I don't know if it helps to hear it, but it's going exactly the way this process tends to go. Just roll with it.I know this is miserable, but it won't kill you, and you will come out of it feeling better than you have in a long time. The readjustment takes time...Yes, hang in there.

You can reinstate some of the cymbalta and withdraw slowly--very slowly--it will save you a lot of suffering.

Your demise sounds like a nightmare! I shiver to think what I'd go through getting off of all my psych meds, too. Effexor was horrible.

You *absolutely* have to be able to sleep - I agree 100% with you. It will drive you insane if you can't (so to speak). I'm glad the nurse is getting you something to help.

I hope you feel better VERY soon...all of those symptoms you're experiencing AT ONCE would turn anyone into an emotional wreck! I think you should be applauded that you wrote such a wonderful, interesting post that I'll come back to when I'm going through a withdrawal one day. Thanks so much for sharing your experience....

I tapered off the Cymbalta from 120 mg to 0 over the course of a month, dropping 30 mg each week. As far as I know, that's the lowest dose available and I REALLY don't want to delay this any longer.

And yes, it does help to hear that feeling fucked up after stopping Cymbalta is normal. It would help even more if you had a rough estimate of how long I can reasonably expect this nonsense to continue. :)

And purely for the record, here's how bad the insomnia and inability to remain sleeping is - I doubled up on Norco tonight before I went to bed at 8 p.m. I'm supposed to take one every 12 hours, but I also make a point of knowing how much I can take if the breakthrough pain is severe and it was bad enough tonight that two were called for. It's 9:49 p.m. as I write this ... and yes, I've been to bed AND to sleep.

well. i hope that remote does not open all garage doors, because all of my shit will be exposed. :)

Unfortunately, it's impossible to estimate how long it it will take for the withdrawal effects to subside. It's a very individual process with all kinds of factors involved. It depends a lot on personal body chemistry along with whether you're on other drugs and how long you've been on them...I could go on...It took me nearly a year and a half of no meds for all withdrawal symptoms to go away. I don't want to scare you with that, but I also know people who feel they have permanent cognitive effects from the drugs, which I really don't.It's the kind of thing you just have to stick out and learn to cope with along the way. It gets easier.

hi again. If it's been less then six weeks reinstating won't necessarily drag out the agony. (from what I've been told if it's been more than six weeks reinstating won't help) I was on Effexor which is a similar drug (SNRI) I opened the capsules and counted pellets once I got down to the smallest amount. I had very few withdrawal symptoms once I did that. you don't have to discontinue more than a couple of pellets a day and then you can wait a week or more before cutting down again.

I've now come off several drugs and Effexor was the easiest because I did it that way. I know it has the potential of being one of the very worst just like Cymbalta. And before I changed strategies I was going down the road you're on.

good luck--I feel for you. I'm coming off several meds and it's a long haul.

I hope you feel better soon.

It's almost as if the manufacturers have some insidious plot to make Cymbalta so hard to come off of because the smallest manufacturer's dose is 20 mg and even conting pellets out doesn't work well because they have different thicknesses of coating! One can go to a compounding pharmacist perhaps and try to get a special formulation (or try a liquid titration maybe? -- don't really know) but going cold turkey off 20 mg is a recipe for disaster. It is possible to switch to Prozac and then taper off that SLOWLY and I really do mean slowly. To get off an SSRI safely one really should taper painfully slowly to avoid the hell you describe. There are almost NO medical professionals out there who really understand how to do this but there is help on the internet if you look for it. I wish you the best of luck.

P.S. I know Cymbalta is not a true SSRI -- affects norepinephrine too but apparently it's the serotonin part that causes the withdrawal issues which is why switching to Prozac can help. I'm sorry to say this but going from 120mg to 0 in one month is WAY TOO FAST. Really it's a recipe for blowing one's brain out -- I'm sorry to say this. But as I said I really wish anyone trying to get off these toxic (yes, that's what I believe) substances the very best of luck and commend them for their courage.

There's no doubt that SSRI's are associated with a discontinuation syndrome that can be really bad for some people. But I think it's important to understand that going off any psychoactive drug is associated with problems -- heck, even stopping caffeine will give you problems. But these symptoms could also be related to you mental illness as well. And for the commentator who went from 120 mgs of Cymbalta to 0 in 1 month -- well, you should have known that was a bad idea.

Just a point or two for clarification's sake.

1. I post here not about psych meds per se, but about the practice of pain management and its increasing use of psych meds to treat chronic pain due to FDA crackdowns on doctors who are perceived to over-prescribe narcotics. Pain management physicians are often reluctant to prescribe narcotics because - by the time patients finally reach them and other treatments have been ineffective - a patient who may very well need narcotics to alleviate pain might be seen as engaging in drug-seeking behavior which can lead to a physician's license to practice medicine being revoked. Their wariness is justified, as is their search for non-narcotic means of alleviating their patients' pain. They're stuck between a rock and a hard place and I sympathize with them because using a pain management method that is known to be effective can cost them their ability to practice medicine but they also have suffering patients that they need to treat.

