Benzodiazepines helpful but no treatment? [POLL]

[bad1080]

i have read time and time again how PwME feel tremendous relief from benzos and now after having experienced it myself for the first time i have to agree. i was given 0.5mg lorazepam by my dentist and usually after a visit all i can do is lay down but this time i was able to get some groceries afterwards without much effort.

i felt normal, the world felt normal, not everything was too much for me. the weather wasn't too hot, the street wasn't too loud, the sun wasn't too bright. my brain felt calm, it was like somebody has turned the world down from a constant 150% to a regular 100% for my nervous system. this relief continued into the next day where at the end i could feel the clouds engulf my brain again. and the best part: all of it without a single side-effect(*, see edit below)!?!

i know about the addiction potential of benzos (and the habituation effect) so i understand the treatment can't be to just take benzos everyday but i am wondering how hasn't it lead to a treatment approach or even just a study? i don't know for how many of us they are working like that (hence the poll) but even if it's just a subgroup that could be helped it should be studied!?

(*)edit: i wanna add the fact i had a looming sense of dread yesterday, which is nothing i usually deal with and it probably came from just that one pill of lorazepam. if that's the case i can understand how profoundly unfun a benzo withdrawal would be...

 

[kushami]

I know it wouldn’t be ideal, but perhaps you could take a small dose occasionally. Maybe even less than 0.5mg would still be helpful.

I don’t know enough to know whether that would be fairly safe in terms of negative effects and loss of effectiveness over time though.

Of course, the natural tempatation would then be to take it every day, because who wants to feel normal once a month and terrible the rest of the time.

I had a similar thing with steroids. I gave into the temptation of wanting to feel better (not for any particular occasion or need), pushed my luck, and now they don’t seem to work for me any more except in the normal way they work for generally healthy people, e.g. to calm down a rash.

 

[Mary]

@bad1080 - I think there are safer alternatives. Benzos are one of the hardest drugs to get off of - they can cause tremendous harm that lasts a very long time and doctors seem to be clueless about how to do a taper withdrawal safely.

I suggest you try inositol - it's cheap, safe and can be very calming. I use it at night for sleep but I know people with anxiety who have taken it during the day and get good results. And in my (and others I know) experience it works quite quickly.

I took 1 mg lorazepam for sleep for around 11 years. I loved it for sleep, actually I started with 0.5 mg and eventually went up to 1 mg and realized at the 11 year mark that it was no longer doing anything for me and I needed to get off of it. And it took 8 months of a very slow taper to get off of it. I'd be back on it in a flash, for sleep, if it were not so addicting and the long term effects were not so bad. If you think things are bad now, they would be that much worse after being on a benzo for awhile and then trying to stop it.

 

[Rufous McKinney]

i felt normal, the world felt normal, not everything was too much for me. the weather wasn't too hot, the street wasn't too loud, the sun wasn't too bright. my brain felt calm, it was like somebody has turned the world down from a constant 150% to a regular 100% for my nervous system.

wow

a freaky reminder of how Not Normal we are most of the time.

 

[bad1080]

something i just added to the OP:
i wanna add the fact i had a looming sense of dread yesterday, which is nothing i usually deal with and it probably came from just that one pill of lorazepam. if that's the case i can understand how profoundly unfun a benzo withdrawal would be...

@kushami why did you delete your reply about the vasodilation? it seemed relevant to the conversation.

@Mary thanks for the recommendation, i ordered some inositol and will report back

@Rufous McKinney

 

[JadeD]

I’ve just started clonazepam 0.5mg at night as I’m having a big neuropathic flare after immunotherapy (to be expected) for my small fibre neuropathy. It has greatly improved my vestibular migraine symptoms so that I can actually move about in my house without feeling like a drunk. It doesn’t stop everything but it has certainly turned the dial way down. I assume too much glutamate and it’s opposing this with gaba increase.

My neurologist obviously only wants me on it temporarily to help calm the nervous system down during the flare but nothing has touched my severe vestibular migraine symptoms since Covid set them off in December 2022.

Note I have ME, pots, SFN and chronic migraines so have many things overlapping. The clonazepam doesn’t stop pem so even if I can do a little more now due to less dizziness all of my other symptoms are unchanged in severity.