coming off clonazepam/first post

[Ado]

I started taking clonazepam after my therapist recommended I see a phych for the extreme stress I've been having. In the last 12 weeks I've had a cancer scare with my mom (everything was ok biopsy negative), death of a close family friend, death of a friend by suicide, a letter from the IRS saying I owe them money, someone that I'm super close to tell me that they only want to be friends, and I'm finishing my senior year of art school and thesis. You can see how this plus GAD + panic attacks was not going so hot for me.

So at first It works great, I can think clearly for the first time in I don't know how long, I can sleep again. Pretty much it's doing what it says on the tin. Here's the problem, within DAYS it's not working as well as it use to. I was started on .5 mg with one at night one during the day as needed instructions. Initially it work great even at low doses. But that stopped quickly. I had to double what I was taking after the first four days to get the same not drowning feeling. Within the next week I'd doubled again. This only got my up to 2 mg per day so not to bad but I'm only getting the effect I used to get from .25 mg so I'm getting concerned and I call my psych. She ups my meds and tells me to stop taking them as soon as I can after the really stressful senior show opening that week. For the senior show I take I'm not quite sure how much but I think it was 3-4 mg in an 8-10 hour span and I was pretty dang high. A few hours later though I start having this crash. Like I start feeling like the worst trash on earth and like I'm a drag on everyone around me and these terrors and suddenly afraid of the dark and my head hurts and it just feels like hell. I had a friend with me who helped me (same one who shot me down a few days ago but yeah) and made sure I was ok and made me tea and held me till I fell asleep at like 4am.

After that lovely episode I decided to CT off my meds. I'd only been on them for like 2 weeks so I thought that there was no way it could be a problem. First 24 hours I felt totally fine I felt better with one of my major stressors out of the way and it was all good. Second day in my pupils dilate the fuck out, I start having mood swings, I lose all appetite for food completely, I feel really thirsty, I start to feel hot and cold, I start having these problems focusing, putting words together starts getting really hard. At this point I'm trying to get stuff done at school and I decide to go home to just sleep it off or whatever. By the time I get home and stuff I start having mussel pain and joint type pain and I remember that WD can cause seizures and stuff so I'm freaked out enough that I take 1 mg right away and go to bed. I take .5 in the morning and I still feel like shit but it's not so bad.

I'm now tapering off at a rate of .25 mg every three days because that's what I have the meds for. I feel like I have the flu and I keep crying all the time. It's so hard for me to focus and I hate it.

And it gets better, I go see my psych and she tells me that I'm not in WD because I can't have developed a dependency already and that it's not possible and all of this is all in my head. I've never been a hypochondriac but it's kinda messing with me here. This isn't all in my head right? I feel like I'm in pain and it's always worse between doses I'm in WD right?

I'm sorry I've never done any drugs before and I'm freaking out a bit sorry for the long rant any suggestions or help would be fantastic.

I'm sorry everything just feels so hard and I spent an hour crying on my shower floor and I don't know what's wrong with me.

-Ado

 

[Allein]

Hi Ado and welcome to Bluelight

First off, you are quite right to take the approach of tapering off these type of drugs The Ashton manual provides a wealth of information on the issue of long term use. 2 weeks use is unlikely to cause seizures if you CT but a little at a time will still aid the process.

Rebound anxiety is a common and almost inevitable consequence of using these types of drugs IME and given you are already in distress it's not surprising you're having a hard time, although I appreciate that those words are of little comfort.

Benzos, like clonaz do nothing but provide a short term break from your stress and worries, in themselves they are no solution, your rapidly escalating dosage suggest to me that you were chasing the initial oblivion of a dose rather than the residual effects that carry on for many hours after the dose. Just like someone developing a problem with alcohol this approach could lead to serious dependence and become a problem in itself, on top of the ones you had initially.

Your sadness and difficult emotional state seem understandable given all the things that have happened recently and you also suggest that you have a history of GAD and panic attacks.

Have you sought any talking therapies ? counselling of some sort may well provide the support that you haven't found in those pills. I would contact you psych and seek further support, whilst I would support the idea of getting off those pills it needs to be hand in hand with some strategy do deal with the reason you started taking them in the first place.

All my best wishes to you, things will get better in time and you will not always feel this way

 

[Ado]

Thank you very mush for your kind words. I've been seeing a therapist for almost two years and it has done absolute wonders for my GAD and I was having a stretch of almost 5 months without a panic attack. I'm going to see her on Monday.

I don't think I was trying to get the feeling of the first dose though? I mean the first one I took I had like the feeling of complete euphoria for almost an hour and I pretty much knew that was never going to happen again. I took them as little as possible my rule of thumb was if I wasn't teetering on a panic attack/ feel like couldn't breath then I didn't need it. This could however be me just kinda lying to myself.

I do have a completely jacked reaction to chemicals though. The one other time I have taken drugs it was for impacted wisdom teeth removal. I did not react to nitris oxide the way you were supposed to and after I woke up and was mobile after sedation so fast that I scared the shit out of the nurse who's exact words were on the lines of "You should not even able able to stand right now! What are you doing? Go sit down right now!" I was prescribed opioids for this, got absolutely zero buzz from it like not even a worm feeling just slightly less unbearable pain and developed a tolerance so fast it stopped having any effect at all within a few days. Like I went from "wow the dose makes me dizzy and removes all filter from my mouth to my brain but also makes this pain a thing I can deal with" too "I took three times the prescribed dose I'm clear headed and the pain is still so bad I'm curling up in a little ball of pain".

