Thanks for your replies, I've been rather unwell from this mess as well as ongoing back pain so I didn't check back in this thread until now.

The decrease by 0.5 mg was not supposed to occur every day. I was supposed to stay on 1.5 indefinitely. But this is a moot point because I'm back at 2 mg. I had a very erratic day 1 week ago and the next day (Tuesday the 11th) I was such a basket case I couldn't go to work. I emailed my psychiatrist and got an auto-reply saying he was out of the office for a week. I was kind of angry he didn't tell me he was going on vacation, but I didn't say anything because I've been having temper control issues lately and I didn't want to "bite the hand that feeds", so to speak. So since I was effectively on my own (I will never call the "on call" person because I am not suicidal or clinical), I made an executive decision to go back to 2 because my quality of life was better before the taper, despite the fatigue. He ended up writing back later that day telling me to do the same thing.

In the meantime, I am very slowly introducing Cymbalta (a non-therapeutic baby dose). I am now on nothing except Xanax and I can tell because the difference in my mood is not good. I checked in with my pdoc again today and all he said was to go up to the full dose of Cymbalta and continue with the 2mg XR. He didn't respond to anything else in my message, where I also said I am in great distress in the mornings and there's no thinking, talking, exercising, or breathing my way out of this panic upon waking up; or that I felt kind of hopeless. The instruction to proceed with the full dose of Cymbalta must have been his response to everything.

He must be busy coming back from vacation or something. Oh well.