Mykeru wrote:Hunt wrote:Mykeru wrote:
Benzos isn't even close to an answer.
I agree and don't agree at the same time. I don't think there's any question that there are a lot of people who have been totally fucked up by benzos, on the other hand, as a class of drugs, they've gotten a very bad rap based on that segment of people who have either deliberately or accidentally abused them.
Not at all saying people don't abuse these drugs, accidentally or intentionally, but here's something I've noticed about how this plays out.
People tend to be introduced to benzos, particularly the very short-acting Xanax, when they initially start having general anxiety and Panic Attacks. At that stage the incidents tend to be very, very intense and inexplicable. People don't know what is happening and why.
Here, let me skip a bit. I finally got to the stage where I recognized a panic attack for what it was: A triggering, without cause, of the fight or flight mechanism, flip of a switch in the Amygdala, part of the hard-wired response to dangers that humans, for the most part, no longer face in day-to-day existence. Once I started thinking of it in those terms, and recognizing there really was no "trigger" except one that could be classically conditioned as associated with a panic attack that was perhaps going to happen anyway, I got paradoxically bored with the whole thing.
But that was only after I took what was supposedly a "maintenance" dose of benzos like a good little patient, stopped taking them and went into full benzo withdrawal. I had no idea what was happening to me, I mean, it wasn't like I was walking around in happy land feeling like I was on something while taking the benzos anyway, and a later therapist told me with the amount I was given it would have taken me 4-6 weeks to ween myself off of it. As it was, I had to be prescribed Librium, the earliest synthesized long-acting form of benzo, and taper off that.
Talk about iatrogenic.
However, initially people who start having bone-fide panic attacks with all the symptoms of racing heart, feeling of suffocation, fear of loss of control and acting out, sweating, dissociation a sense of imminent doom and death and the like treat it as a life-threatening event, because that's exactly what it feels like. There's a tendency to become obsessed with what externally is causing it so as to avoid that situation. What happens is as you avoid one, it happens anyway, and so you avoid that, and so on until, unchecked, one can become a full-blown agoraphobic. Another thing I find people obsessing with is learning how to stop it once it starts, which tends to make it worse, the mental equivalent of "tensing up" and is the reason I tell people the only way out of a panic attack is out the other side.
And it's exactly at this point that powerful drugs are introduced to the person desperate to have some sense of control over it. People start taking it anticipatory and, even worse, benzos have a rebound effect, where they actually make the condition worse. That's especially the case with strong-short acting Xanax. Basically, you can take an average person who doesn't have any anxiety or panic attacks, give them Xanax for a while and actually induce the condition.
Supposedly, the benzos are a stop-gap measure, but I tend to think of them as a "get out of my office" measure, a quick and dirty solution for physicians that does nothing to really help the person.
So I would tend to talk more in terms of inadvertent dependency than abuse, and that's because the way people are given benzos, as THE solution with no better alternative, let alone knowledge that the benzos can be far worse than the condition they are supposed to treat, is a recipe for dependency. Most of the time the person prescribed benzos isn't referred to Cognitive and Behavioral Therapy, and isn't fully briefed on the pitfalls of the drugs because very often the physician prescribing doesn't have a clue themselves.