The is also some history of addiction in my family. So I don't know if it's physiology punching me in the gut here or just predisposition to abuse chemicals.

 

[THECATINTHEHAT]

Your shrink is talking shit, it's absolutely possible for someone to develop dependancy in that time.

Just keep doing what you're doing, remember that it is most likely because of the benzos and will clear up eventually and you should be ok pretty soon.

 

[Ado]

Thanks omen I feel like talking to my psych messed me up more than anything because I started to feel like maybe this was all just me you know? She gave me this whole I did my phd on benzos and this condisending don't believe what you read on the internet speach. She was the one who told me that I should be able to CT with no problems at all.

 

[Allein]

^^
You know yourself better than any doc, certainly in this respect anyhow, I agree with Owen and regardless CT seems stupid when you can do a short taper and avoid potential problems

You may misunderstood my meaning or I'm just assuming things based on my own experience of benzo dependence. What I was referring to was the difference between the first few hours after dosing and the fact that the half life of Clonaz can be as much as 50Hrs.

Tolerance can build really fast if you increase dosage, the rule of diminishing returns really applies, I guess its quite possible that some peoples GABA receptors behave differently to others, I'm no doctor.

I've had a number of substance abuse issues and got into serious problems with illicit Diazepam so my view of benzos is somewhat tainted, my advice to someone with a propensity to enter into habitual drug use would be to avoid Benzos, I'm better able to cope with my anxiety and depression without them, although I accept that some are able to use them sparingly to good effect. Unlike your doctor I don't believe we are all wired up the same.

 

[Speed King]

I have been on clonazepam for 7+ years, with a dose as high as 4 mg a day, prescribed, 14mg +, getting high, and have had to come off way too fast from misuse, plus a ignorant doctor who doesn't understand how a taper works. The point is, it's long acting, so you have time to prepare to come down, hard or not. You will survive, just use this bad trip/ scare/ etc, to learn your lesson now because yes, it does suck balls during a major withdrawal combined with stress. Chin up buddy. Btw, you wanna hear some shit, I was diagnosed with Hodgkins Malignant lymphoma last week, and I'm not tripping at all.

 

[Ado]

@Allein I got your meaning and it's totally cool, I react to chemicals in really not normal ways so assuming based on norms and your experience totally makes sense and I didn't take any offence or anything. That said. I'm never planning on EVER taking any more benzos EVER. There is no way in hell. They make me feel great and like I don't have GAD or social anxiety or insomnia, and then they stop working and also fuck with my ability to remember stuff and focus. No, I have found my drug of choice and I'm never touching that sinkhole again.

And thanks for the support all around I really appreciate it. I just have to get though three more finals and then I can take some total down time to come off.

@Speed Dude that completely sucks I'm sorry. Hope things work out for you take care of yourself.

 

[adder]

I took clonazepam for 6 years and before that I had taken various other benzodiazepines for 3 years. Eventually I luckily quit last year. It's been a little bit over 4 months and I feel mostly fine other than the old problems that I need to fix. During the first month it was incredibly overwhelming both mentally and physically, then in the second month I was just shaky and the mental mess-up continued, it's like being on the edge of psychosis, and I think it's still the primary cause of going psychotic at times. I'm far from being happy, I've just realized how much I actually need to feel accomplished and peaceful, it's very easy to slip again at this point, but I can now also understand why I've started taking drugs in general. The good thing is that there wasn't a single day that I would think about taking a benzodiazepine, I guess I was mostly physically dependent as I started at 6 mg of clonazepam and never really increased it on a longer basis.

Anyway, I can now appreciate little things much more. I realized that clonazepam had been making things much worse than they really were and it was exacerbating the problems that I used it for. I am introverted, but I was a talkative kid and I liked spending time with other people, then one event and later drugs made me a terribly anxious person. Now everything turned over, I realized that other people are just people and most of them are actually much weaker than I am.

You're going to be fine once you get to that point. There's nothing to be ashamed of. It took me years to turn the table, but in the end I'm here. I was pretty much a wreck already and on some days I literally thought that it would be my last day. So you can as well swim your way up to the surface of the ocean.

 

[THECATINTHEHAT]

^^
You know yourself better than any doc,

This. All the objective studying and theorising in the world is no substitute for your subjective experience.

For a psychiatrist to be saying it's impossible for you to have developed tolerance is poor practice. They should have said it's very unlikely and that studies suggest that it's unlikely. It's basic academic practice to accept the fact that there are no aboslutes in any any branch of study, just theories that have increasingly large bodies of evidence behind them (some of which are then totally disproved).

 

[sub21lime]

I was on clonazepam for 4-5 months, 2mgs a day. 1mg in the morning then 1mg at night. I pretty much stopped cold turkey and luckily didn't go through hell. I remember not sleeping for 7-10 days and having rebound anxiety. I also remember feeling really off, hard to explain. Buuutt it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be!
Good luck to you!