Background: Last year in August (2012) I decided to go off 60 mg Cymbalta cold turkey. Life was going well, I was no longer depressed, and was successfully treating sleep apnea. My doctor suggested that perhaps my history of depression had been due to sleep apnea, so now that I was being successfully treated for sleep apnea and getting full nights of restful sleep, it might be reasonable to try going off antidepressants. so it seemed reasonable to So, without his advice, one day I decided to stop taking 60 mg. I was miserable within a few days. Body numbness, inability to think, my head felt horrible. But, I thought, the half-life is short and I should be able to tough it out. After 8 weeks of insomnia (2-3 hours of restless sleep per night) plus the symptoms above, I went to my doctor in defeat and resumed taking Cymbalta. We decided to try 30 mg, and within two weeks I was feeling normal again, no symptoms, and was getting full nights of sleep. I have continued to feel normal on this lower dose, so at least the 8 weeks of misery at least got me to a lower dose. However, I can honestly say, it was one of the most miserable 8 weeks I have ever experienced in my life. After I had recovered I asked the pharmacist if people could still experience withdrawal symptoms after 8 weeks of not taking this medication. He told me that the withdrawal symptoms should have been gone in 2-3 weeks at most because the drug has a short half-life.
Now, in March 2013, I have decided to try getting off Cymbalta completely. The days are getting longer, I am not depressed, and life is fairly good at this point - definitely a good time to try going off of Cymbalta again. I went to the doctor and got the okay to taper off Cymbalta by removing a few beads each week. Starting on March 7th, I removed three beads from my 30 mg pill each morning and took this lower dose. I thought I would try doing this for two weeks and then take out an additional three beads, which was slower than what the doctor recommended initially. He had recommended that I take approximately half of my regular dose for 2 weeks (15 mg) and then go cold turkey. But given my experience last year, he agreed that I could try removing a few beads every few weeks which should completely eliminate any possibility of developing withdrawal symptoms. Well, guess what....Starting on day 4 of only removing 3 tiny beads per pill, the withdrawal symptoms started creeping in. Now, about a week into it I have started losing sleep and the symptoms are pretty bad. My skin is just crawling and my mind is very numb. This morning I was pretty freaked out and only removed two beads.
So, now I am thinking how am I ever going to get off this stuff? If removing only a few beads makes me this miserable, how will I ever taper through the whole pill? Has anyone else had to do an extremely slow taper? I cannot go through months and months of this - which makes me feel that I will be stuck on this stuff for life. Can Cymbalta affect my brain chemistry permanently and make it so I can never get off of it? I feel pretty hopeless at this point. What if this happens even when I remove a single bead? What if I have to go through this for each of the many tiny little beads in that pill?
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