In April of 2021, I walked into Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). I had been feeling increasingly unstable, and despite not having a plan, my fantasies of suicide were getting harder to ignore. After unburdening myself to a triage nurse, I was ushered into a windowless room, relieved of my belt, and given paper slippers. The doctor who visited me said he thought I should stop taking Klonopin.
I was open to suggestions.
Examining my chart, he shook his head at my long-term, daily use. He said I shouldn’t have been taking Klonopin for so long, almost like I’d been writing my own prescriptions for the past nineteen years. Going off it, he told me, would reduce the mood swings that were making my life so difficult. I might briefly experience symptoms of withdrawal—increased blood pressure and heart rate, sweating, perhaps even tremors and seizures—and if I did, I should call 911. But it would be for the best, so I agreed. Six days later I was released with taper instructions intended to have me free of the drug in three weeks.
It took just two days on a smaller dose of Klonopin to feel profoundly uncomfortable. My hands were tingling, and I couldn’t stop sweating. I could still exercise, write, bathe, and cook meals. Within a week I could do none of those things. Here’s what happened to me as I tapered down to small doses of Klonopin, and then, for the first time since 2002, to none at all.
The tingling in my hands became numbness, which spread to my arms, legs, feet, and, briefly, my stomach. This is called paresthesia, which, combined with the sudden onset of stabbing pain and pressure in my neck, led to my first incorrect diagnosis, cervical radiculopathy, commonly called a pinched nerve. Tinnitus, a ringing in the ears—which I’d experienced before—reappeared at shocking levels, like a million helium-fueled car alarms. I slept next to a speaker blaring white noise, although “slept” isn’t correct; I became an insomniac. Excessive sweating, hyperhidrosis, was the most embarrassing symptom. I packed spare shirts on the rare occasions when I left my apartment, and lost ten pounds. When I spoke aloud, my voice didn’t sound like mine, which is symptomatic of depersonalization. I became unspeakably sensitive to noise, light, and all things sensory. Then there was fasciculation: My left biceps began twitching, but this I welcomed, because now there was a symptom visible to my general practitioner—I wasn’t faking—although he still had no solution. I developed pain in both my hands, severe enough that I struggled to dress myself. This, along with a new, constant ache in my right knee, led to another misdiagnosis: arthritis. The first twenty minutes of each morning I spent vomiting, or retching, as I hardly ate. During the second week of withdrawal, I began to feel like a conduit for lightning, which I kept from my wife, Cristine, and from my general practitioner, because I worried I’d sound crazy. The sensation of being electrocuted for hours on end (and I don’t mean the “brain zaps” associated with SSRI withdrawal) was the most agonizing symptom. I’ve since learned that many people experience this during benzodiazepine withdrawal, and some end their lives because of it. My condition soon bridged mind and body and I became a tic person, compelled to bend my fingers in bizarre ways. The world smelled strange; I smelled strange. I didn’t know what was happening.
To say that these symptoms—and there were more; look up akathisia—exacerbated my “illness anxiety” would be a comic understatement. I knew that every hypochondriac is eventually vindicated, but that their “I told you so” has a fatal price. After decades spent scanning my body for abnormalities, I believed my time had come. Having kicked opiates cold turkey in the past, I felt nostalgic for three simple days of traditional nausea, sweatiness, and bone-deep ache. As the weeks progressed, doctors at CAMH enrolled me in therapy and made a number of other suggestions that didn’t feel like they addressed the gravity of what I was going through. My terror became constant. I was on fire but couldn’t be extinguished. I paced and cried and trembled and sweated. Although I suffered intensely from the physical effects of benzodiazepine withdrawal, I was broken by the emotions. I’d never been so anxious, and for the first time in my life, I was suicidal with a plan.
A couple of months after my stay at CAMH, I found a glimmer of hope. During a 12-step meeting, held on Zoom because of the pandemic, I shared that I’d been diagnosed with a pinched nerve and would potentially need surgery. I also mentioned that I’d recently been tapered off Klonopin. A person with their camera off sent me a message urging me not to have surgery. They suspected I had something called benzodiazepine withdrawal syndrome (BWS) and recommended I look up Dr. Heather Ashton.
