Hmm. I was prescribed Cymbalta and wrote about the reasons for that in a sister reply to yours, and your post reminds me why I have been hesitant to take it. If I may ask, did your wife's post-withdrawal symptoms eventually subside?
Yes, it took months to ramp off it. She had starry vision whenever the lights turned off for several months after that, which doctors were pretty dismissive of. She claims to never have been quite the same since taking it (and she only ever took what the doctors described as a baby dose) but she seems quite fine and normal now, over a year later.
She's been on a lot of drugs, and the ramp down for this was by far the biggest pain. Compounding alone cost hundreds of dollars and tons of driving time to places that could actually compound it, all to get off the damn drug.
She was mostly prescribed it for pain/nerve damage.
Edit: that being said, her doctors did have patients who were on absolutely massive doses for the long term with basically little to no side effects, so I think it depends a lot on the person.
