Mental Health Anxiety Disorders MEGA thread

^ Wouldn't you rather be dependent than have horrible anxiety for the rest of your life?

My thoughts exactly- the answer is absolutely. If it wasn't for my benzodiazepine prescription I'd be missing out on so much.
 
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Agreed :)

I can now get off an SSRI and an anti-psychotic and stop drinking and cut down on weed and of course go out of my house due to a low dose of a benzo
 
Clozapine has some gabaergic action; its a pretty heavy ap. I have worries too, man. Now can you go out of your house? Is it that bad? Benzos should only be a last resort.
 
^Yeah, I can go out. It's just that I have ten different worries each day, so it's really annoying. When I've gotten rid of one worry, the second one comes, and then the third one and so on ... and then repeat. :\
 
well it took courage but i asked my doc to reduce my clonazepam dose from 2mg twice daily to 1mg twice daily. we will see if the zoloft (50mg) can pick up the slack...
 
drscience, you probably already know this, but be super careful cutting back on the clonazepam. Go very slowly. Last summer I tapered off a starting dose of 1mg, and it took 4 months. At first I cut back too quickly, and had two episodes of nonstop vomiting, and weeks of horrible nausea. Hope you have a better experience.
 
thank you very much for the advice :)

hopefully the 110mg methadone wlll offset the benzo withdrawal :/
 
I have been on citalopram (40mg/day) for a couple of years. I also have been on Clonazapam (1mg/day) for about the same amount of time. I tapered off of the Clonazapam last summer (I didn't like that it made me so forgetful) but after being off of it for about 5 months, my anxiety was unbearable and I went back on it. I am wondering if the citalopram is really doing me any good. It sounds like some of you have been able to treat your anxiety with just a benzo. Is that true, or have I misunderstood your posts? I am always interested in taking less meds, but not at the expense of my quality of life.
 
Alright, this might be a little long so bear with me.

My pdoc is scripting me benzos since 2007, at first it was clonazepam up to 3mg and I had initiated a taper by myself with him because I was finding myself to be yes, anxiety-less but also emotion-less and I didn't feel like being a zombie so around 2010 we did a taper with valium and I dimished my benzo consumption by 66% since I am on 20mg of valium since then, I couldn't completely taper because of "psychosocial" things namely following world politics too much to the point where I could do nothing but worry myself sick so we decided to keep me at 20mg of valium. Until now, because last year I went into a methadone clinic because pain doctors, regular doctors and the final thing that made get myself on methadone, my provider starterd to hike the price of all his pills, may it be Dilaudid or HM Contin, I was reallllly addicted to hydromorphone by then. Obviously the detox center attempted to ween me off valium because its part of their protocol but 3 doctors there told me that if my pdoc thought I should stay on valium, which I had a large tolerance by then and was pretty much only taking as not to have withdrawal symptoms, they were ok with it. So yes I am on both methadone and valium, cos i had a huge tolerance already it was impossible methadone would make me stop breathing, and yep it didn't, this is june, a good 9 months later.

So for the first time in almost 7 years of treatment with benzos with my pdoc who knows I don't respond well to all antidepressants we tried anyway, I had to call him, shortly, maybe a week after I had seen him and where he had scripted me 15 additional .5mg xanax for when I have panic attacks, I would often get in trouble where I would have one of those and 30mg of val that day and you can guess easily what happened then. I called him because, hell, it will be a lesson on my impatience, i could only have my valium script renewed the next day, which is in the 2 day window the government insurance will let people renew earlier, because, as I had just seen the pdoc on the 22nd of may, and I renew the vals on the 6th of each month, when I had seen him I was already gonna be lacking valium the next time, even if i took all 15 xanax he had scripted me till them. Unable to endure the withdrawal I was in for 7 days anymore, i called him, so he called me back after his meetings and I told him, "please doc, this is the first time in 7 years of treatment, i'm calling so you can tell the pharmacy its fine to renew the diazepam, i lost my last 8 days in the bus". That last part is a lie but I had to say that.