After the meeting I did as suggested and discovered a number of websites run by medical professionals concerned about the effects of benzos, and an enormous online community of people like myself. They’d also been prescribed a benzodiazepine with assurances that it was safe, then discontinued it, and were enduring what they often described as the worst experience of their lives. Their doctors were baffled, and sometimes accused them of lying. One doctor, however, was their patron saint: Heather Ashton, a British psychopharmacologist, who in 1999 published Benzodiazepines: How They Work and How to Withdraw, known colloquially as the Ashton Manual. It details every symptom I was experiencing, and outlines a frightening array of problems related to benzodiazepines.
Klonopin is one of numerous benzodiazepines regularly prescribed for anxiety and insomnia. Commonly called tranquilizers—brilliantly effective branding—the most well known of these central-nervous-system depressants are alprazolam, lorazepam, diazepam, and clonazepam (or Xanax, Ativan, Valium, and Klonopin, respectively). They are among the most widely prescribed medications in America. Today the safety of these medications is increasingly being questioned, but initially Dr. Ashton was just one of a handful of skeptics. Another, Professor Malcolm Lader from King’s College London, began sounding the alarm in the 1970s. In 1981, Lader warned of an “epidemic in the making,” and in 1999 he said, “It is more difficult to withdraw people from benzodiazepines than it is from heroin.” Nonetheless, according to the most recent study estimating total benzodiazepine use among Americans, which analyzed data from 2015 and 2016, an estimated 30.6 million American adults had taken benzodiazepines in the previous twelve months, with 25.3 million of them using them as prescribed.
In her manual—the most accessible of all benzodiazepine-awareness materials, and thus the one most suffering patients first discover—Ashton speculates that 10 to 15 percent of those taking benzos (potentially millions of Americans) will experience protracted withdrawal, as I did, and still do. Others, like Sean Hood, a researcher from the University of Western Australia’s School of Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, believe it could be much more—up to 40 percent. Yet in medical school, students spend only a few hours studying benzodiazepines, perhaps a few more, depending on their residency. In 2020, after decades of mounting concerns, the FDA finally mandated a boxed warning for benzodiazepines indicating that “clinically significant physical dependence” was possible, as were “life-threatening” withdrawal reactions. Unfortunately, as Dr. Alexis Ritvo—an addiction psychiatrist in Colorado, and the medical director of the Alliance for Benzodiazepine Best Practices—explains, patients and their doctors aren’t necessarily aware of the warnings: “While the FDA publishes their boxed warnings, there is no formal way prescribers are required to be educated about them.”
Doctors at CAMH had assured me that benzodiazepines usually “clear the system” in two, perhaps three weeks—a commonly held belief—so any withdrawal symptoms would likely persist only that long.1 Ashton and others believe that withdrawal can last months, even years. Days after I read Ashton’s manual, a specialist in Toronto said my “symptoms suggested multiple sclerosis,” four words that would terrify any hypochondriac, anxious, or ordinary person. I now know this misdiagnosis isn’t uncommon, as BWS can mimic the symptoms of MS, along with other illnesses and injuries.
According to Ashton and several recent studies, benzodiazepines alter brain function through neuroadaptation that persists after discontinuation. Initially, they work by enhancing the effect of a neurotransmitter called gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), the body’s tranquilizer. With long-term use, the brain adapts by reducing—downregulating—both the number and sensitivity of GABA receptors. At the same time, the brain’s excitatory neurotransmitter, glutamate, becomes more active without GABA’s soothing influence. Once someone discontinues a benzo, their GABA-suppressed brain, full of unchecked glutamate, creates a chronically hyperstimulated nervous system. GABA receptors eventually do upregulate—taking their own sweet time—and the brain resumes soothing itself, but until that happens, for some people, as for me, the physiological sense of being in danger is persistent, and debilitating. To paraphrase a post from the peer-support site BenzoBuddies: If my nervous system is a car, benzo withdrawal has tied a brick to the gas pedal and disabled the brakes.
Armed with new information, I found those first few weeks both frightening and empowering. Frightening, because members of benzodiazepine support groups can sometimes catastrophize, partly because anxious people fear and focus on the worst, and partly because the truth is genuinely catastrophic. Empowering, because now there were answers, buried beneath layers of disturbing facts. While I was still suffering terribly, I was relieved to finally know why. I returned to CAMH’s Emergency Department, certain the doctors at this renowned facility would be familiar with Ashton’s ideas. I was wrong. They didn’t believe the symptoms I was experiencing could be caused by benzodiazepine withdrawal. My research—gleaned in part from the stories of countless others—fell on deaf ears. They suggested I practice mindfulness and take up exercise, and sent me home.
