My Wife Has Lost All Emotional Contact With Me
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Hello everyone my wife has been taking cymbalta duloxetine 60mg twice a day for the passed 6 years now we have 3 children and live in a lovely house in the country side everything is as good as I could ever make it I love my wife more than words could ever say but she has become empty cut off and loveless she tells me she doesn't what to change she docent want me to leave these tablets have cut off all her emotion and left a bear shell of a woman who could never bear to even thinking about coming off these drugs she can't see that isn't normal to feel nothing and docent want to change that I have been married for 12 years I have 3 of the most beautiful children in the world I can't leave my children I love my wife so much as well but I can't see how to move forward I'm so unhappy in this emotionless marriage but she is happy to continue like this for the rest of her life I so wish I knew what to do my life is falling apart but I think these tables are the wrong way forward iv never taken them and never would I just wish my beautiful wife could feel the same. My advice to anyone thinking about taking these tablets is don't life is what you make it not what makes you anything is achievable

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*sigh* this web site doesn't allow editing or deleting a response, so correcting a typo isn't possible:

...releaser, receptor agonist, reuptake inhibitor, receptor antagonist or receptor inverse agonist FOR one or more amino acids...

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Normally, a psychoactive drug can be classified as a releaser, receptor agonist, reuptake inhibitor, receptor antagonist or receptor inverse agonist or one or more amino acids the body uses to regulate mood or feeling, but no-one seems to know how this one does whatever it does, even though it was supposed to mimic GABA.

Reading through the information on this drug, particularly on the history of legal actions against it, makes me wonder how any doctor in his right mind could prescribe it for anyone in any dose (unless they're terminally ill).

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Well we managed.
Went to doctors, he said "the combination of drugs she was prescribed was a mis-communication" 4 x the normal dose of the cym. and 6 x the normal dose gabapentin.
Within the month she had quit both very close to "cold turkey", our lives are once again ours.
That did not happen overnight, it's been just over four months and we still have some "residual effects" but things are very much better.
These drugs were prescribed as both a "anti-depresant" and to help with neropathic pain.
I'd like to THANK everyone who commented and wish all the very best.

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I completely understand your pain. I took Cymbalta for 5 years and suffered severe memory and emotional loss. I was sleep walking through life. Although my wife never complained, I could tell that she was getting irritated with my lack of interest. I have since gotten off cymbalta(which took weeks of suffering and strategic planning with my doctor) and have since found feeling in my life again. Please talk with your wife about getting off of this hoffific drug SAFELY. Things will get better(although they will surely get worse as she faces withdrawal) but stay by her side. God Bless.

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I coletely understand your pain. I took Cymbalta for 5 years and suffered severe memory and emotional loss. I was sleep walking through life. Although my wife never complained I could tell that she was getting irritated with my lack of interest. I have since gotten off cymbalta(which took se suffering and strategic planning with my doctor) and have since found feeling in my life again. Please talk with your wife about getting off of this hoffific drug SAFELY. Things will get better(although they will surely get worse as she faces withdrawal) but stay by her side. God Bless.

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The RXWiki link appears to be fairly thorough, but it omits one important side effect that's more or less guaranteed; dependence. The mechanism of dependence causes psychoactive drugs to lose their effectiveness, and it leads to withdrawal if the drug is stopped. If you search the Internet, you will find that withdrawal from Cymbalta can range from not too bad to "hell".

The wiki also starts with "Cymbalta is a medication used to treat:". It should say "Cymbalta is a drug used to attempt to temporarily hide the symptoms of:".

Treat and medication are the wrong words, because both imply having something specific to do with a cause. Cymbalta is a psychoactive drug (as in cocaine, LSD, heroine, benzos, etc.). All it does is alter perception by interfering with the function of the brain (while it's doing unknown damage to liver, kidneys and who-knows-what other parts of the body).

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just crying,

Thinking about the Fibromyalgia pain your wife will have to deal with when she gets over the drugs that were hoped to somehow ease that pain, caused me to do a little looking into Fibromyalgia. You might be interested in this:
earthclinic.com/CURES/fibromyalgia_remedies.html

If your wife has taken any extended regimens of Cipro or other fluoroquinolone (antibiotics), this might be interesting, but I'd look further for some corroboration:
earthclinic.com/CURES/fibromyalgia.html#cause

I just looked at the warning on a toothpaste tube, and the warning really has been changed since I last looked.

