.

Researchers also measured skin temperature on the arm, calf, chest and thigh, along with heart rate, blood pressure, blood flow to the skin and sweating.

Professor W Larry Kenney, a study co-author, said: “The water pumped into the suit was 125 F, causing skin temperature to rise to about 100 F.

“As the skin continued to be heated to temperatures similar to sitting in a hot tub, the women’s internal temperature continued to rise.”

Women with untreated depression were slower to begin sweating and increasing blood flow to the skin than women without depression.

When blood flow to the skin increased, it was less efficient. Despite beginning to sweat later, women with untreated depression did not sweat less overall.

Women taking SSRIs responded to heat in a similar way to women without depression.

By contrast, women taking SNRIs responded similarly to those with untreated depression. SSRIs therefore normalised responses to heat stress, while SNRIs did not.

Researchers found no differences in blood pressure between the four groups.

Fisher said: “Up until now, there has been very little data on how depression or any of these classes of antidepressive drugs affect people’s responses to heat stress.

“This study took the first step toward understanding how women with depression, whether taking medications or not, may respond to extreme heat.”

Kenney said the findings challenged common beliefs that SSRIs increase vulnerability to heat.

He said: “In prior studies, my collaborators and I have identified how several factors, especially age, sex, and activity level, contribute to risk from extreme heat.

“Additionally, there has been widespread concern that many medications contribute to heat vulnerability, but the research evidence behind the risks of many medicines is often thin or nonexistent.

“Both physicians and people taking SSRIs should be aware that these medications do not seem to contribute to heat vulnerability. Rather, SSRIs improve heat tolerance in depression.”

By Somayeh McKian, a member of the clinical advisory board of Vea, the AI-powered mental health journal app

The danger of efficiency culture in women’s mental tech is that we are inadvertently optimizing the very patterns that drive our collective burnout.

When we look at the explosive growth of the femtech sector, the dominant narrative remains focused on speed, tracking, and passive compliance.

We build apps that treat a woman’s emotional state like a broken supply chain or a medical deficit that needs to be optimised, streamlined, or forced into submission.

But true psychological resilience cannot be quantified by a simple mood slider or an algorithmic checkmark.

As a psychotherapist and gender studies scholar, my research into the lived experiences of women, particularly how cultural mandates and bodily surveillance are pathologised, reveals a deep-seated form of suffering.

When women constantly say “yes” while meaning “no,” or ignore a chronically depleted body to maintain a rigid role, they are living out what I call an “inkless life.”

It is a blank manuscript in which their physical and emotional existence has been entirely authored by external critics, medical charts, and the “Discourse of the Other.”

They aren’t suffering from an efficiency problem; they have been stripped of the agency to author their own skin.

If femtech platforms simply digitise these rigid, externalised “shoulds,” they risk becoming high-tech tools of compliance rather than portals of liberation.

The investment community and health tech innovators need to realise that the next frontier of mental health tech isn’t about managing symptoms on the fly; it is about existential archaeology.

We must build digital spaces that serve as a “corporeal pen,” transforming self-reflection from a passive hobby into a defiant, existential act.

True innovation lies in helping women find the meaning, the latent metaphors, and the unique tasks already written into their struggles and transforming inherited pain into a human achievement.

This is exactly the structural paradigm shift we are anchoring at Véa. Instead of building superficial tracking logs, our architecture treats life as a manuscript.

We design clinical narrative journeys that help women decode where their internal boundary scripts were written, recognize how somatic depletion is a truth-teller, and wield phrases like “stop it” not as external policing, but as internal, defiant boundaries.

If we want to build a sustainable ecosystem for women’s health, we must stop funding platforms that merely help women endure their exhaustion more efficiently.

In the intersection of meaningful life and technology, we look at the human spirit not by its current restrictions but by its latent potential for change.

It is time to back technologies that give the fluent soul a sharp new set of instruments to rewrite its own narrative.

Somayeh McKian is a certified psychotherapist, in-training logotherapist, gender studies scholar, published author and part of Véa’s clinical advisory board.

A screen time app that lets friends cut their phone use together has won the £15,000 top prize in a women-led startup competition.

Snitch, led by design engineering MEng graduate Asha Bakhai, took first place at WE Innovate, Imperial College London’s flagship competition for women-led startups.

The team aims to tackle excessive screen use among young people, which some research suggests may have a negative effect on mental and physical health.