While working at Hoffmann–La Roche in New Jersey, in 1955, chemist Leo Sternbach synthesized a compound that was later called chlordiazepoxide. Finding it pharmacologically underwhelming, Sternbach shelved it. Two years later, his colleague Earl Reeder discovered the discarded compound while cleaning his lab, and decided to test it on mice. Chlordiazepoxide was found to have significant sedative, anti-convulsant, and muscle-relaxing effects. After more testing on big cats from the San Diego and Boston zoos—then on schizophrenics and the elderly—in 1960, chlordiazepoxide entered the market as Librium. It was promoted as a safer alternative to barbiturates, which had largely supplanted bromides as a treatment for anxiety.
Earlier advertisements for barbiturates had been aimed at women, in typically sexist fashion. The normal reactions to life’s difficulties experienced by wives and mothers were framed as signs of an anxious, neurotic disposition. An ad for Butisol with the tagline “Now she can cope…” depicts a smiling, apron-clad mother playing with her daughter in the kitchen. But by the 1960s, with the advent of benzodiazepines, drug companies realized they could appeal to a wider clientele. Arthur Sackler—paterfamilias of the Purdue Pharma–founding Sackler family, who in 2025 was ordered to pay 6.5 billion dollars for their role in the corpse-strewn opioid crisis, which has taken many of my friends—coined the term psychic tension. This condition was apparently widespread among housewives, but it wasn’t limited to them—it could affect anyone—and benzodiazepines, he asserted, were the purported cure.
Sackler had been hired by Hoffmann–La Roche to market Valium, the successor to Librium, and his campaign made it the first medication to earn one hundred million dollars. Between 1969 and 1982, it was America’s bestselling drug. Sales peaked in 1978,when over two billion tablets were sold. With the creation of the term psychic tension, pharmaceutical companies had found a way to make the struggles and stresses of daily life medically problematic for everyone. Or, as Dr. Christopher Blazes—a psychiatrist at Oregon Health & Science University who lectures widely on benzodiazepines—puts it: “Drug companies marketed benzodiazepines by pathologizing normal emotions and the challenges of living, convincing us we need a pill to cope.”
To what extent the psychological community was influenced by pharmaceutical companies with regard to benzodiazepines is a matter of dispute. But in 1980, the ostensible illness “panic disorder” was included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM. Xanax (alprazolam) conveniently appeared the following year, promising to treat this new syndrome, which was characterized by instances of sudden anxiety unconnected to reasonable triggers. Because Xanax was faster-acting than Valium, as Valium had been faster-acting than Librium, this new benzo found its niche.
Advertising for the drug followed Sackler’s playbook, suggesting that most psychological discomfort could be interpreted as illness, thereby medicalizing the experience of just being alive. My current therapist would say it’s reasonable to find certain things—fear of flying, public speaking—nerve-racking, but that by exposing oneself to and surviving discomfort, the frightening things become more tolerable. This self-healing methodology isn’t easily exploited by pharmaceutical manufacturers. It’s also much harder than swallowing a pill.
I’ve been tormented by anxiety since high school. During the tenth and eleventh grades, I stayed home for weeks on end. While my friends passed notes in class, I was on the couch watching The Price Is Right, worrying about countless things, all beyond my control, or yet to happen. Three blocks away my grandfather was dying of cancer, and my unpredictable father, his location unknown, might be coming to visit at any moment—and nine times out of ten, when I saw him, I wished I hadn’t.
Between the ages of seventeen and twenty-eight, I tried numerous therapeutic modalities, and was prescribed countless medications. Paxil dulled my nerves enough for me to attend class, but I was too cognitively soggy to pay attention. Effexor enabled me to flirt with women but obliterated my sexual machinery. Talk therapy required talking, but I had nothing to say beyond “I want to go home.” Group therapy meant sharing with strangers, which felt humiliating, and cognitive behavioral therapy promised results over time, while I needed immediate relief.
