Thanks for the updates! Did you have reactive tinnitus? I saw you mentioned a reactive whistle, but did you have tinnitus that would get louder with other sounds? Do you have hearing loss? Did the Clomipramine cause a lot of weight gain or side effects like heartburn?
My tinnitus still fluctuates quite a bit, and I swing from being okay with it on quiet days to being deeply depressed.
I only had this whistle. My tinnitus used to get a lot louder with everyday sounds, but luckily, this is rarely the case now. I'd say it varies, but it's much more stable.
I don't have meaningful hearing loss up to 8 kHz; there are a few dips of 10 dB, and that's all.
Clomipramine gave me a few episodes of sweet teeth. But I kind of managed. I don't think I gained any significant amount of weight as I was also always working out 3-4x/week. I did not experience heartburn, but I did experience some weird constipation that slowly improved over many months.
Thank you for the update! It's awesome to hear you're doing so well. So you took Clomipramine for a total of how many months (I understood you're still actively taking 10 mg)? Also, would you be willing to share who your angel of a psychiatrist is? I would like to work with her, even if it's virtually.
If I remember well, I started sometime around July last year? Maybe June? I started with 25 mg, and my maximum dose was 100 mg for two months, then 75 mg extended release until I started to wean off.
My psychiatrist was reluctant to give me Clomipramine; he only did it after I showed him the anecdotes. My psychologist was the angel I mentioned before. Her name is Elke Müller-Soukoup; she has a website you can easily find on Google. She treats about 10-20 cases of hyperacusis per year, on top of being known for therapy for tinnitus in my city.
That used to be the case with me for over 20 years when I had "mild" tinnitus. But when severe tinnitus hit over 2 years ago, I was unhabituated, and that train left the station. My tinnitus is variable in the type of sound as well as volume, and there's no habituating to it at this point by living everyday life, which is difficult. It's impossible to forget for long and gets worse over time. Back when I had mild tinnitus, it worked just to push forward and keep tinnitus out of my mind most of the time. But the variable severe level is a different animal. And antidepressants just made things more painful for me, even after weaning off.
I'm very sorry to hear about your tinnitus getting worse after 20 years. It's a very difficult condition.
I hope your tinnitus stabilizes so you can try to push for a normal life again. When my tinnitus started, not even 80 dB sounds would mask it. Yet, I habituated with the help of antidepressants somehow.
The key is to turn off your emotional response to it. When I was doing my psychological therapy for hyperacusis, I'd often do exercises to stimulate my other senses. For instance, I had a few exercises where I'd have to close my eyes and touch an unknown object she would place in my hands.
I had about 10 minutes to figure it out. I never got it right, but at the end of the exercise, I was asked if I thought about tinnitus during that moment. The funny thing is that I managed to ignore it completely while touching and feeling the object.
That's when the whole "I can habituate" thing kicked in a bit. I'd normally not do such things, but getting that help (psychiatrist and psychologist) took me out of that hole. It doesn't work for everyone, but it worked for me.
Ah, also, getting out of Tinnitus Talk was somewhat harder than habituation. I lurked here every single day, and I fed my brain and body with a lot of negative emotional responses, and you only realize what kind of damage that does later on.
I think one can put tinnitus in the same mental space as an obsession in an OCD-prone brain. The more you stimulate that obsession, the worse it gets. And to me, coming here to read all the stuff was precisely that.
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