2. I wasn't prescribed Cymbalta or any of the other SSRIs / SNRIs that I've been on due to mental illness; I've been taking these medications because they have apparently shown some amount of effectiveness as a non-narcotic pain reliever (although I sometimes wonder if I would have been better off with a placebo - if I could do it all over, I'd take the narcotics, habituation be damned). It appears that pharmaceutical companies are eager to find multiple uses for the same medication, regardless of side effects, presumably because those corporations can then market their drugs for multiple diagnoses while only incurring R&D costs for the initial development, theoretically increasing their sales and profits.

3. My doctor and I carefully planned out a tapering schedule to roll off these medications which I followed to the letter; it isn't as though I simply decided to stop taking them. Since I'm one of a handful of my doctor's patients who is trying to go medication free and use techniques such as yoga and exercise to manage my pain, and since psych meds don't seem to have been used very long to treat pain management, I'm not sure how my doctor or I could be expected to know about anecdotal reports of side effects such as brain shivers which would likely only appear in psychiatric journals, not journals of pain management. Since most of the other medications I've been on have had relatively mild withdrawal effects that can be masked or mitigated through other medications, taking a month to taper off Cymbalta seemed perfectly reasonable when I had gone off vicoprofen with nothing more than a muscle relaxant to alleviate withdrawal symptoms and gone off oxymorphone cold turkey. When I started experiencing adverse effects, I promptly looked them up, but by then, it was too late. This is something that my doctor and I will be talking about tomorrow so that he is aware of this and can warn other patients and try to develop a tapering plan which further minimizes the side effects.

4. I'm not sure where you found support to infer that I was on these meds to treat some form of mental illness. In fact, the blog entry seems to state fairly clearly that the medications were prescribed to treat chronic pain. And as far as knowing what constitutes a good or bad idea in this area, there may be tricks and tactics that are widely known in the community of people who have been exposed to these drugs since they were initially prescribed to help treat mental illness. As far as the pain management side of the fence goes, it's a brave new world that doesn't have such people in it. Yet. Think of me like an exchange student, if you will. I'll go back to my pain management doctor and tell him all about these ideas and practices and known side effects and that will make things easier for his next patient. It doesn't make me any less fucked, but someone has to be first.

Cymbalta is prescribed by doctors[even though it is an "antidepressant"] for pain, etc. What happens when a psych med is off-labeled, yet "approved" by the FDA, is that doctors then have free reign over how the med is prescribed and Cymbalta is a nasty time released capsule prescribed for many reasons now, yet unfortunately is the same wicked medication that causes death, severe withdrawal symptoms, and frankly does JACK SHIT FOR PAIN.
Lilly Trials for Cymbalta, not just for mental illness, but for market shares.
Be strong Puckett.:)

Puckett.
This sucks and you are not the first to be rx Cymbalta for pain. I am glad that you are here to speak for others to understand that Cymbalta is rx for pain, for mental health issues and hey, urinary incontinence.[Traci Johnson.Johnsen]

Readers need to understand and really "get" that this medication has crossed over from "Christian to Secular". In a bad way.

Thank you for being a loud voice in a really small world.

My friend rx Cymbalta for pain,and died; with another antidepressant.

The withdrawal issues on Cymbalta have nothing whatsoever to do with what it was prescribed for in the first place. It has to do with how it affects the delicate balance in the brain, the feedback mechanisms, the allostatic load, the down regulation etc. And when doctors act like they know what they're doing when they advise going from 120mg to 0 in a month all they are basing that on is the half life, the time it takes to get out of the blood stream, and that has next to nothing to do with what's going on in the brain. There are a couple of books out there that can help with the process. One is The Antidepressant Solution by Joseph Glenmullen and the other is Your Drug Might be Your Problem by Peter Breggin. And as I said there are resources on the internet too. The people who know are the victims, the ones who have been through it, who are learning one agonizing step at a time, not the doctors or drug companies who push these drugs in the first place.

The discontinuation may have slowed your writing process down a bit - but, if it's of any consolation, hasn't wilted any of its quality. It's a great entry and you're a great writer.

I'm a little late in responding on this topic as it has been over a month since you posted this but I just wanted to chime in by saying that I too have gone through the Cymbalta withdrawal and it was brutal.

So brutal in fact, that I have gotten quite fired up over not being informed prior to me ever starting cymbalta of it's potential for withdrawal symptoms.

I have started an online petition addressed to Eli Lilly about it and I have formally filed a complaint with the FDA. People need to know what they are getting into when starting this type of drug.

I hope you got through this ok.