Any medications that helped me were self-prescribed, and not technically medications. Marijuana dulled the panic, but also everything else, particularly my ambition. I watched reruns of Columbo and Barney Miller all day, stopped reading books, but was capable of socializing. Booze made me not care that life was frightening, but also not care that other people have feelings, and that employers expect you to show up at work. Opiates made everything manageable, even pleasant. They also put a lit match in my hand, encouraging me to burn down my life and the lives of those I loved.
In October of 2002, I was living in Vancouver, British Columbia, freshly divorced and far from the comfort of my hometown. One day, I began to experience chest pain, which I worried was heart cancer, if such a thing exists. I decided to see a doctor. At a walk-in clinic, my chest pain was diagnosed as “harmless anxiety,” and I was prescribed 0.5 milligrams of Klonopin once daily, with no further discussion. Boy, did it work. Within hours of taking the first pill, I found my pain had vanished. Something else happened, though. My shoulders dropped, my jaw unclenched—my mind loosened its stranglehold. I’d been transported back to my childhood, to a time before I knew what it meant to be afraid. My body, previously a source of mysterious pain, was now a pleasant vessel. I could breathe, slowly, instead of like I was running for my life.
Over the next two decades, however, my mental health gradually worsened. I read self-help books, saw hypnotherapists and psychoanalysts, and was shot up with ketamine. I learned tools that made me a better son and partner, but the sense of internal distress I’d felt since high school never improved. My doctors would regularly increase my Klonopin dosage, and for the first few months I’d feel some relief. But inevitably the anxiety would return, newly powerful, bringing with it strange new problems. I developed somatoform disorders—physical ailments that couldn’t be attributed to physiological issues. I became obsessive-compulsive, substance abusive, and unspeakably sad. Throughout my thirties and forties I experienced a constellation of mental illnesses, none of which I’d suffered from prior to being introduced to benzodiazepines. During the years when I took Klonopin as prescribed, therapy didn’t help, nor did getting sober, or abandoning sobriety. I tried exercise, changed my diet, found religion, and wrote gratitude lists. Yet year after year, I felt worse, never better.
By 2021 I was taking multiple milligrams of prescribed Klonopin daily, while still contending with a roaming sense of dread that was creative in its efforts to keep me unhappy. My body was only a source of mysterious pain, and I’d long given up on feeling safe. Cristine was the first to suggest that Klonopin might be the problem. I didn’t believe her. Doctors had always assured me it was a harmless, effective medication, and when I took a pill, I felt relief. But the periods between pills were often awful. My muscles ached, I sweated through my pillowcase, I woke up rattled and couldn’t concentrate. I got angry, sometimes explosively, and I wept like an absolute baby at least once a week—but I thought that was just the human experience.
Later on, after reading about BWS online, I would come to recognize these symptoms as indicative of interdose withdrawal. Studies have shown that when people prescribed benzos for reasons unrelated to anxiety—for epilepsy, as a muscle relaxant—enter withdrawal, they exhibit the same anxiety-mimicking symptoms I did. This implicates the drug, not the patient, yet when I would see my doctor, complaining that I felt worse, he interpreted it as a recurrence of my original anxiety and repeatedly increased my dosage, when probably the anxiety was being generated by the anti-anxiety medication. For the previous few years, I’d also been trying to manage the intense discomfort I felt between doses myself, unaware that was what I was doing. Like many people on benzodiazepines, I’d sometimes take more than my prescribed dose because I felt so unwell. That would work, but then I’d have to ration my pills, and I’d feel awful again. This behavior may make benzo patients wrongly appear to be misusing their medication or drug-seeking. But, in reality, this is a common and nightmarish feedback loop, wherein a patient takes increasingly larger doses of benzos to combat the effect of being on the benzos themselves, all the while believing their mental health has declined.
By April of that year I was a mess. The periods between pills were increasingly hard to bear, and other stressors in my life were mounting. My closest friend—who felt somewhat paternal to me—had just died suddenly, exactly the way my father had twenty-five years earlier. The grandmother who helped raise me had also died recently, and my mother was undergoing intensive treatment after a recent cancer diagnosis. These were the big, home-from-school-on-the-couch issues. Death, disease, and dad stuff. My emotions were dramatic on Klonopin. I began to feel vaguely suicidal and thought I should tell someone, which is how I found myself in a windowless room in CAMH, open to suggestions.
