SweetOnSylvia wrote:
Hello,
this was something I posted on a query about clonazapam, and whether or not the poster should take it... This is a part of my story and a part of my life and it is a confusing life, but it is my life and I wish to warn you so that you do not have to go through what I am going through:
I was on the medicine for seven years, starting when I was sixteen after a traumatic incident and I was hospitalized and they just pumped me full of medicine to get me to calm down. I often react pretty bad to most psych meds, yet, I did not have any adverse effects overtly to benzos. Things actually felt more clear and I could make more sense of my thoughts and could cope with sensory information without overloading. I was not diagnosed then and so I still lost all of my friends by a year after I came back to school (this was starting to happen a few years before I went to the mental hospital which could possibly be explained by the sudden complexity of friendships after puberty) and would not be diagnosed with autism (even though I was diagnosed with quite a few other conditions) until almost five years after this. However, by the first year anniversary of being on clonazapam, I started to feel as if my vocabulary was deteriorating-- and I am a writing and writing poetry is everything to me so this would be come a frequent anxiety-- and over the years, I would get this feeling that things were making less sense. I began to grow even more distant from my body and even constructed a theory to disprove the existence of the body. I was also starting to have difficulty with memory, with remembering events that had happened in my life since I got on the medicine-- my once bright memory had started to become overwhelmingly fuzzy after being on the medicine for four years)... I also have poor or average visuospatial skills, according to a test that I had, but I do not think I had this as a child...
Please do your research. I felt more functional on Clonazapam, so much more funcitonal and my thoughts made more sense even if my memory was fuzzy... I still have visual thinking, with or without the medicine and would still interpret things I read or things I felt through images-- knock on wood that this stays-- but I am not sure if it is strong as it was when I was little... I am off the medicine now, am now on the beginning of the third month of withdrawals-- clonazapam withdrawals for long term users like myself can go on for a year or even two years and there is still a chance that your brain will not fully recover... It sucks so much as I was put on it by a corrupt mental hospital that has since shut down-- where I went twice during my adolescent years-- after a sexually abusive incident with a teacher... And now I have brain damage because I got addicted before I even got out of the mental hospital and there were no doctors telling my Mommy that I should not be on this medicine. In fact, there were several doctors-- doctors she had to fight to get me off the lithium which had rendered me into a constant state of elopement-- who were telling her that I needed to be this medicated... Doctors are horrible and clonazapam is wonderful until it slowly destroys all the things that you loved about your brain...
I was on benzos for years and begged the doctors to get off of them (Xanax for most of the time, clonazepam for only a year or so). It wasn't that serious for me, it just made me angry and when I got depressed, I was DEPRESSED. I already have a poor short term memory and poor coordination, but I will say that I notice that my memory is better now than it was then. I am sorry you went through that. I was hospitalized as a teen and felt like a guinea pig, so I get your distrust of doctors. I was on lithium too and felt like a zombie with stacked vision (seeing each object as a stack of cards... eg seeing a computer behind a computer behind a computer and so forth). I am currently on buproprion and escitalopram, though my doctors want to put me on either ritalin or adderall. I hope you find what works best for your body and brain. If your doctors aren't listening to you, definitely seek a second or third opinion. No one knows how you feel but yourself.
_________________
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.” -Buddha
"It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" -Alice in Wonderland
"I know that I know nothing." -Socrates
Diagnosed with ADHD, general anxiety disorder, chronic severe depression. In the process of obtaining an ASD diagnosis.
AQ from Psychology Tools: 45
05 Mar 2020, 1:58 am
