Greetings !
Welcome to the site.
Well, no this is not normal as it seems like you are still reeling under the depressive cognition and
Cymbalta after 1 year long use has become ineffective owing to increased tolerance/ resistance that your body must have developed against it.
So while I support the idea of bringing you off Cymbalta but the weaning strategy can be improved by first bringing you down to 60 mg dose and after 1 week further down to 40 mg dose / day and then after 1 week down to 20 mg / day dose and then after 1 week taking 20 mg dose every alternate day for another week and then stopping the drug completely. This slow tapering of the dose is essential to prevent development of withdrawal syndrome which can further worsen the condition.
Also alongside the withdrawal of Cymbalta there is a need to replace it with another
anti depressant which can be done by introducing
Lexapro ( generic name -- escitalopram ) at dose of 5 mg / day in the morning when you have reduced Cymbalta to 20 mg / day regular
dosing. This process of introducing a new drug while discontinuing the older one is called as Cross- titration, kindly discuss about this with your doctor.
After 1 week of being on 5 mg dose / day the dose can raised to 10 mg and then after 2 weeks further up the dose to 20 mg /day as per the discretion of your doctor.
I am hopeful that such sort of replacement of the current Cymbalta with Lexapro will prove to be useful in bringing you out of the clutches of
depression which is present at the moment.
I hope this helps.
Regards.