My nephew is not a virgin to drugs, street and prescription. His dad/my brother is a schizophrenic so there are plenty of drugs around that my bro shares with his son and my nephew grew up around. He likes his weed and whatever else but yet he never did like ritalin/speed-like stuff. He's a bad case of ADHD so ritalin is prescribed but he mostly resist taking them. For one his father used to be on massive doses of ritalin, prescribed by this doc and he help a good job as a giant int'l bank's top programmer. He was not, per se, normal, but the company worked around his condition because he could get things done amazingly well. When the doc got busted for prescribing unheard of ritalin to many of his patients, all that stopped and he toppled down into the gutter. Now he does everything and anything he can get anyway he can. My nephew grew up seeing his dad and is disgusted and avoids ritalin in general. Funny he does other known and unknown drugs his dad does just fine.
Anyhow, recently, my nephew got the nasty flu. He went ER and when the ER doc noticed him totally having ADHD/Anxiety antics, he prescribed Alprazolam 0.5mg, I think 10 of them. He took all of them pretty much at once. I saw him walking around like a zombie barely able to slur out any words. At the time I didn't know what he took. Well, when he went back to the ER a couple of days later, they gave him more. We took control of the alprazolams and gave him one at a time... one or two a day.
Now another two days later we found him sobbing and blurting out some nonsensical story about how he's paranoid to death, having too much thoughts, having mental breakdown, just sobbing- totally unusal, disoriented, having anxiety to the max, difficulty breathing-imagined he thinks, unable to sleep because his too afraid (he has a serious chronic problem sleeping and he takes clonidine for that with marginal success), wearing plastic gloves saying his afraid about the gems his hands etc etc.
I need to help him calm down because I think his going to go full blown schizoid or something. I came to conclusion his symptoms are uncannily similar with heroin withdrawal (based on whatever little I know of about that)... I don't think he's much experience with benzos. He takes 20mg ritalin SR or two a day for his ADHD. He also takes clonidine before he attempts to sleep. We went to see (had a prior appointment) his psych doc and he was appalled that ER gave him benzos.
What do think is going on with him? Is my guess in the ballpark? Can someone have this serious withdrawal symptoms with the amount he took? How can we calm him down?
TIA
Anyhow, recently, my nephew got the nasty flu. He went ER and when the ER doc noticed him totally having ADHD/Anxiety antics, he prescribed Alprazolam 0.5mg, I think 10 of them. He took all of them pretty much at once. I saw him walking around like a zombie barely able to slur out any words. At the time I didn't know what he took. Well, when he went back to the ER a couple of days later, they gave him more. We took control of the alprazolams and gave him one at a time... one or two a day.
Now another two days later we found him sobbing and blurting out some nonsensical story about how he's paranoid to death, having too much thoughts, having mental breakdown, just sobbing- totally unusal, disoriented, having anxiety to the max, difficulty breathing-imagined he thinks, unable to sleep because his too afraid (he has a serious chronic problem sleeping and he takes clonidine for that with marginal success), wearing plastic gloves saying his afraid about the gems his hands etc etc.
I need to help him calm down because I think his going to go full blown schizoid or something. I came to conclusion his symptoms are uncannily similar with heroin withdrawal (based on whatever little I know of about that)... I don't think he's much experience with benzos. He takes 20mg ritalin SR or two a day for his ADHD. He also takes clonidine before he attempts to sleep. We went to see (had a prior appointment) his psych doc and he was appalled that ER gave him benzos.
What do think is going on with him? Is my guess in the ballpark? Can someone have this serious withdrawal symptoms with the amount he took? How can we calm him down?
TIA
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