Now when went to pick my valium, the pharmacist goes, he renewed your 60 monthly 10mgs but he cancelled all remaining renewals (which were 10 more at the time...fuck). So till then I had been living in anger, desperation, sick of waiting to know why he did that, i had an urgently placed appointment with him yesterday. And he went on going that the methadone clinic had "weened you off the valium" -but it was way too fast, not Dr Ashton-style like I decided to lower my benzo intake at that previous tapering i had done with you before, so you fucking renewed my old script right when I called you and told you about it, telling you about how suicidal I am. Which I didn't have time to mention because he started to rant that I am closed to any other alternative to benzos, which I never was, it's just that everything he's given me before made me feel tons of times worse than what I was already feeling pain-free or made it so that the benzos didn't even do a thing, with the speedier AD's. And he was going like "look at you you got problems speaking straight" it wasnt that, I was there trying to keep my cool because otherwise I would have been torturing this man by now and it would have started with verbally abusing him. So i told him all about how when I had initiated a taper in the past and how I had succeeded finally and he went alright, i'm gonna keep giving you these, but no monthly refills, every 15 days now from on, and only renewals for 3 months because we will see you again then and also only if you Remeron a chance.

That's an Antidepressant I thought about before but due to all the fattening effects I hear it has, I will not be giving much of a chance, I'll pretend to take it. And at least the idiot didn't cancel my xanax script too. I hope you can see and understand why I am extremely vindicative at him and how I feel totally wronged and mind raped, especially since not even a month before he had given me disability for 6 months, put in as treatment diazepam 10mg bid, alprazolam .5mg prn and seroquel 50mg before bed if insomnia. That guy had his mind changed by a pharmacist telling a lot of things I had already told him but since it came from that pharmacist I guess it means more than when I'm talking. At least what contributed to him not to ween me off immediately, which I told him before that like last time, it will only be initiated when I do it, only then can it work, and it'll be a mg per mg on a monthly basis. What these fuckers dont realize is that I'm able to have always taken a low amount of methadone thanks to valium and that it makes me able to reduce my dose monthly easily. I gotta remind him of that when I see him in 3 months. At least he changed attitude after explaining to him my victory over clonazepam and a lot of my own created stress and also when I told him without those benzos I would be right now dead and would have never accomplished all of the progress I have done in a year, but still... Whatever the fuck just happened to me is a mystery, I can't make fucking sense of what these persons do in my back but it's certainly not for my own good like they all claim. This has wrecked me mentally so badly that 2mg of xanax, 10mg of val, .2 mg of clonidine, 100mg of hydroxyzine isn't able to take my mind off of. Oh yeah he also cancelled my fucking seroquel, i'll have that given to me by another doctor for sure because seroquel 25-50mg small sleeping doses help like nothing else.

And fuck this mirtazapine, I don't want to have my mood altered, if you're actually happy in this world, it's you who has a problem, not me.
 
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sorry you had to go through all that B.S. T-REAL-O, doctors always afraid we're going to OD.

I take mirtazepine, does it have bad side effects? I take it for sleeg

50mg zoloft
1mg twice daily clonazepam
110mg methadone daily
30mg mirtazepine at bedime
 
sorry you had to go through all that B.S. T-REAL-O, doctors always afraid we're going to OD.

I take mirtazepine, does it have bad side effects? I take it for sleeg

50mg zoloft
1mg twice daily clonazepam
110mg methadone daily
30mg mirtazepine at bedime

Only for sleep ? hm, well during the times I was still just chipping and being lucky in my scores of really cheap pharms I was given the starter dose, the big purple ones and I took it before bed, thing is I woke up in an overly good mood even if my fridge was almost totally empty and I had no weed (it was still my doc then). I had managed to eat breakfast but I just couldn't have my hunger satiated.


And you're also on methadone, I keep reading about how it reduces the effects of methadone.

