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“There is a subgroup of depressed patients whose depression takes the form of not being able to feel anything at all, and I worry this effect would exacerbate their problem, but I have never heard this from anyone and SSRIs do not seem less effective in that subgroup, so these might be two different things that only sound alike.”

The depression did not take the form of not being able to feel anything at all, but it did (before medication) result in me feeling less intensely. I tried Cymbalta for about a month. At first, it was great and it made me feel very happy. Then, I began having side-effects and could barely feel. I noticed that it was impossible to feel excited, and that my inability to even slightly excite myself made it impossible to feel motivated. I stopped caring about things completely.

Examples: One of the most difficult things for me was getting out of bed to go to work in the morning. This became much harder after the Cymbalta side-effects began. Before Cymbalta, I at least had a little bit of anxiety that created an aversion to getting fired. This was just enough to make me get out of bed in time to go to work. After one month on Cymbalta, that anxiety was gone. I just didn’t care at all. I don’t remember how I managed to make myself go to work despite that when I first noticed this, but I realized that every day that I let this continue, there was a significant risk of me simply not getting out of bed. I also realized that because I had lost my ability to motivate myself with anxiety and excitement, I had become incapable of getting myself to work on any of the things that would improve my life situation.

So, in addition to Cymbalta causing severe emotional blunting that I believe posed a risk to my livelihood, Cymbalta caused severe apathy that made me incapable of doing the extra work it takes to build a meaningful and desirable life. I also experienced intolerable gastrointenstinal symptoms. For those reasons, I quit Cymbalta. Even without the intolerable gastrointestinal symptoms, I would have concluded that Cymbalta was too detrimental for me to continue using it. Even if getting out of bed had been easy enough to be sure that I’d do it consistently, I saw the irony involved in taking a pill that perpetuated the problem it was supposed to help me solve. An anti-depressant that makes me too apathetic to bother with building a more worthwhile life is not serving it’s purpose and is therefore unacceptable to me. Now you have heard of at least one person who experienced severe, potentially debilitating apathy on anti-depressants, and found that specifically Cymbalta caused severe apathy as a side-effect by exacerbating it.

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