Benzodiazepines

In 1980, the British Medical Journal published a “Systematic Review of the Benzodiazepines” by the Committee on the Review of Medicines. The committee denied the addictive potential of Benzodiazepines and limited their suggestions to short term use. The results have been devastating.

From The Times: In an age in which benzodiazepine dependence is increasingly becoming a global problem, online forums serve as a lifeline for numerous benzodiazepine...

In this blog post, Andy White highlights the role Xanax plays in silencing political dissent and keeping the public complacent. Instead of expressing anger...

World Benzodiazepine Awareness Day has just launched its official website, w-bad.org. The new site includes useful information about benzodiazepines, ideas for taking action, and video...

ProPublica is well known for creating interesting data bases that allow anyone hooked up to a computer to see by name whether a physician is accepting Big Pharma payments — from dinners to speaking engagements to consulting services. What may be lesser known is that occasionally ProPublica will publish other data that when carefully mined can reveal even more about the use of psychiatric drugs especially when there is a public funding source available.

From the Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry: A major national newspaper is looking for people in the UK willing to share recent stories of negative effects...

In this piece for The New Inquiry, Sophie Putka chronicles the mental health profession's long history of pathologizing, diagnosing, and medicating women's emotions. "With Freud’s claims...

In my most recent blog post, “The Unmedicated Life”, I attempted to answer a question I’m frequently asked by other survivors — “How did you get better from psychiatric medication damage/withdrawal?” But there is also a part two to the question that I didn’t address, which is, “How did you know when you were better?”

The authors of an article in Journal of Psychosocial Nursing reviewed the literature on psychotropic PRN medications in order to respond to a request to...

It has been 7.5 years since I got off benzos, the drug that damaged me the most, and 6.75 years off all meds; the final medicine I tapered was a tricyclic antidepressant, nortriptyline, in autumn 2006. Since that time, I have not taken another psychoactive medicine, nor have I had any desire to. Neither have I sought out therapy or the like. Personally, I’m sick of labels, sick of the industry, sick of talking about my “problems,” sick of navel-gazing, and would just rather live.

Four different studies conducted in different ways examining different groups have linked use of certain psychiatric drugs to bone fracture risks and negative impacts on human bone development.

In this piece for STAT, Jennifer Adaeze Okwerekwu describes the value of psychiatric advance directives for those at risk of experiencing an emotional crisis. "'It’s something that can...

This week the drug monitoring and patients' rights website, RxISK, launched the Centre for Medication Withdrawal, a page dedicated to establishing what causes dependence and how to treat it.

Researchers in Taiwan found in a retrospective analysis of data from the Taiwanese National Health Insurance system concerning 59,647 patients from 1996 to 2000 that...

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

When I was born, everyone was expecting me to have arms. The doctor's mind raced; how am I going to tell this mother and the father that their son has hands but not arms? If he's missing so much in his extremities, mustn’t he also be missing a mind? My mom looked into my eyes and knew - in a way that only mothers know - that I had a mind, and spirit.

“The use of benzodiazepines, such as Xanax and Valium, is on the rise, and the number of overdose deaths related to them soared in...

From STAT: Although benzodiazepines are some of the most commonly prescribed psychiatric medications in the U.S., few people realize how dangerous and addictive these drugs can be. "Highly...

Overall, 16.7% of 242 million US adults reported filling 1 or more prescriptions for psychiatric drugs in 2013.

From Healio: Researchers recently found that veterans diagnosed with PTSD and prescribed antidepressants or atypical antipsychotics are at a higher risk for dementia than veterans...

Researchers in Taiwan found a 3.33x greater risk of benign brain tumors in patients who had been prescribed benzodiazepines for at least 2 months....

The 11 July 2016 will be the inaugural World Benzodiazepine Awareness Day, part of a campaign to raise global awareness about the issue of doctor-induced benzodiazepine dependency, which affects...

The Washington Post investigates the epidemic of suicide and the overuse of psychiatric drugs that is sweeping through towns in Colorado.

The childhood and psychiatric abuse altered my neurological, hormonal and other bodily functions and it was difficult to say which abuse left what mark. The doctors used medication to fix the changes and the taking of prescription pills became a habit. I took pills to calm me, pills to sleep, and pills to make me happy. A few months after stopping all medications, I was a bundle of nerves and I opened the cupboard for a pill. Living on autopilot as I had been doing for so long had to stop. I switched gears from absentmindedly resorting to pills, to purposefully calming myself without using drugs by breathing the way the psychologist had taught me.

With drugs for ADHD increasing 17%, and an "unprecedented increase in patients taking antidepressants and antipsychotics," overall prescription drug sales in the United States...