When you can't sleep or eat or breathe without feeling like you're about to die, you'll do pretty much anything to make it stop. Benzos really are a miracle drug in that moment.
People who took Xanax to manage anxiety did worse after eight weeks than people who took a placebo.
Huff was going through interdose withdrawal, having mini-withdrawals between doses, which is common among people who take short-acting benzos. But it's hard to tell the difference between these withdrawals and the anxiety benzos treat, as Huff discovered. Even medical professionals often confuse them. "Doctors don't appreciate that [symptoms are] from the withdrawal, not an underlying condition," Finlayson says. "Which is how they got so popular with anxiety."Though Huff's doctor insisted her symptoms were from anxiety, not drug dependence, Huff wanted off the Xanax. Like most people in her situation, she found her way online to the work of Heather Ashton, a retired psychiatrist and professor of psychopharmacology at Newcastle University. Ashton laid out how benzo dependence works and how to get off the drugs in the very accessible Ashton Manual.I found the manual because, like Huff, I couldn't get a doctor to help me, and I was determined to taper myself. The first step was to cross-taper from the short-acting lorazepam to Valium, which has a longer half-life and so is easier to withdraw from. But I found Valium to be way more sedating, which meant I had to struggle through several months when my brain felt like it was wrapped in cotton and I could barely keep my eyes open. Eventually I was able to start reducing my actual dose. I'd make a very small cut to one of the three daily doses, then ride out the resulting wave of symptoms for two to four weeks.Doctors keep right on writing scrips for benzos for years, despite the fact that they're linked to depression, suicide, Alzheimer's disease, and traffic accidents.
JC Curle has also contemplated suicide. She was 25 and in law school when she was prescribed daily Ativan after an accident in 2008. Curle developed a slew of medical problems—urinary tract infections, stomach problems, numb hands and feet, migraines—but whenever her symptoms worsened she was told it was her anxiety coming back and to keep taking the Ativan. Her redemption came in the form of another symptom: She developed OCD. A psychologist treating her noticed that whenever Curle took antibiotics for the UTIs, her compulsions got worse. It turned out that the class of antibiotics she was on, which includes Levaquin and Cipro, blocks the effects of benzos, so Curle was going into sudden withdrawal—with symptoms including anxiety and heightened OCD—whenever she took them.Huff says cancer was nothing compared with Valium detox.
Some experts in the field go further. "General practitioners should stop prescribing them, period," says Allen Frances, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Duke University who chaired the task force that produced the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). "Doctors and patients should be much more aware that the gain from benzos is vanishingly short term but the pain is often lifelong."I wish I'd known, too. It took me ten months to wean off benzos altogether, and now, six months later, I'm still experiencing symptoms of withdrawal. Nothing like what Curle or Huff or other people have gone through, but still no fun. The worst was continuous heart palpitations that made it impossible to sleep, eat, breathe, or function. I didn't want to see a doctor for them because I knew the treatment would involve more medication, and that was the last thing I wanted to start.I began meditating twice a day, to cope with what I hoped would be a temporary symptom. To my surprise, after a few weeks the palpitations diminished, and have stayed manageable as I continue to meditate daily.If I ever have another really bad year, I'll know what to do.Update: 1/12/17: an earlier version of this piece spelled JC Curle's name incorrectly. It has since been corrected."The gain from benzos is vanishingly short term but the pain is often lifelong."