Please discuss your experiences with Clonazepam here, especially experiences going off it. On other threads, people have expressed widely different experiences going off it, from no trouble at all, to horrible prolonged difficulty.
I am interested in knowing the particulars of the difficulty, the dosages involved, the sense of whether the drug was "needed" or not.
My personal experience in about six months of taking a smallish dose, is that I can skip it without a problem (that I notice) but I prefer to take it, as my sleep is much less interrupted when I take it than when I don't. I don't feel "addicted" to it at all.
I recently started taking a slightly higher dose and found my sleep was tremendously better--but worry that the more I take, the harder to come off it in the long run.(I still take less than 1mg.)
However, Cheney's theory makes a lot of sense to me: that people for whom it is neurologically necessary (in terms of excitatory neurotoxicity) there is no risk of addiction, but there may be a "dependency"--precisely because it is filling a need. When that need has been satisfied through treatment for the underlying CFS issue, going off it should not be a problem.
I'd love to know peoples' experiences with this, especially what the withdrawal feelings are like; since this illness already has so much irritability, tired/wired, sicky achy stuff already, I can't tell if the days I skip it are any different from the days I take it! Especially because the days I skip it I don't sleep well...
Please pipe in with your stories
I am interested in knowing the particulars of the difficulty, the dosages involved, the sense of whether the drug was "needed" or not.
My personal experience in about six months of taking a smallish dose, is that I can skip it without a problem (that I notice) but I prefer to take it, as my sleep is much less interrupted when I take it than when I don't. I don't feel "addicted" to it at all.
I recently started taking a slightly higher dose and found my sleep was tremendously better--but worry that the more I take, the harder to come off it in the long run.(I still take less than 1mg.)
However, Cheney's theory makes a lot of sense to me: that people for whom it is neurologically necessary (in terms of excitatory neurotoxicity) there is no risk of addiction, but there may be a "dependency"--precisely because it is filling a need. When that need has been satisfied through treatment for the underlying CFS issue, going off it should not be a problem.
I'd love to know peoples' experiences with this, especially what the withdrawal feelings are like; since this illness already has so much irritability, tired/wired, sicky achy stuff already, I can't tell if the days I skip it are any different from the days I take it! Especially because the days I skip it I don't sleep well...
Please pipe in with your stories