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Hey it'sbeen a month, the doctor was appalled, he took her off the gabapentin and told her to gradually cut off the cymbalta, she spent like two weeks before going "dry" and got completely off it.
It's like peeling a onion, a frsh layer of brain, she was prescribed because these drugs are suppose to help with neropathic pain. I can assure you they do, a person taking that "cocktail" will simply not care about anything.
She doesn't remember asking to leave, like I said a onion, she's been pain, had some weird stuff (both feet swelled up) happen to her and she's currently recovering from a sprained back. Not yet the gal I met, but I see signs, sex is coming back in our lives, we talk and have started a exercise regime together...nothing "big" just a walk a couple times a day.
THIS DRUG IS A MONSTER.
When I went to the docs and pronounced she was leaving he asked her why, she couldn't come up with a answer, I showed him 8 pages of side effects.
I believe that with such profound effects from a drug, that a physician should notify the spouse of possible side effects.
Side note, either time or the effect of the drug wearing off, but she is once again learning to live with her pain because everyday it gets just a little better...I think it's a onion efect, her brain was "fogged up" with this cocktail to a point where she couldnt feel, now a new layer has emerged she feels everything.
Thanks for the replies, her choice to "cut" these drugs out of her life saved our relationship.
Monster drugs and the pharmacies and doctors who prescribe and administer them should be liable.

Thanks to all.

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Glad you managed to get help that was usable. A friend of mine was put on Cymbalta after a bunch of others, in turn, obviously caused problems, so I looked into it (as I had done with the others). I found that the brain's long term reaction to Cymbalta is such that over time, the brain of a person taking it will adjust to compensate for its effect (look up "neuroplasticity"). Since Cymbalta is an SNRI, taking it increases the effective levels of Norepinephrine and Serotonin in the person's brain, and the brain compensates over time by decreasing its sensitivity to Norepinephrine and Serotonin. That creates the dependence. If the person then stops taking Cymbalta, the brain will suddenly not have enough Norepinephrine or Serotonin, and that's why one possible withdrawal effect of Cymbalta (and other "antidepressants") is WORSE depression. So, giving someone Cymbalta for depression is an attempt to make them feel better now, knowing it will eventually stop making them feel better, and that they will probably feel worse when they stop taking it. That means that if the person doesn't stop taking it as soon as it makes them feel better (or doesn't quickly), they will become dependent on it.

I have yet to have a doctor explain to me how this makes sense. It's only good for the drug manufacturer. I also have yet to have a doctor explain to me why someone would prescribe an antidepressant for someone who is depressed, when the instructions clearly state that it is for "clinical depression". Clinical depression is not an illness that can be objectively identified by the presence of an identifiable cause like a pathogen or a genetic defect, it is subjectively "defined" and diagnosed based on the presence of various symptoms that are not exclusive to the condition, individually or combined. A patient that has been lying on their back staring at the ceiling for 2 weeks is probably clinically depressed, if there is no physical cause for the behavior.

If you had trouble sleeping, or were having anxiety attacks, how would you react if your doctor prescribed whiskey, beer or temazepam (Restoril), alprazolam (Xanax) or diazepam (Valium)? If you were depressed, how would you react if your doctor prescribed cocaine, LSD, mescaline or bupropion (Wellbutrin), mirtazapine (Remeron), fluoxetine (Prozac) or sertraline (Zoloft)? Now look up each of those medications here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoactive_drug (reuptake inhibitors, releasers and agonists have similar effects to each other). Sleeping pills and anxiolytics are downers and antidepressants are uppers. A drug called medication is still a drug; its intended effect is to change perception by interfering with the brain's function. Whether you have a psychological problem or a physical one, a drug won't make it go away, and if the drug makes you feel better, it may discourage you from seeking and addressing the real cause, its only temporary, and it may end up making you feel much worse and dependent or addicted. If you can't find and fix the cause, be aware that modern drugs are not tested for long-term safety.

That's not all I found. If you read the product information sheet ("label"), you will find warnings carefully worded to protect the manufacturer from lawsuits, without properly informing the patient and doctor of the risks (for example, imagine a warning against "operating motor vehicles under the influence, until you are certain you can do so safely", on a liquor bottle). I won't go into the stupidity of giving someone a drug when they have a psychological problem, but isn't that what people are doing when they self-medicate their problems with drink and recreational drugs? The words "addiction" and "dependence" are often used interchangeably, also in medical dictionaries and articles. When an ad says a drug is not addictive, it's with the hope that you make the same mistake; actually, addiction is dependence with a craving. The practical differences between antidepressants and recreational "uppers" are that antidepressants are weaker and have more unpleasant side-effects so that most people won't crave them.