In 1988, the pharmaceutical manufacturer Upjohn funded a study of the use of Xanax for “panic disorder.” After four weeks, those taking it had improved more than those on placebos. Since benzodiazepines are effective in the short term, this isn’t surprising. The Xanax patients also reported troubling side effects, however, like amnesia and slurred speech (two things I experienced while prescribed Klonopin). After two months, both groups were tapered off their medications over four weeks, then were studied for two more. Of the Xanax-treated patients, 39 percent failed to complete the discontinuation study, with most of them withdrawing because their condition had “deteriorated significantly.” The paper doesn’t note what happened after these patients left the trial, but it’s reasonable to suspect that they resumed their medication (as I soon would). Around 27 percent of patients suffered from more frequent panic attacks and 13 percent had anxiety more severe than before the study. In addition, 35 percent of patients reported various new symptoms such as paresthesia, diarrhea, and weight loss. While placebo patients experienced progressively fewer panic attacks throughout most of the trial, by the end of the four-week taper, Xanax patients were experiencing almost four times as many. Upjohn cherry-picked the results of this study, focusing on the positive data from the first four weeks in its published reports. In 1993 it funded another study, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, and the results were the same.
But benzos do have a useful function, which I gloriously experienced when I was first prescribed them. Some doctors point this out, insisting they shouldn’t be demonized. Dr. Blazes calls them “important medicines to use for short periods of time, in inpatient psychiatry, in emergency medicine, for sedation, for someone who has a profound phobia, and for intermittent use for things like fear of flying.” The problems, he says, happen when they’re taken consistently for a prolonged duration. Dr. Mark Horowitz—who recently copublished The Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines to assist patients and their doctors—disagrees, insisting that benzos “are bad for people, and should be demonized.”
Dr. Ritvo has witnessed many of her patients suffer after discontinuing their medication. She believes the problem has been hard to address, in part, because it hasn’t been named, so she recently helped coin the term benzodiazepine-induced neurological dysfunction (BIND). She also produced a 2023 study that featured some alarming statistics. In the survey, over 54 percent of people tapering off benzos had considered suicide, like myself. Almost 48 percent lost their jobs or became unable to work. Despite over forty years of warnings about benzos, hers was the first study of its kind since 1987, when the results had been equally grim.
There are few products in medicine so widely prescribed yet so consistently flagged as dangerous by doctors as benzodiazepines. To borrow a horror movie line, the call is coming from inside the house. Yet some senior clinicians, including those who formed the International Task Force on Benzodiazpines (ITFB) in 2018, continue to minimize withdrawal concerns, stating that “the risks and side effects (of benzodiazepines) have been overemphasized,” and those suffering from withdrawal are actually suffering from “maladaptive personality traits.” One clinician associated with the ITFB, in response to my request for an interview, stated that “the benzodiazepine epidemic [idea] is trash.” There’s a reluctance to acknowledge the harm of benzos, Dr. Horowitz believes, because doctors are afraid to admit they may have been doing something wrong. “People have been prescribing these drugs for thirty years, every day telling people they’re safe, effective, and easy to stop, because that’s what they’ve been taught. They would get extremely embarrassed [if] it comes out they’ve been lying to patients. So they’d rather shoot the messenger than hear the message.”
But there is mounting evidence that the costs of withdrawal can be catastrophic for patients, and far worse than any doctor’s potential embarrassment. Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring worked for both pharmaceutical manufacturers and the Food and Drug Administration’s Division of Psychiatry. Today he specializes in tapering people off benzodiazepines, and has had “a lot of patients commit suicide.” When I interviewed him on Zoom, he was the first person to tell me something I didn’t know I needed to hear: that he was sorry I’d been injured by my medication. He’s counseled hundreds of people through withdrawal, and has seen what can’t be denied: “The doctors say, you know, this has been going on for six months now, there’s no way it’s related to withdrawal. It pits family members against each other because all of a sudden the family member thinks you’ve developed some hysterical condition where you’re imagining things, and then they don’t want to support you or endorse it. You can literally wake up in hell… with your family not believing you and your doctor gaslighting you and your health just destroyed.”
I was grateful. In the hell I found myself navigating, my family didn’t doubt me. Unfortunately, they had no clue how to help.
By October of 2021, I had been free of Klonopin for four months, and being alive felt almost unbearable. Knowing what was wrong with me helped, but I struggled to believe it, in part because those tasked with my care didn’t. CAMH acknowledged a version of benzodiazepine withdrawal syndrome far narrower than what I had been experiencing, while my own physician was equally ignorant, although less dismissive. He shrugged, the last thing you want to see your doctor do when you’re suffering.
