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Comment by gavinray | Hacker News Reader

  > Having kicked opiates cold turkey in the past, I felt nostalgic for three simple days of traditional nausea, sweatiness, and bone-deep ache.

I am one of few people stupid enough to have, at one point, been addicted to and subsequently withdrawn from, almost everything but alcohol.

There is no way to explain the hell on earth that is benzo/GABA-ergic drug withdrawal, and I would not wish it on my worst enemy. It is an order of magnitude more intense than opiate withdrawals, and the timeline is weeks/months rather than days.

Like the author, I managed to quit via a year-long Ashton protocol taper.

The irony is that benzos were the one class of drugs I wasn't abusing for recreation. I was using mega-doses of Etizolam to cope with PTSD flashbacks, and only discovered I had become physically addicted after flushing it all and winding up in the ER.

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> weeks/months rather than days.

Weeks to months is actually pretty fast for benzo withdrawl IME.

For me it took nearly an entire year to feel completely normal. I was only taking 10mg diazepam per day (not a big dose).

To anyone on the journey now... hang in there. It feels never ending. But I promise you... you will wake up one day and feel completely normal.

how long were you taking them?

14 months. (Usually) not every day, maybe 3-4 times a week. And 8 months to taper off. How long it takes to taper depends on the level of discomfort you’re willing to tolerate.

Diazepam half life is so long that dependence can develop even when not taking it every day.

Edit: and I totally believe there are people who can take the same amount as me and not become dependent as easily as I did. Everyone is different

> Diazepam half life is so long

This is a desirable trait when tapering a dose. It reduces hour-to-hour blood level variation which reduces the whole up-down of alternating between euphoria and rebound anxiety. Idea is to target a constant level which is tolerable and slowly lower it.

The article implies this (a Valium taper is mentioned) but I don't think it outright states it so I'll say that for anyone who is addicted to a fast-acting one like Xanax or Klonopin - a switch to Valium might help.

My taper was nearly one year. Ten years off now.

'Discomfort' is one of those words that technically encapsulates the feeling, but feels too weak to use. Kind of like 'anxiety.' It runs the gamut between slight nervousness to abject terror.

I was on Ativan for acute trauma avoidance (to try to prevent PTSD) for about 6 weeks. I hate taking medicating and stopped it cold turkey. It took me another 3 weeks or so to feel "normal" again and the withdrawal period was so phenomenally physically uncomfortable and panic-inducing that I will never take it again for any reason. I spent most of that time thinking I was going to die. In the long run, I guess it helped with PTSD avoidance (which seems to be one of the things they do now), but even just thinking back to those few weeks makes my skin crawl.

I did everything under the sun, got sober, did klonopin for a bit to help with anxiety and was lucky -blessedly lucky that it didn't do too much for me.

My best friend was not so lucky and was on ativan and had the worst experience getting off of it, and had years of problems with it because it aggravated the anxiety she was already experiencing.

Benzodiazipenes (sp?) has it's medicinal uses, particularly with injury or surgery; but yeah -if you're not very careful and very lucky it's hell to get off of if you end up dependant on it.

I'm very glad to see the word is getting out and is more wide-spread. I hope that it doesn't result in a complete freakout the way that oxycotin did. It's vital when it's needed, hopefully it will remain available.

What gets me, as someone with chronic anxiety, is that they've only come up with one thing that reliably works -and it's this. It feels like the research stopped in the nineties or so. I often wonder wtf about that.

Lavender extract is about as effective as klonopin according to a study.

I use it to deal with my anxiety.

I don’t trust benzos in the slightest. Especially so after reading the horrors of this thread.

It sounds a fantastic claim, but I'll read up a bit on it so thanks.

Must admit though I've not had any drug - prescribed or illicit - that had a more immediate and powerful effect on my anxiety than a benzodiazepine (granted I've not tried heroin before!).

Thankfully they are incredibly hard to get prescribed where I live due too all the above associated dangers.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12500767/ - this is the study the GP is talking about.

