Benzodiazepines

On November 25, Mad in America posted a link to an article in the Journal of Neurological Sciences. The article is by Harnod et al, and is titled An Association between Benzodiazepine Use and Occurrence of Benign Brain Tumors. The authors studied the records of 62,186 individuals in Taiwan who had been prescribed a benzodiazepine for at least 2 months between 2000 and 2009. They compared the incidence of brain tumors in these patients with the incidence in patients in a matched-pairs control group. The hazard ratio for benign brain tumors (benzo group vs non-benzo group) was 3.15 (95% confidence interval: 2.37-4.20). The hazard ratio for malignant brain tumors was 1.21 (95% confidence interval: 0.52-2.81). What this means essentially is that one can be 95% confident that the benign tumor association is real, but that the malignant tumor result might have arisen by chance. ...

Melissa, a commenter on a recent post, asked if I would do a post on akathisia. Akathisia literally means inability to sit. People with this problem typically pace for long periods, and if they do sit down, they continue to keep moving and shifting their position in the chair. In severity it can range from a generalized sense of uneasiness or agitation, to severe discomfort and even pain. The discomfort tends to be located in the legs, but can also occur in the hip and pelvic area. In severe cases, the victims pace to the point of exhaustion, but even then sitting does not relieve the discomfort. ...

There’s another benzo withdrawal story on Mad in America: The 99th Mile: When Benzo Withdrawal Meets Parenthood by Melissa Bond. Melissa recounts that when her Down’s syndrome son was 18 months old and her baby daughter was three months, she consulted a physician because of problems with insomnia and consequent exhaustion. He prescribed 2 mg of Ativan daily, which he increased to 6 mg within six months. Melissa describes in detail the problems of withdrawal, and the extreme measures she had to take to cope with this. ...

In my earlier post on this topic, I mentioned that benzo withdrawal can be dangerous, but it’s been drawn to my attention, by Monica, that perhaps I didn’t adequately stress how dangerous it can be in some cases. If you click here, you can read Monica’s own account of her experience in a detox center in Florida. It’s a thought-provoking article. Because for many years benzos were dished out so liberally, there is still a mistaken perception that they are relatively safe and benign, which is not the case. ...

Important updates on this subject can be found at the posts listed at the bottom of the post. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I've recently come across an article by Matt Samet called Social Vacuum. It's dated March 2013, and was published on Robert Whitaker's website Mad in America. Matt had been taking a benzodiazepine for some time, and while on a tapering withdrawal, he experienced some distressing symptoms, including some acute social discomfort. (For a full account of benzo withdrawal – click here.) ...

Christopher Lane, author of Shyness has written an interesting post. The gist of the matter is as follows. There’s a class of drugs known as benzodiazepines (benzos for short) that are promoted by Pharma and prescribed by psychiatrists to “treat” anxiety. (As if anxiety were an illness!) See my post on the So-called Anxiety Disorders. Benzos include such household names as Valium, Librium, Ativan, Xanax, etc.. When introduced in the 1960’s, these drugs were widely touted as “safe” tranquilizers. Readers may remember Valium as “mother’s little helper,” so called because it was marketed to millions of harried housewives as they struggled to adapt to an increasingly complex and multi-faceted lifestyle. ...