I've had anxiety most of my life going back to when I was 10 years old. When I was 17 I started having panic attacks. They weren't just occasional panic attacks either. They became a problem all day long. I went a while suffering without telling anyone anything was wrong. I was certain I had a heart problem. Eventually I was diagnosed with panic disorder after requiring a visit to the ER. The ER doctor gave me .5 mg of xanax which calmed me down quick. Later I went to a psychiatrist. Keep in mind this was in 1990 and there wasn't the hysteria surrounding RX drug abuse so doctors prescribing habits were much different. This psychiatrist insisted that every time I had a single panic attack it set my "cure" back by a year. I don't know where he got that idea. Basically every month when I went to see him and I told him I had a panic attack, he would bump my dose up by 2mg/day. I reached a point where I was taking 24mg/day. Yes, you read that right, 12 xanax bars a day. I was at college and the drugs were causing me to have trouble thinking. Somehow I ended up making an "A" in Freshman calculus. I eventually switched doctors and started working to lower my xanax dose. I got down to 7mg/day. Then I lost my job and had to go on Medicaid. My doctor that was prescribing 7mg did not take medicaid so I had to switch doctors. This doctor just dropped me dose from 7mg to 4mg at once. It's left me not doing so well. That was way too much to drop all at one time. I have a friend who has a xanax RX but he doesn't use all of his so I'm supplementing using his leftovers. I know that's not good but at the same time I cannot function on 4mg. I don't know how to end this cycle. Why would this doctor have thought 24mg/day was OK to give me? I was just a teen when this was going on and it was before the internet so patients didn't have the information about the problems of these drugs or what the normal doses should be. I just blindly followed this psychiatrist's word because I didn't know better. Now 26 years later and most doctors refuse to prescribe xanax and the ones that do will not prescribe high doses. I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place.