I was forty-seven years old, far too old to need my mother, but I needed mine. She drove into Toronto and we sat in a park and talked. The park felt dangerous now. It was too bright, too loud, too alive. With my nervous system on fire, I chain-smoked cigarettes, trembled, and told her that one doctor’s suggestion, spinal surgery for a pinched nerve, terrified me. The information that seemed more logical, that I had some kind of benzo-related brain injury, was just as distressing. I couldn’t decide whom to believe. I’d researched the stories of people with pinched nerves and related to part of their experience. I’d listened to testimonials from former benzo patients on the YouTube channel of the Benzodiazepine Information Coalition and identified with everything they said. I wanted the answer to be a pinched nerve because that was clear and fixable. If it was benzos, it was horribly abstract, and my recovery might take years. I doubted I could make it.
Walking my mother to her car, I heard myself speaking, and I didn’t sound like myself. I couldn’t tell her this; she’d be frightened. When she hugged me goodbye, I hoped she’d have advice, somehow know the answer. I felt like I must have the day I was born: maximally vulnerable, helpless, terrified. She promised I’d get through whatever was happening, and I tried to believe her. Once she left, I realized nobody could save me.
On the way back to my apartment, a car honked loudly. I broke out in a sweat and my left leg became numb. That symptom had vanished a week earlier. I sat on a park bench and vomited into a Burger King bag. It was becoming unavoidable. This wasn’t a pinched-nerve problem.
I felt like I needed to do something. Dr. Ashton counseled a very slow tapering regimen with Valium, which has a long half-life and comes in milligram sizes that are easy to diminish. CAMH had tapered me rapidly off Klonopin using shorter-acting lorazepam—almost the opposite of Ashton’s advice—which in hindsight makes me wonder if that’s why my withdrawal was so agonizing. It seemed risky, and certain users on BenzoBuddies and elsewhere warned me against reintroducing a benzo. The benzodiazepine community is full of strong opinions, and people can be dogmatic. It’s understandable. After being gaslit by doctors and drug companies—and while suffering immeasurably—a sense of righteous indignation is sometimes the only stable thing in a person’s life. Someone whose symptoms took four years to resolve is suspicious of anyone claiming to have been healed in three months. Similarly, someone who chose to reinstate their benzo in order to taper more slowly might have had a bad experience, and so cautions others against doing the same. Tolerating how I felt until my symptoms improved—something those same users warned me could take years—felt impossible. I decided it was Valium, or Jim Beam and a high window. I loved my wife, my mom, and a small Matisse at the Met. It helped to think of them.
My physician hadn’t been the first doctor to prescribe me Klonopin, though he had maintained, and steadily increased, my long-standing prescription. Overall, I felt he was well intentioned and ill informed, as many doctors are. When he was skeptical that my suffering was related to his prescription pad, I couldn’t be angry. He hadn’t been educated. Thankfully, he was open-minded, and when I outlined my plan to taper slowly, he accommodated me, with a strained, indulgent smile.
For a week I stared at the bottle. Valium, twenty milligrams once daily. If I cut my dosage by one milligram a month, I’d have reinstated and discontinued in under two years. Fellow sufferers swore they’d taken this route and found relief, refuting decades of assertions from medical professionals and drug companies. They were upset in part because no one believed them. I identified with everything they suffered from, so why doubt their solution?
On October 27, 2021, with fat, wet cords of electricity in my neck, screaming tinnitus, and hands that felt like I’d been punching glaciers, I took my first Valium. On October 28 every physical symptom I’d been experiencing since April was gone, and did not return. Instead of two years, it would take twenty-seven months of pruning pills like a bonsai master until I was again free.
But freedom wasn’t what I found. Not even close.
I moved to New York while tapering off Valium, and found a doctor who was familiar with benzodiazepine withdrawal. He was willing to continue prescribing me, and said it was crazy that I’d been tapered off Klonopin in only a few weeks after nineteen years. I was ecstatic with relief and almost hugged him. I’d been returned to a world where things made sense, where facts were agreed on, not up for debate.