I even downloaded the clinical trials of Cymbalta from the FDA's web site to try to figure out their justification for using it to treat depression. If you know anything about psychology, science and statistics, you won't have to look far to realize that the clinical trials are a sham, for several reasons:

1. It is not possible to design a valid clinical trail to show the efficacy of a psychoactive drug unless the drug, the control and the placebo have completely identical side effects to each other and for every patient, and there is no chance of any patient improving on their own. Even with "active placebos" these requirements cannot be met. If any side effect is different, there is no way of knowing if a difference in efficacy is due to the main effect of the drug, the placebo effect of one or more of the side effects, or some other cause. Furthermore, the placebo effect affects different people differently.
2. Results are skewed toward showing effectiveness by the methods used to select patients.
3. Results are skewed toward showing effectiveness by how patients that leave or are dropped from trials are accounted for in the analysis.
4. Trials are not entirely double-blind, because differences in side effects can allow trial participants having previous experience with antidepressants to tell if they are receiving a placebo or not.
5. The methods used to rate patients' levels of depression are not objective, the resulting ratings are not suited for comparison with the ratings of other patients, and the adjustments made to ratings so patients can (supposedly) be compared to each other result in data of highly questionable suitability for the purpose of statistical analysis or otherwise showing efficacy.
6. The logical statistical methods used to analyze the data are of questionable suitability to analyzing analog, subjective data.
7. Short term safety testing is inadequate, because healthy "patients" are not included in the trials using the same environment, doses and lengths of time as patients requiring treatment.
8. Long term safety cannot be economically or ethically tested, and is not done; yet the instructions leave long-term use at the discretion of prescribing doctors, even though it is known that the drug produces hazardous metabolites (but not all of them are known), and information on which doctors may base discretionary use contrary to instructions is unavailable.
9. The FDA allows manufacturers to perform as many clinical trials as needed to get 2 trials showing efficacy. Statistically, the more trials are made, the greater the chance that 2 trials will show efficacy purely by chance; essentially guaranteeing that trials will be successful.
10. Information is not provided on the numbers of patients that must be treated before one is helped and before one is hurt. These values are necessary for weighing the potential risk of taking the drug against the potential benefit (if any).

The clinical trials of Cymbalta don't show efficacy, they show that there is a questionably valid, very small statistical improvement in the depressed patients using Cymbalta compared to those using a placebo, in 2 or more invalid, skewed, not necessarily double-blind trials, for the period of the trials. The trials do not show if the apparent improvement is due to the placebo effect (of one or more of the side effects or of patients knowing they are getting a real drug), if it is due to the desired effect of the drug, if the patient got better because time passed and/or their environment was healthier during the trial, or if the drug is safe or suitable for longer than the trials. If someone swears that Cymbalta cured their depression, it is likely that they responded to the placebo effect of an initial "high" or because the side effects were awful. If they're still taking it, they probably have a rude awakening ahead of them. The science alone says the drug may make some patients feel better temporarily, but then create varying degrees of dependence; and that the risk of harm to the patient from the drug is high, and in the long run unknown (and cannot be proved either way, regardless of statistical evidence being gathered, because statistical "proof" is a "high probability" with exceptions, not scientific proof without exception).

The bottom line is that if you have been prescribed an antidepressant for (not clinical) depression, the drug was probably misrepresented to you. For example, "safe levels" in drivers are not determined (e.g., by testing as they have with alcohol), therefore people taking them should not drive; so if you have an accident while taking them, you can't sue the manufacturer, because you were warned. How many people would still take antidepressants knowing that? How many people would be willing to take antidepressants if they were informed that doing so (for a length of time that varies by patient) will probably result in dependence, and to stop taking them will mean going through withdrawal that can take years? How many people would be willing to take them if they understood that the varying effects psychoactive drugs have on thinking, judgment and reactions can lead them to do stupid or careless things that could look like suicide or suicide attempts even if they aren't? Would people still take them if they were told that they may cause liver and/or kidney damage, and that they are not intended for treating depression (only clinical depression).

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My heart really goes out to you fella I want you to know that coming off this drug is not always as hard as they say my wife has dropped her dose from 120mg a day to 60mg a day and within 4 weeks I had my old wife back and she has managed really well more than any thing I can feel her buzzin inside that she is starting to feel her emotions again everything is starting to flood back now and I'm starting to buzz myself knowing iv got my wife back .
Keep you chin up fella and hang in there try to move away from all the medication and that is when you will start to get your wife back

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Thank you so much for your reply since I first wrote this i spent the whole day researching everything could about the drug My wife was taking and managed to find a web site that was full of small blogs that different people had written about there own exspeariances with this drug and after asking her to spend just a little time reading through then that was enough to start the ball rolling to get her to start to do her own research.
A few weeks down the road now with her tablets reduced I'm now starting to get my old wife back and I now know why it is I fell so madly in love with this woman coming off these tables is a long journey but now the light is looking that much brighter thank you so much for you thoughts and time to reply to me

