In London last week, the cover story in one newspaper was about a rape trial. Yes! We know how well those go in merry old England. The defendant’s lawyer, a woman, argued that the 16-year-old victim of a three-dude gang rape wanted it because she was chubby, and the “sex” would boost her self-esteem by making her feel attractive to men. A couple days before, a 17-year-old pregnant married South Asian woman was found murdered in her home.

Twisty, like Liz, badkitty, anaham, Mary Kay, Sarah Z, I’m another commenter who has had a different experience with Cymbalta, than yours. But I also routinely have paradoxical relations to drugs (the ones that are supposed to make me sleepy make me wired, etc).

Like some other readers here, I live with fibromyalgia and chronic depression, both probably hereditary. The fibromyalgia isn’t life threatening, but the depression has been. I didn’t get a diagnosis for the fibromyalgia until I’d had the symptoms for about fifteen years, and I hid from the diagnosis of the depresssion for a longer time. I worked out for myself that I wasn’t crazy (“hysterical”) or making shit up. I understood that the alcoholics and drug addicts in my immediate family were/are self-medicating in destructive ways. So I resisted ALL medications for years (including “natural remedies”) and worked hard to manage my symptoms without them, through diet, exercise, therapy, physical therapy, meditation, twelve-step groups, self-help books, willpower and all kinds of major life changes. My mother and I helped check my sister into a hospital so she wouldn’t kill herself before she cleaned up (she’s been clean and sober for over ten years now). For me, suicide is what people do when the pain they are experiencing is more than they can bear at the time, with the resources at hand. The people left behind are devastated. When I couldn’t walk over the Mississippi river (something I have to do where I work) without imagining hitting the water as a way out, I decided to try the meds.

Twisty, I had a similar reaction to the Elavil (amytriptaline) which was prescribed for me to help with symptoms of fibromyalgia. It worked for the sleep-disorder stuff, but I felt utterly stupid until noon every day, and I’m a teacher so that was unacceptable. I tried Celexa, but it made me perpetually hungry, paranoid, and took away my ability to have an orgasm, also unacceptable. Now I’m taking Cymbalta (have for a year) and I’m doing OK. It hasn’t helped my chronic pain at all, as we’d hoped, but so far I have been side-effect free.

So, I’ve found a combination that allows me to reconnect with my joy, and to continue working to support myself and my daughter. But the drugs are never enough by themselves-they’re not happy pills. If I don’t do the other stuff I need to do to manage my symptoms, they get worse. In the last few years, when I have experienced a suicidal impulse, I have been able to understand it as an emergency flare my body is sending to my consciousness telling me to seek help.

But I grasp that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I apologize for giving offense. And I certainly never meant to equate you with the drug companies, although, looking back at what I wrote, it sure looks that way.

Fine. It’s useless and/or dangerous for YOU. That isn’t what you said. Words are important and you know it.

Also, “Fortunately, for you and for drug companies, there is no shortage of anti-depressants or of people to prescribe them! ” is both dismissive of my experience and incorrect. In fact, Cymbalta is currently the only drug which works on my constellation of symptoms. What I’m going to do when it quits, as all of them have, sooner or later, is a good question. A good scary question.

They don’t have to mistake you for a psychiatrist. I originally asked my doctor about SSRIs because they helped someone I worked with. I’ve done a lot of writing about and educating on this topic. Some people have been good enough to say I helped them get help. Word of mouth is important. Words are important and have power. Else why would we do this blogging thing.

Biochemically induced depression is real and life threatening. — I was 13 the first time I tried suicide. I’m currently 54 and I’ve been living with that shit for 40 years. Really you know, I do know what I’m talking about. Just as I have never thought I knew more about your medical situation than you do, I’d appreciate the same courtesy. Rather than the implication that I’m a tool of the drug industry.

MKK

Of course it does. What am I, chopped liver?

Dang it, I knew that sardonic little remark would draw out the yay-Cymbalta folks. I doubt that anyone reading this blog would mistake me for a psychiatrist or a pharmacologist, but if it will ease your worried mind, Mary Kay, I hereby go on record as stating that the article to which this comment is appended should in no way be construed as medical advice.

Fortunately, for you and for drug companies, there is no shortage of anti-depressants or of people to prescribe them!

This literallly makes me see red. Cymbalta and drugs like it are the only reason I, and lots of folks just like me, are alive today. They make life not only possible, but good. Just because you had a bad experience with a drug does not mean it is useless and/or dangerous. People vary enormously. Please don’t do this. You have no idea if you might be warning away someone who would be greatly helped. PEOPLE VARY. And so do their reactions to drugs.

MKK

Because it’s a war out there, Us vs Them. There are “two” sexes in mainstream thinking, so men identify with their own camp, and it takes a lifetime of critical thinking and empathising to unlearn the brainwashing that started for all of us in childhood. All men harbour hatred towards women because we’re “the Other” to them. We either represent, in a flesh effigy, their extremely powerful and scary mother, because her body and our bodies mean the difference between life and death for everyone (whether men like to acknowledge this or not, and you bet your sweet ass they try as hard as they can not to), or we represent all the vaginas they want to poke their sad little weiners into for their own satisfaction; those elusive vaginas that they don’t have 24/7 access to; the vaginas that men think they SHOULD be entitled to. Men grow up convincing themselves and every other man out there that women are inferior, so they would never TRY to identify with a woman because that would degrade THEM as well as us. Women are on the other end of the shit stick, so we CAN identify with others. We have the capacity for empathy because we aren’t constantly in the process of wildly trying to protect our sovereignity in the world. We don’t have anything to lose by being decent human beings, or by having a revolution. As Susan Maushart said,

Men don’t seek change to the status quo because the status quo has been good to them. Husbands don’t actively seek more equality in marriage for the same reason that managers don’t lobby for sales jobs, doctors don’t aspire to become nurses, and queen bees don’t facilitate workers’ strikes. (Wifework, 204)

Whew! Sorry, that question just triggered my feminist reflex.