Each month I took a slightly smaller dose of Valium than I had the month before. First twenty milligrams, the next month nineteen, and so on. My symptoms never returned, and I felt relatively sane. Toward the end of 2023, after splitting a single two-milligram pill in half daily, I became like Bernini, chiseling off unmeasurably small fragments of Valium, trying to taper my medication into invisibility.
I knew what was coming, and it scared me. Around this time, my anxiety became markedly worse, which I attributed to fear about ending my taper. I scanned my body for the symptoms that had plagued me in 2021, but couldn’t find them. That gave me hope. So in February of 2024, around the time of my fiftieth birthday, I told my doctor I was done. He reassured me there was no rush, but I said I was ready. Looking back, I realize I made my decision with the confidence of a boiled frog.
In the weeks and months following the end of my taper, living in New York became like sensory waterboarding. In August I went to visit a friend upstate, and took a cab from the train station to their house. It was raining. The driver didn’t say hello when I got into his car, I didn’t know the area, and the song on the radio sounded sinister. At a certain point, I became convinced he’d intentionally taken a wrong turn and was kidnapping me. Objectively, I knew the idea was ludicrous. He was a slight old man listening to Shania Twain, but every cell in my body said I was in danger. Eventually I recognized the name of my friend’s street, and returned to sanity.
On a Saturday in October, I was at my weekly acupuncture appointment. Dr. Lee always left me alone for twenty minutes, pincushioned, staring at his diplomas. I couldn’t hear the usual murmuring from his office, and started to think he’d been gone for longer than twenty minutes. I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew it was bad. While I debated this, telling myself to stop, I reached awkwardly behind me, pulled a dozen needles from my back, got dressed, and fled his office. He called me minutes later. I was embarrassed, and haven’t been back since.
In November I returned to Toronto for my sister’s wedding, and spent a month researching this article in my mother’s suburban basement. I freaked out twice in the airport and vomited once, but kept it to myself. The suburbs were quieter. I was happy, and people noticed. They preferred this version of me, as did I. Throughout the summer I often told Cristine I didn’t understand why I felt so anxious, so totally broken. I knew how benzos had affected me but still didn’t see the connection to my life post-taper. Maybe my cognition had been crippled, and I couldn’t connect the obvious dots. Maybe I had been so concerned about the potential return of the physical symptoms of 2021 that I hadn’t noticed what had happened to my mind. Once I got back to New York, armed with new research, and became housebound again, genuinely disabled, I saw what couldn’t be denied, and I’ve been devastated ever since. If my taper was a success, it was a pyrrhic one. I’m free of benzodiazepines forever, which feels positive. And I’ve proved to myself that, as my mother assured me, I can get through things that feel difficult. But instead of relief on the other side, there’s just more difficulty to get through.
I am primed for disaster twenty-four hours a day. It’s exhausting. Our nervous systems interpret our environment before our consciousness does. Mine constantly says I’m in mortal danger, and I spend my days struggling not to believe it. Yes, I have always been an anxious person, but not like this. Today my symptoms fit the criteria for so-called panic disorder, but they did not before benzodiazepines. I used to love going to the movies. Now I sit in a theater silently telling myself I’m safe, that I don’t have to leave, as my instincts demand. I survive—I don’t watch—movies in a theater. I am certifiably agoraphobic now, but I wasn’t before benzos. I rarely leave my apartment, and when I do, it feels like I’m going to war. I was always physically healthy. Today I take heart medication. I was diagnosed with hypertension last November after decades of normal physicals—common among the benzo-injured. Anxiety obliterated my appetite last year, and I lost eighteen pounds I couldn’t spare—some of it muscle—which my physiotherapist blames for my current sciatica and torn meniscus. Everything I once did with ease is now a challenge. Things that were once challenging are indescribably difficult. I struggle to organize my thoughts, so writing this article has felt like swimming the English Channel. I’ve been called a “shell” of my former self, and I don’t disagree. I can’t eat in restaurants, and I’d rather bathe in acid than ride the subway.
Had I known this could happen to me, I never would have filled that first Klonopin prescription. The physical symptoms I experienced in 2021 are gone, but my mind—clumsily operating a failing body—feels profoundly broken. No matter how much someone loves or believes a person who is dealing with long-term benzodiazepine withdrawal, they’ll never truly grasp the severity of the injury—understandably, as it’s said not to exist by many—and will sometimes doubt it. So on Saturdays I attend a virtual support group for people like myself. They’re the only ones who understand my experience, and my heart breaks that they do. Some are two months into their taper, and some are three years past it, but all are suffering with something that language is laughably ill-equipped to describe.
