Symptoms: Akathisia, emotional blunting, sexual dysfunction, cognitive impairment, depersonalization/derealization, suicidal ideation, severe anxiety/panic, muscle/joint pain, anhedonia, dyskinesia, harm-OCD, psychosis, involuntary distress vocalizations, catatonia, incontinence, purpura, tremor, bruxism, palpitations, brain fog
In December 2020, following a Covid infection, I was prescribed benzodiazepines by my doctor because of severe insomnia. I was given oxazepam. The doctor provided me with some vague information about the risk of dependence. I was able to sleep again ("chemical" sleep), but with annoying side effects, including loss of balance. I had palpitations that worsened with the sensation of missing beats (extrasystoles). I went to another doctor to seek advice about the palpitations, who replaced the oxazepam with lorazepam at a higher dosage. My situation didn't improve though, and I started attempting to decrease the dosage by cutting it in half or missing one night (I had no information about tapering off back then), but when doing so, my insomnia came back.
Two months after starting lorazepam, I suddenly began to suffer from harm-OCD, with severe obsessive thoughts coming from nowhere. I don't want to get into specifics, but these unwanted thoughts were extremely bad and haunted me all day long. From that point on, they lasted for years without respite. Because I had already developed dependence, I couldn't stop taking my lorazepam pills and was struggling a lot to decrease the dosage incrementally. Because of the harm-OCD thoughts that were plaguing my life, I crashed emotionally and fell into depression a few months later and was hospitalized in a psych ward.
Before the hospitalization, my psychiatrist had replaced the lorazepam with alprazolam (Xanax), and I started experiencing acute withdrawal and craving between doses, sometimes with vocalized crises. In the psych ward, my treating doctor prescribed me a high dosage of bromazepam to mitigate the crises and introduced my first antidepressant, paroxetine. My experience with paroxetine was very unpleasant, as I developed side effects such as nausea and sexual dysfunction, and when I left the clinic to come back home, I was feeling terrible, like a drug addict, with heavy somnolence. Life was falling into continual distress.
The following four and a half years since December 2021 were hell on earth, with 14 hospitalizations (a total of two and a half years in hospitals and clinics), including three outside Switzerland, where I live (in Serbia, Spain, and Ukraine), 20+ visits to emergency services, and countless doctor appointments (I counted 50+ doctors). In 2022, as I was prescribed another drug (Abilify) and sliding into polymedication, I stopped Abilify cold turkey (craving for relief) and shortly thereafter started to experience horrendous involuntary distress vocalizations, repetitively groaning and shouting, that would sometimes last up to six to seven hours. They plagued me almost daily for three years. My family was in utmost distress.
The doctors tried to replace one benzo molecule with another, without success, and I kept feeling horrible. Along the way, as I was told I needed to (as a baseline treatment), I started taking antidepressants as well as antipsychotics (first and second generation).
In 2024, in a desperate attempt, I went to Ukraine despite the war to a specialized clinic, and for the first time, the doctors succeeded in tapering off benzos very slowly over months. This was an important step on the road. However, my condition was getting even worse, and I came to a point where I completely lost hope.
I came back home and wanted to commit suicide. I called an ambulance and was hospitalized again in a psych ward. As my state was catastrophic, I was prescribed a high dosage of quetiapine (up to 600 mg) and sertraline (Zoloft) (up to 200 mg). I was already suicidal, and in my profound despair, I ended up losing my mind and experiencing psychosis, with hallucinations (3D visual and olfactory), time fragmentation, catatonia, mutism, and so on. I was groaning and shouting. I was also experiencing somatic issues such as purpura and incontinence. Because of my delusions, at some point I stopped eating and drinking for four days.
It was in this state of utter despair that, in February 2025, some friends came to my hospital room to pray for me. I can testify that that day, Jesus healed me. I instantly experienced a deep sense of relief, with peace that I had completely lost flowing in again. Since that day, I stayed one extra month in the hospital, where I kept recovering progressively. Over a few months, I was able to decrease and taper off the two antidepressants and the antipsychotic I was on.
To this day, I have been drug-free for almost one year now, with no more psychotropic drugs. The dreadful side effects have completely disappeared (such as the appalling long-lasting vocalizations) or been dramatically reduced, and I am getting better every day. I experience love, joy, peace, and life again. Thank God, after four and a half years, I finally could come out of the pit, out of hell on earth.