Symptoms: Akathisia, emotional blunting, cognitive impairment, insomnia, depersonalization/derealization, suicidal ideation, tinnitus, neuropathy, severe anxiety/panic, muscle/joint pain, anhedonia, GI disturbances, 70+ symptoms total
In April 2021 my life took a turn I never expected and almost didn't survive. What began as medication for emotional stress turned into a spiral of psychiatric harm that stole my mind, my body, my sense of self, and nearly my will to live.
After an abrupt cold-turkey from 20 mg Prozac in 2020, I suffered a delayed explosion of symptoms, but I didn't know it was withdrawal. I thought it was stress, moving between continents during the chaos of COVID, living out of Airbnbs, trying to hold it all together. Doctors didn't ask what I'd stopped. Instead, they restarted me on 60 mg Prozac and added 0.75 mg Klonopin. Four weeks later, I stopped the Klonopin, unaware that benzo withdrawal can be catastrophic even after short-term use.
What came next was hell: panic, akathisia, a sense of dying while awake. I went to three different ERs in the Greater Toronto Area within 24 hours. No one asked what I had discontinued. No one recognized benzodiazepine withdrawal. Instead, they injected me with 6 mg of Ativan in one day. I felt sedated, violated, and terrified, pupils dilated, heart racing, mind splintering. One single reinstatement of 0.5 mg Klonopin could have stabilized me. But they missed it, they missed me.
From that moment on, my life was a daily negotiation with terror. I lived through protracted benzo and SSRI withdrawal. I suffered nausea and months of eating almost nothing. I was bedbound, covered in fear and despair. I endured psychiatric hospitalizations in two countries, misdiagnosed and misunderstood. No one saw the pattern. No one said, "This is chemical injury." No one told me, "You're not crazy, your nervous system is in shock."
I clawed my way through two and a half years of burning withdrawal. I walked through insomnia, depersonalization, inner trembling, hopelessness. I survived things people don't come back from. And just when I thought I couldn't anymore, something changed.
I am tapering slowly off the last medication out of a total of four (polydrugged), another monster to come off: mirtazapine, 3.3 mg left but very powerful even at such a low dose.
And most of all, I'm no longer afraid of myself. I just accept the waves and will never be afraid. I have God, my Lord Jesus Christ, who keeps me alive, and my son who supports me through this difficult time, and also my dear 77-year-old mother who is still strong.