The mysterious symptom popping up in some GLP-1 users What if you lost weight and didn’t care — about anything?
by Jonquilyn Hill and Kelli Wessinger Feb 16, 2026, 6:30 AM EST If you watched the Super Bowl, you might have noticed that a lot of the ads were for weight-loss drugs. Even Serena Williams was selling them. That’s because demand for GLP-1s has skyrocketed over the last year, with users more than doubling from 2024. GLP-1s are relatively new and the industry is rapidly expanding, so we’re still learning more about their long-term effects. Users report fatigue and nausea as being quite common during use. But with more people using the drug, more side effects are popping up. Dr. Sera Lavelle is a clinical psychologist who noticed several of her patients reporting a strange GLP-1 side effect: extreme apathy. She told Today, Explained co-host Jonquilyn Hill that it isn’t quite depression, but more of a “missing spark,” making people lose interest in things they previously loved. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. When did you first start noticing people having a psychological reaction to GLP-1s? I first started looking into this about a year ago. It was kind of the same conversation with three different patients in the same week, and I started noticing they all had this flat affect. None of them were depressed, but each was saying things like, “Well, what’s the point?” “Maybe I don’t even care about that job promotion.” “I don’t know what it is, but I’m not even excited to go out with my friends.” And these three in particular had been on GLP-1s. And of course, you can’t make an inference based on three people, but it is what motivated me to start looking into more of the psychological effects, particularly around what we do and do not know about how GLP-1s affect dopamine and motivation-seeking behavior. The other thing is that there’s a big difference between a person being depressed [versus the GLP-1 side effects], which they have started looking into. Does it affect suicidality and depression? You have to think about depression like, yes, it can be that kind of apathy feeling. However, depression really implies a negative affect: Like, I’m no good, I don’t feel like existing, right? That’s very different than a flatness.