I'm having a personal battle and I want to share it to expose the failures of our mental health systems to adequately treat patients with in my case grief and situational depression after my daughters death.
2) After Tiffany's loss I went to grief counseling and I was prescribed Cymbalta to help me handle the extreme grief. They explained that it would help me from falling into bouts of extreme deep depression as I tried to find my "new normal" in a world without my daughter.
3) Now 5 years later the mental health community still pushes this medication, but the recommended time period for using anti-depression medication is approximately 1 year. When does mental healthcare segue over to making money? I think this is a topic for discussion
4) I've made a personal choice to detox myself from Cymbalta with the support of my family physician. So far my symptoms of withdrawal include sweating, anxiety, weird zapping sensations in my brain and dizziness, it's only been 5 days and it's only just beginning.
5) I am going to keep you updated on my progress and symptoms as I go through this so that everyone has a good grasp on how even medications that aren't supposed to be "addictive" can affect a person when stopped, particularly anti-depressant medications.
6) I've reached a point where I don't feel I need this medication, I'm coping well, but were I a different person I wouldn't go against the mental health providers and decide to stop using them. My question is how long would the mental health providers have kept me taking them?
7) I strongly suspect that the "mental health community" would have been more than content for me to be dependent on Cymbalta for the rest of my life, as well as big pharma. After all nothing keeps the business going better than repeat business in both industries.
8) One problem is that we as a society are always looking for cure-alls. A simple pill to be the solution to our problems. While these medications can be and are helpful, and in my case they were, when does the line between medical necessity and patient abuse begin?
9) I don't know that answer, but I do know that in my case the time for me to come off this medication was in 2016 and only because of MY determination to be whole again is it going to end, for me that's a big problem with this industry.
