Benzodiazepines

From Daily Express: A patient advocacy group has launched a petition at the Scottish Parliament requesting improved support services for people withdrawing from antidepressants. People from...

For the Huffington Post, David Freeman asks “By tamping down anxious feelings, could it be that these so-called “anxiolytic” drugs are blunting our empathy and...

Tom Sullivan of Fox News asks psychiatrist Peter Breggin, author of Medication Madness, whether drugs rather than guns are at the heart of mass...

Psychotropic medications, including short-acting benzodiazepines, strongly increase the frequency of falls in the elderly, according to research from the Netherlands published in Maturitas: The...

Research from Germany finds that people with schizophrenia or schizoaffective diagnoses given multiple medications - an antipsychotic plus a benzodiazepine or more than one...

From The Lown Institute: The recent deaths of several beloved musicians, actors, and other public figures have brought to light the dangers of taking multiple, potentially fatal drugs. "In...

There is mounting evidence that benzodiazepines are causing Alzheimer's Disease. I cannot imagine any genuine medical specialty ignoring or downplaying information of this sort. But psychiatry, with the perennial defensiveness of those with something to hide, promotes the idea that they are safe when used for short periods, knowing full well that a huge percentage of users become "hooked" after a week or two, and stay on the drugs indefinitely.

Addiction Today reports "Attention on illicit drugs has deflected focus from the gigantic scale of harms by legal, prescribed drugs. We give you the...

Drugs that pass into the water supply can alter the behavior of fish, according to a paper published today in Science magazine. Experiments using...

A group of French doctors presented a new study in the area of pediatric anesthesiology at this year’s World Congress of Anaesthesiologists in Hong...

Kermit, West Virginia is home to the Kermit Sav-Rite Pharmacy, whose owner has pleaded guilty to fraudulent sales of prescription drugs. The Centers for...

Two years ago, when I first felt the dizzy confusion of benzo disability, I talked about it openly. I remember discussing it briefly with an older friend who found my plight strangely fascinating. He asked if I remembered Quaaludes, a sedative-hypnotic that was all the rage in the 1960s and ‘70s. “We called them ‘Stumble Biscuits,’” he told me, “because you’d stumble down the street and hit one car and then stumble over and hit something else and it was just happy and goofy. It’s too bad they took them off the market. Those things were great.”

The Army Medical Command has determined that benzodiazepines could worsen rather than reduce PTSD and lead to addiction. The April 10 policy memo also...

Can withdrawal from psychiatric drugging be so terrible as to leave you with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) — to somehow rearrange your psyche for the worse even once time and hard work have undone the damage caused by the chemicals? To so profoundly alter your core self that you acquire a new diagnosis meriting special considerations or further treatment in order to resume a normal life again? If the real definition of insanity is “repeating the same mistake over and over and expecting a different result,” then embracing a psychiatric diagnosis of PTSD as a result of psychiatric damage would surely make you “insane”.

Psychologist and Professor Amber Gum has published the story of her personal journey of rethinking psychotropic medication in a special issue on "The Politics of Mental Health" in The Journal of Medicine and the Person. Influenced by Mad in America and the work of Robert Whitaker, Gum became aware of evidence that “suggests that psychotropic medications are less effective and more harmful than most believe” and now hopes to encourage other mental health professionals and researchers to engage in open-minded, critical self-assessment of standard practices.

“The war against the opioid epidemic in Massachusetts may be pushing another potential public health crisis into the shadows,” the Metro West Daily News...

Pneumonia cases in the elderly are strongly associated with use of anticholinergic medications, including benzodiazepines and tricyclic antidepressants.

White race and size of initial prescription, along with poor sleep quality, are associated with long-term benzodiazepine use in older adults.

“We asked people from all over the world to share about the iatrogenic injury they sustained from taking benzodiazepines as prescribed and why they...

It is the deadly cocktail of benzodiazepines and opiates that is most responsible for the rising rate of opiate overdose deaths... and benzos may actually be THE decisive deadly component in the lethal drug combination. Yes, fentanyl and propofol can be dangerous drugs, but to focus the main attention in this crisis on these rarely used drugs is deliberately misleading...This minimizes the critical role of benzos and rather conveniently lets certain institutions and their leaders off the hook as the main suspects in such a vast number of cases that should be labeled as crimes of negligent homicide.

On October 23, the New York Times ran a very nice feature story about a Los Angeles woman, Keris Myrick, who, even though she...

Medically-induced harm—affecting tens of millions of people worldwide—has taken the field decades to take seriously.

It was the first time in my Klonopin journey it occurred to me the problem might not be inherent in me. The problem might actually be the Klonopin. Convinced my very life was at stake, I made the firm decision to get off the stuff once and for all.

It’s stunning what a quarter milligram of a benzodiazepine can do to the body. I’ve been detoxing off a high dose of benzodiazepines since September of 2011. The first few months were a failure. But this past May, I found my expert and thought I had the formula. Things were going well for detoxing off a substance many deem more addictive that heroin. That is, I realized, until they weren’t.

“The anguish, anxiety and nightmares were unbearable,” the former film executive Tod Abrams had wrote in a note to his family. “It was only...