Also: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19962288/

    > A multi-center, double-blind, randomised study of the Lavender oil preparation Silexan in comparison to Lorazepam for generalized anxiety disorder

FYI: CalmAid a brand name for Silexan, and Ativan is a brand name for Lorazepam.

Lavender works but it takes a long time to build up to a therapeutic serum level.. like a couple weeks to a month. Once you're there it's lovely stuff. Look at Calm Aid.

It seems like benzos are only suitable to be used as a short term solution, but in typical human's of capitalism fashion, we use them as a long term solution since the long term cost is usually far beyond the horizon of the next financial quarter.

There are other drugs since the 90s that are effective for anxiety, but they're either way more subtle and take longer to work than benzos (SSRIs, SNRIs, lavender pills, buspar and derivatives) or don't have the same withdrawal syndrome but come with a much worse package of side effects (quetiapine and other antipsychotics).

I have had clinically significant anxiety since I was a young child, and in the end, treating other mental illnesses effectively (I developed bipolar 1 in my late teens) and exercising very regularly seems to pull my baseline level of neuroticism down to within the normal range. If I get good cardio in, usually an outdoor run, 3 days a week, I feel normal.

SSRIs, SNRIs and I think buster do have withdrawal symptoms that can be as severe as benzos.

I'd say a mild benzo withdrawal and a severe SSRI withdrawal can overlap, but SSRI withdrawal doesn't give people seizures or last for years.

I took buspar for like 4 years because it basically didn't scramble my brains the way other anti-depressants worked and I could say I was 'cooperating' with treatment -despite getting no benefit from it.

I had no issues getting off of it; not to say that other people don't either -they very well might.

About a decade ago, my doctor prescribed me Klonopin for sleepwalking. 0.5mg daily.

After two or three months I discontinued it. He suggested to just stop, but I thought better of that, tapering through 0.25mg and 0.125mg. What followed was weeks of unrelenting insomnia and headache.

I wouldn't recommend.

It seems like Jordan Petersen really permanently messed himself up trying to shorten the timeline of getting off prescription benzos in a dangerous way.

I always feel awful when I hear people making fun of him for this. It seems like it's one of the most horrible and difficult things out there.

strange end for a strange person.

yeah very weird what happened to him, sad

At his daughter's urging, he went to a sketchy Russian clinic where they subjected him to an unresearched protocol: stop the medication cold turkey, then put the patient into an induced coma. Who knows what kind of number this did on his nervous system. Based on his subsequent behavior and illnesses, I think it's safe to say he's been permanently disabled.

I'm convinced a small percent of people get addicted to anything much more easily. Ive enjoyed various things but it's like meh- though Ativan is fucking amazing (but only for fear of flying). I think it is a brain reward structure thing; I get bored very easily and i guess it takes a decent amount of danger or effort to get me very interested.

I think that's a common impression. Interestingly, while there are still a lot of questions marks around what makes someone predisposed to addiction, the few things we do know tend to run counter to the idea that people dealing with addiction are overly sensitive to feelings of reward and pleasure. Or that being less sensitive would make someone more resistant.

One of the most well studied genetic risk factors for addiction vulnerability is the DRD2 gene, which encodes the dopamine receptor D_2. People who are particularly vulnerable to addiction commonly have a deficiency here, meaning getting bored very easily and feeling under stimulated/rewarded by typical things is in part what makes riskier sources of pleasure (i.e. drugs) so appealing.

Disclaimer: Not a medical professional, just like reading about addiction and genetics.

Interestingly, thinking this way is how many people get addicted.

A couple of the people I knew who ultimately ended up in rehab would describe themselves as not having addictive personalities. One even bragged about how boring drugs had become to himself.

This is the hubris that opened the window to their addiction. They thought it was a thing that happened to other people, so it was safe to dabble. Then dabbling became a little more frequent, then they decided the drugs were actually helping them and therefore it was logical to do more, then they took little breaks to prove that they could stop but came right back to the drugs as soon as their life got a little hard again.

Good job. Yeah benzo withdrawal is, ime, the only one that turns you into a 'wild animal'.

Good job 'choosing life,' as they say.

Just curious, why not alcohol? With it being so common and easy to get...

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