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Six weeks after starting this "regiment" of Cymbalta and Gabapentin, I was taking DIAZAPAM, because I lost control
I threw my cell phone at her while driving because, I was expected to make the call, while driving.....because she couldn't do it.
It was the 512th thing she couldn't do that day and she was just being what I thought was "intractable" (?)" irritable,argumentative and just difficult....way too!
I was in a trusting inventive and loving relationship up to the point of Fibromyalgia.(At least the diagnoises)
Hold it, she was in pain before diagnoises of fibromyalgia, and spent two weeks in hell getting off the morphine.
I know she was depressed, we had moved, put our life on holding pattern so she could be closer to her daughter and new grandchild by 530 KM.
Damn near killed me, recovering from surgeries on my knee's and elbows, I also managed to fracture my lower back getting "our piece of heaven"with failing health, I quit smoking, put on 60 lbs and went diabetic.
We came back twenty eight months ago.
I remain a "non-smoker" have lost 70 lbs, no metformin today because my count too low, it is 5.3 two hours after main meal. was 4.4 before lunch...4.0 after 3 cups of the max!
We just went thru a year of hardships, lost a friend, did home care for both of them and remain as always her friend.
We bought and paid for a mobile home of which needed a lot of work.
We just updated, out of pocket, a work truck and finally got her a decent little car I promised her twenty eight months ago.
Slow in the near north, injuries, homecare, funeral and then her son moved in, we set him up with doctor, applied for ODSP, got him on the right meds, bi-polar and depression OCD runs in this family.
She was seriously injured at work and workmans wont even acknowledge her, the Cymbalta was a replacement for the morphine.
She always had a addictive personality.
I went online made up a four page "Cymbalta" side effects.(This after 11 months of really no sex, hard times, trying to "cope" with her)
Got her off the 90 liters of coke zero she was drinking per month, and the 20 lbs of candied peanuts.
That stopped the diarrhea.
The weight loss is great thing?
Was suppose to make doctors appointment when the four pages came out and I highlighted about 8 things which she couldn't argue.
Told me she didn't know about the side effects.
Then I found all the packets and the "4 page warnings of side effects" and realized she had lied to me.
She managed to put off making the doctors appointment till yesterday.
It's for next week.
She informed me today, because she can't be bothered to make lunch or dinner for three guys doing free labour on the house, making sure she is warm, clean and dry, that she wants me to give her the car so she can leave.
PERMANTLY.
After all it's not going to work....is it?
We have been together for 12 .5 years.
Came from southern Ontario with 3 kids (all hers, her hubby committed suicide, (Is that relevent?)) with our belongings, 1977 chev and a 18 foot camper and a couple grand.
We stayed at a friends place (actually his driveway) till we found our piece of heaven, cut our way in stayed the summer, then moved within driving distance and opened a couple small business's.
We ended up buying a house, which we sold for a marginal profit (I DO MEAN Small) after the kids left and re-invested in our piece of heaven.
She didn't like heaven, so when we came back we rented, then we bought the mobile.
My grandchild phoned me yesterday and told me how much she loved me, yes her daughter's daughter.
I raised hers as if they where mine, both boys have/had psycholigical problems.
I am unsure when she is leaving, I've read enough to know, stopping Cymbalta is a gradual thing, she's been lieing to me and apperantly the doctor?
I asked her to try zyban.
Is she depressed or adicted?
I know she cant be bothered with anything but her quite time and her other habits.
I've cried ...is all I can do...besides vent.
Thanks

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Your situation upset me so much I cannot stop thinking out it therefore this response to you. You are the husband of your wife. If your wife doesn't want you to leave she must allow you to accompany her to her psychiatrist to discuss this situation; i.e. are their other psychiatric meds that could help her condition w/o consuming her, taking her 'away' from you? She says she doesn't want you to leave. She must back this up by offering you both the opportunity to examine this with her psychiatrist/psychologist. If she doesn't really want to change, you must do what you must do. Or, if you can't do this yet, go for counseling yourself to help you prepare to leave if this is your last resort.

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I am sorry about what you're dealing with, it is very unfortunate that these medications do this to some people and, when they aren't feeling anything, they think the medication is working and it's a good thing.

Learn more Cymbalta details here.

Have you contacted her doctor about the issue? No, they can't discuss her medical issues with you, but you can contact them to voice your concerns, so they know what's going on.

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