Last night, I gave up. I gave up, again, on my effort to go off of duloxetine (Cymbalta). It’s just too much.

At first, I felt better when I reduced how many little beads I removed from the medication capsule. But over the course of the week or so, things got worse, and then even worse.

How weird is it to have a medication that you take twice a day, each time with about 70 tiny beads in one capsule, and if you take out 4 beads from one capsule only once a day, you end up with

• tingling under the skin of your arms and legs
• extreme fatigue and the need to sleep for hours in the middle of the day
• difficulty getting out of bed, even when you are awake
• a strange pressure around your genitals, like a tingling, almost like a low-level sexual arousal, but not pleasant (and hard and kind of embarrassing to even describe)
• an inability to concentrate and a sudden chronic forgetfulness
• lethargy
• recurrent desire to self-harm
• intrusive thoughts about hanging yourself

It’s so bizarre that I find it interesting and almost comical (especially how forgetful I am), except that it is also miserable.

I reached out to Kelly, the psychiatric nurse practitioner who became my new prescriber last summer. She was very empathic, said she would reach out to some colleagues in case she had overlooked anything. She told me to go ahead and go back to the full dose, and that we could meet today to talk.

Well, at least I don’t have to count out those tiny beads anymore!

So last night I took my evening dose without taking out any beads. I took it, wishing just to feel better. In fact, I feel worse today. I know it will probably not take too long for me to feel “normal” again, but it’s challenging to endure until then. I spent a lot of the day in bed today, or staring mindlessly at my phone. When I did have my appointment with Kelly (online), we had some long silences because sometimes my mind would just go blank for a while.

She told me that all of her colleagues had the same approaches she and I had already tried. And that’s good, I guess, like having a bunch of second opinions without having to tell my story over and over again to additional doctors.

Then she told me she had one other idea, something still considered “unconventional.” She said some people were using psilocybin to help with withdrawal. There isn’t a lot of research, she told me, about using it to get off something like Cymbalta or Effexor, my nemeses, but there is a growing body of research about its effectiveness helping people with addictions, both for the withdrawal phase and to beat their addictions longer term. And of course there is also more and more coming out about its use to treat depression and post-traumatic stress.

She said she’d send me a list of resources, videos and readings, so I could learn more about it. She’s been intentionally learning more over the past few years, and this summer she will start a 10-month training so she can be licensed to use it in her practice. I’ve previously listened to most of Michael Pollen’s book (How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence), so the general idea that psychedelics can be beneficial to mental health isn’t new to me. But I had never thought of it as a support to help me get off the duloxetine.

I told my husband about the idea this evening. He’s all in favor. He read Pollen’s book too, and for the last several years, I think he has wanted to try psychedelics for the more spiritual side of the experience. He hasn’t exactly said that, but I get that idea. Regardless, he thinks it’s a great idea for me to try. I’m not opposed, but I’m a bit more skeptical. I think it’s because I have tried so many things to help me feel better. I’ve had my hopes up and been disappointed before, not only about getting off meds, but also about therapies to treat trauma. At one point, I was so excited to try EMDR, after reading about its effectiveness. But for whatever reason, it never did anything for me, well, except confuse and frustrate me, I guess.

I mean, it’s good to at least have an alternative path to consider, because the “go it slow” method has just failed me for the second time. I just don’t want to invest too much energy in hoping for a different outcome.