Where I was after may 22nd where I thought everything was going great (with the prospects of finishing my BA in networking in late august added to it was when I was on :

10mg valium bid
51mg methadone
50 to 100mg hydroxyzine (simply da best antihistamine and an actual anxiety reliever + done booster_
tagamet (makes my dose in the morning hit hard so I can go back to bed right after taking it, seems to shorten the effects a bit though but eh..)
.1 clonidine bid (currently reducing my done dosage slowly) see I'm currently weening myself off methadone, i'm not gonna be doing both substances at once, no way, the largest dose I got up to is 60mg and considering the dilaudid IV habit I had (32 to 56mg a day), it is because of the diazepam, they cannot understand that the benzos make it so I take less methadone, and it's not a for profit clinic, this is canada ffs!
25-50mg seroquel at bed time
.5mg xanax prn

I still have all that...in theory, its just that i'll have to re-explain/fiddle around the story so it makes it seem like I had told him I had been to ORT. Also the whole removing the seroquel for the remeron...not sure why one would want to do that, he already knows of my health issues (there are many, the physical kind,thats why i got into opiates so late in my druggie carreer..." and that I shouldn't stuff my face, like the remeron will make me do. The thing is he knows that, I called him after I was told I would be weened off my valium way too fast and in a dangerous manner, and he said alright, these people should have contacted me before doing this with you, you're one of the rare cases where continually taking of your benzos is warranted as you never had trouble with refill dates in all these years and you did show improvement in your life. He even went on to say "these people didn't take your tolerance into account, neither did they take into account that you never bought benzos off the streets, they are dangers to public safety".

Did I speak to his robot he uses for when he's overwhelmed by work ? (I know the poor guy is, as a matter of fact).
 
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I have gotten sort of socially awkward over the past few years, for reasons I dont know. Does social awkwardness fit under social anxiety? When Im on a good dose of benzo, the awkwardness clears right up. I can talk to whomever I want, quite comfortably. But as soon as the benzo wears off, Im back to plain ol me. Does it sound like I have social anxiety? Or some other issue to look deeper at? And has anyone found a way to cope without the use of narcotic (even if only barely) benzos?

I dont have fond memories of nightmares and lack of sleep/energy when kicking alprazolam...
 
As some of you know I have posted about how I had been fighting my come down for the past 9 months. I have decided to go back to the doctor today after work to inform him about this symptom that has been constantly bothering me for months. He checked up everything and it turns out that I do have anxiety. For months I was in denial and never believed the doctors I went to and told them that I'm not going crazy and that I really feel there is something wrong with me. I guess it was hard to accept because I was never an anxious person. I guess that after that night when I took way too much mdma I triggered an anxiety and now it has surfaced. I wasn't prescribed any medication so I guess I just have to learn how to cope with it. The doctor told me to try to forget about it and live my life. I wish it was that easy.
 
As some of you know I have posted about how I had been fighting my come down for the past 9 months. I have decided to go back to the doctor today after work to inform him about this symptom that has been constantly bothering me for months. He checked up everything and it turns out that I do have anxiety. For months I was in denial and never believed the doctors I went to and told them that I'm not going crazy and that I really feel there is something wrong with me. I guess it was hard to accept because I was never an anxious person. I guess that after that night when I took way too much MDMA I triggered an anxiety and now it has surfaced. I wasn't prescribed any medication so I guess I just have to learn how to cope with it. The doctor told me to try to forget about it and live my life. I wish it was that easy.

Aw Maya <3 You're certainly not alone sweetie. I've been dealing with anxiety for 7 years, and some members much, much longer.

Like your doctor mentioned, illicit drugs can trigger underlying psychological issues in those who have not yet had them "blossom". For example, marijuana triggered my anxiety around December to even worse than it was before then, which is why I have been using benzos so much now- to try to cope with it.

Mindfulness can be helpful, but it has never really worked for me, neither has meditation. As ironic as it is, I always get anxious when I try to practice either one of the two because thinking about my emotions triggers me more as well as being "alone". *sigh*. I'm still looking for alternate ways to cope, which I think many of us are trying to do also!

And your doctor saying to forgot about it and live your life? What the hell is his problem? He is obviously not someone who suffers from anxiety because that was so heartless to say.
 
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