The app lets users join accountability groups and set shared limits across their most-used apps.

When one person scrolls, the group’s combined timer counts down. Its founders say this helps build awareness, encourages reflection and supports small changes in behaviour by making screen use a shared responsibility.

Speaking at the WE Innovate Grand Final, Bakhai, co-founder and chief executive of Snitch, said: “Thank you to all the people who have been involved with thinking about what it could look like for young people to not be addicted to their phones.

“Whether that’s our friends who we started this with – exchanging screen time passwords and things like that – or the users along the way who beta tested with us, or our families and our friends who we’ve forced to use our app, even though it failed and bugged out and blocked all their apps. Thank you to all of them – and especially, thank you to WE Innovate for making all of this happen.”

Snitch’s team also includes co-founders Serena Sebastian and Yoshiki Berrecloth.

WE Innovate is a six-month pre-accelerator run by Imperial Enterprise Lab for teams led by female students, recent alumni and early career researchers.

The programme supports 25 women-led teams through masterclasses, business coaching, one-to-one expert support and peer mentoring.

The top five teams competed for a share of a £30,000 prize fund.

Professor Hugh Brady, president of Imperial College London, said: “WE Innovate was born out of the realisation that women founders were grossly underrepresented among our wider founder group across the university – so it was an imperative for Imperial to start such a programme.

“It was just last year that we heard Dame Alison Rose, author of the Rose Review, speak about the untapped economic opportunity and potential of women entrepreneurs in the UK.

“After 12 years, this programme has supported hundreds of women entrepreneurs, leading to exciting ventures across health tech, clean tech and all aspects of deep tech.”

The winning teams were selected by a panel including Kristen McLeod CBE, chief strategy officer at the British Business Bank, and Elizabeth Gooch MBE, founder and former chief executive of EGS plc.

The panel also included Pierre N. Rolin, founder and chief executive of Ankh Impact Ventures, and Professor Mary Ryan, vice-provost for research and enterprise at Imperial.

The final marked the second year of WE Innovate National, a UK-wide programme with separate Grand Final showcases held this month at Queen’s University Belfast, Swansea University and Loughborough University.

Joanna Jensen, founder of skincare brand Childs Farm, gave a keynote address about her experiences as an entrepreneur and co-writing The Rise Report of Female Entrepreneurship.

The report found that the UK economy would be £310bn larger if women started and scaled businesses at the same rate as men.

Jensen said 78 per cent of the founders surveyed reported that human connection had been central to their journey, while one in seven identified loneliness as their biggest challenge as an entrepreneur.

She said: “That is why what Imperial is doing matters so profoundly. Not just here in South Kensington but as WE Innovate goes national.

“Because a founder in Loughborough, Durham or Swansea deserves the same access to networks, mentors, capital and belief as a founder sitting in this room tonight.

“Talent is everywhere. Opportunity, until now, has not been.

“A nationwide network for female founders, being backed by women and men, having doors opened for them by women and men, and then paying that forward: that is how you close a £310 billion gap.

“Not with one programme. With a system of programmes, joined up across the country, and held to account on outcomes.”

Waypoint, led by innovation design engineering MSc student Bana Quronfuleh, received the £7,000 second prize.

The team is developing a video game controller that allows visually impaired players to hear and feel popular games.

AlphaVectors Biotech, led by Imperial alumnus Dr Apanpreet Kaur, received the £5,000 third prize for its lipid nanoparticle platform, which aims to improve the stability of RNA vaccines at room temperature.

Lipid nanoparticles are tiny fat-based particles used to protect and deliver genetic material, including the RNA found in some vaccines.

The other finalists, FluoroCycle and Epile-X, each received £1,500.

PHlora LABS received the Lauren Dennis Award, which was established in memory of a pioneering WE Innovate alumnus, for developing a synbiotic suppository intended to prevent recurrent vaginal infections.

Synbiotics combine beneficial microorganisms called probiotics with substances known as prebiotics, which help them grow.

The award recognises a team demonstrating exceptional entrepreneurial spirit in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and includes a six-month business coaching package.

DisoLens received the Engineers in Business Award, sponsored by the Engineers in Business Fellowship.

The award provides each winner with £1,500 in grant funding, mentorship and a professional CV package for entrepreneurs working across engineering sciences.

The team is developing a self-dissolving biodegradable contact lens intended to remove the need for lenses to be taken out each day.