My journey with duloxetine

Topics mentioned: medications, duloxetine, sertraline, fluoxetine, depression, anxiety disorder

About: Lola shares about her journey with duloxetine and other medications that are used to treat depression and anxiety, including what helped and what she found challenging.

After a long, hard battle with CAMHS for a diagnosis of mixed depression and anxiety disorder, I was put on medication. Finding the right one for me took a while - I tried the standard fluoxetine, going up and down on doses and for the longest time, I was doing okay until I realised that maybe it wasn’t going as well as I thought.

Next, I tried sertraline. Many people I know have had a great experience on sertraline, but I found it numbing and stopped feeling like myself. My dad told me he had a similar response, which was comforting given the number of people I know who are thriving on it. So I kept trying.

I now take duloxetine, a Serotonin-Noradrenaline Reuptake Inhibitor (SNRI). I found out about the medication online after doing extensive research. I was told by my GP that SNRIs aren’t as commonly used nowadays as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), so he wouldn’t have immediately thought to prescribe them. However, I also suffer from a chronic pain condition, and duloxetine is often also used to treat such pain.

Starting on 30mg, I didn’t really feel much of an effect on my mood. Most of the benefit I felt came in the first two weeks after I stopped taking sertraline and started on 60mg of the duloxetine. After a few weeks on this dose, I felt my overall mood start to pick up a bit. It wasn’t what some people might imagine, where you find the proper medication and suddenly, you're back to your perfect self. That just isn’t realistic.

Before medication, I felt like my mood was on a yo-yo. I would have times where I was okay and sometimes even great, but when my mood dropped, it dropped hard. It was exhausting to feel like this every day, but now that I’m on duloxetine, these drops have evened out a bit more. I still get them and have periods that feel hopeless; however, it feels more manageable to me now. My medication is combined with counselling, and I feel that the two treatments together suit my particular needs.

Unfortunately, I have experienced side effects from taking this medication. Whilst simple and common, they are still very irritating in my day-to-day life. The most prominent one for me is stomach pain. Even after a month of taking this medication, I was getting stomach pain.

Like clockwork, a few hours after taking the meds, this dull ache in my stomach would start. Then after I had lunch, I’d get nausea and heartburn. My doctor recommended taking it in the evenings, as this may reduce the effects. But I then found I couldn't get to sleep at all, so I went back to mornings.

It was so incredibly frustrating to have a medication I thought helped, finally, and have it also disrupt me at the same time. The options given to me then were pretty much: wait it out and it should improve, go back down to 30mg in dosage, or stop and try something new. So, I was left to weigh up the pros and cons.

Not wanting to start again, and considering the positive effects of the duloxetine, I decided to wait it out. I still get side effects from time to time, though now they’re less severe it isn’t as disruptive.

As for reducing the pain, I use a symptom tracker to track all my chronic health symptoms, and I have noticed that my pain score has been decreasing. I was happy until I went through a bad period of pain and was disappointed again.

Getting these ups and downs of pain is sometimes distressing to me as such a young woman, and I do not feel as though duloxetine is reducing my pain. It is important to note that I do not have an official answer as to what causes my chronic pain, so it may be that duloxetine just isn’t suited to my condition, or that it needs more time to have more of an effect.

Overall, my experience of taking duloxetine has mainly been positive, as the longer-term effects on my mental health have far outweighed the negatives. There are pros and cons to all medications. I feel duloxetine has had a positive impact on my life, and it was such a relief to find a good fit for me and to start feeling like my old self again.