Although prescriptions for benzodiazepines dipped in the 2010s, by 2019 benzodiazepines and similar Z-drugs formed the most commonly dispensed class of controlled substances in the United States; during the pandemic, benzodiazepine prescriptions rose again among some populations. These medications are popular because they’re effective in the short term, and because the damage they cause has remained hidden. That’s changing. In March 2025, The Wall Street Journal published an article about the horrors of benzo withdrawal, as did The New York Times that May. That spring, the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM), with funding from the FDA, finally released benzodiazepine-tapering guidelines, recommending a reduction in dosage by 5 to 10 percent every one to two weeks. While this is progress, by virtue of the society’s name it also reinforces the misperception that benzodiazepine patients are addicts. They aren’t. Many are just physically dependent as a result of having trusted their doctors. Real progress would be having this distinction acknowledged. The slow taper proposed by ASAM is similar to the taper Ashton recommended decades earlier, so there’s hope that the work of early benzo skeptics might finally be entering the mainstream.
But there’s also regress. In 2021, Almatica Pharma introduced Loreev XR, an extended-release version of lorazepam. There were no new clinical trials conducted to demonstrate that the drug was safe and effective as an anxiety treatment; instead, the FDA relied on findings based on the original formulation of lorazepam, first approved in 1977 under an earlier regulatory framework. Three doctors praised the drug in a presentation aimed at general practitioners. One, Dr. Charles Nemeroff, former president of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, was investigated in 2008 by the US Senate Committee on Finance for failing to disclose over one million dollars in payments from drug companies while he was conducting research on medications produced by those very companies. Another, Dr. Rakesh Jain, was ranked as one of the pharmaceutical industry’s highest-paid psychiatrists in a 2021 analysis of federal data. The transparency website Open Payments shows he received more than a million dollars in 2023 alone.
Dr. Christy Huff was a cardiologist, wife and mother, and onetime medical director of the Benzodiazepine Information Coalition. In 2015 she was prescribed Xanax for insomnia caused by dry eye syndrome. A few weeks later she had already developed symptoms of dependency, including tremors and severe anxiety, for which she was given more Xanax. In 2024, after years of protracted withdrawal, she committed suicide. Before her death she referred to Xanax as her murderer. She’s not the only person dead by suicide to have done so. Aware that I’m still not recovered, for the sake of my loved ones and myself, I recently started seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. X. During our first session, I described my experience with benzos. Dr. X. thinks I might be helped by Cymbalta, an SNRI. I’m terrified of rolling the dice with another psychiatric medication. I know too much now. But I’m also suffering beyond what feels manageable. I can barely function or be present with those I love. I’m fifty-two years old. The past twenty years of my life have been severely impacted by a prescription pad. If I’m lucky, I have thirty years left. What will they look like if I trust another doctor? What will they look like if I ignore my doctor’s advice? Why is this the position I’m in? Anxiety is fear of the unknown, of that which cannot be controlled or predicted. Benzodiazepine withdrawal is an extended assault by the uncontrollable and the unpredicted. This seems especially cruel.
I miss who I once was, before Klonopin. I miss the reliable low-grade fear and obsessive thinking. Things were simple. I miss who I was while on Klonopin: overly emotional, chronically on edge, but genuinely calm for fifteen minutes daily after taking my medicine. Today I’m an unmapped territory, subject to strange weather, haunted by a language no one can translate. I still don’t know if I did the right thing by coming off Klonopin. It’s sometimes hard to not go back, to return to the devil I know and take benzos for my remaining days. I’d be free of whatever it is that I’ve become. But I try to be hopeful. People say withdrawal ends, although it may take years. I’d like to say I faced the world unmedicated, and found something to embrace, maybe for the first time, instead of something to flee.
[1] When The Believer asked CAMH about its approach to benzodiazepine withdrawal in 2021, a representative said they weren’t able to provide blanket responses about their practices, “as there is variability in terms of treatment offered for benzodiazepine withdrawal depending on other mental health issues present and additional context.” We followed up with a series of more specific questions about the care the author received at CAMH, but CAMH provided no further comment.