Genuine underlying conditions versus benzo withdrawal?

[[Pe...]]

Xanax for Klonopin w/d.  WTH?!?!  That would be hilarious if it wasn't so serious.

[[am...]]

I have had DR/DP, anxiety, insomnia and paranoia since being as small as I can remember, even in elementary school assembly I remember watching myself in the third person, I remember quite well staying awake until the early hours and only sleeping a little.  None of it ever bothered me, it is just who I am.  I always dealt with it just fine.  In fact I would never even have known there are words for it until I got involved with the mental benzo world.

 

Of course these facets of my personality got way way worse when I CTd but I never for one second believed that I have any mental "illness".  I think so many people are convinced by the idiocy of psychiatry that there individuality, what makes them them are defects and should be medicated.  It's disgusting.  If something isn't having a major negative effect on one's life I really don't see the need for any kind of intervention, even if there was it should be something vastly removed from brain and nerve damaging toxins that seem to be the first course of action for pretty much any life problem these days.

 

 

Life is hard, we are organic and we have been programmed to believe the crap we see in media, if we don't have the perfect body, job, friends, family and though processes that we are told are normal in mass media, then we are ill in some way or another, usually mentally........and  only if we ram handfuls of meds down our throats do we stand any chance of attaining that nirvana.

 

It's a crock.  I'm happy with how I am,  I'll deal with whatever problems come along myself.  I don't need a jumped up charlatan telling me his opinion based on nothing, telling me I am defective in this, that or the other way.  As far as I am concerned psychiatrists are for the most part dogs, coming second only to scumbag lawyers who free rapists and murderers on technicalities.

 

 

As far as psychiatry is concerned, every stage of life is a condition that needs medicating.  Look at what has happened to our advanced societies.  It's nasty, they're horrible places.  I so wish I could buy an earth ship and get off the grid.

 

 

 

 

[[Be...]]

This is an interesting subject, and I happen to think somewhat along the same lines as Amano. Normal, in terms of the psyche, is big as the ocean. We have this stringent criteria for what constitutes a healthy psych, and the laughable matter is most of us miss the mark. O you're detail oriented? You have OCD. You think life sucks? You are depressed.

 

What if you are meant to be a tad more dour, a tad more obsessive, etc? The DSM is psuedo science; a very baseball park attempt at taxonomy that would have these bullshit labels applied to 95% of the population... Just my op. Took a continuing ed course regarding personality disorders recently, and was taken back by how illogical the DSM seemed.

 

As far as distinguishing between other issues and benzo w/d, I think that only the individual can judge, and that's hard since objectivity goes out the window with such intense suffering. We can only ride it out and see what remains. If something is 1000x's worse since the benzo, or is new entirely, then it is fairly easy to attrribute it to w/d. Again I don't think it is clear cut, and it is a terrible waiting game.

 

Now there is a whole different class: People who have underlying physical conditions in addition to their benzo issues. I fall into this category, and it is a unique hell. I guess I will find out in 6 months, a year, 1 1/2 years what is really going on here

 

 

[[Ho...]]

Sorry Holly, I meant no offense, really.  But some people go to pdocs after getting sx's from benzos and the pdocs miss the boat, and cause more harm.

I know you didn't, I was just venting...

[[Gr...]]

I just want to say thanks for all the replies so far.  I am way more skeptical about psychiatry than I used to be...I once actually thought they had the answers to almost anything...how naive I was!

 

Personally I had most of my "issues" before taking medications, but certainly have had more issues due to taking some medications.  That's why it's all blurry to me, because it's hard to know what's a non-medication symptom and what is somehow associated with coming off medications.  This is the only reason I asked about a couple of days back on benzos in my original post...logically if symptoms are due to withdrawal from a substance (i.e. lack of that substance) then briefly reinstating should (again, logically) briefly stop whichever symptoms are due to withdrawal from that drug.  Whatever symptoms remain should be those that exist independently of drug withdrawal.  I certainly wouldn't suggest anyone going back to benzos long-term however.

 

One day this field may grow a lot closer to real science, but for now it does seem like there are quite a few arbitrary mental disorders.  Just to take one example, I have always been shy and socially awkward, which led to me becoming lonely as I entered my 20's.  This in turn led to me feeling very depressed about myself, which in turn led to drinking heavily as a desperate attempt at blotting it all out of consciousness for a few hours every night.  Upon seeing a shrink I was told I had depression and substance abuse.  My social anxiety, the original problem, was initially ignored in this diagnosis totally!  I have since sought other opinions, and have been "diagnosed" with social anxiety, social phobia, avoidant personality disorder, and Asperger's syndrome/disorder (not all by the same doctor!).  My latest mental health appointment saw me come away from the clinic no longer having Asperger's at all, with two separate workers at the clinic saying I am not all that similar to "real" Asperger's patients they have seen, apart from the social difficulties.  They also doubted the personality disorder, preferring instead to call it social anxiety all over again.

 

Just for a bit of light hearted relief, a friend and I recently took online personality quizzes, and both came back with a mixture of "disorders"...in my case I could choose between avoidant, schizoid, schizoaffective, dependent, obsessive, and other personality "disorders" depending on exactly how I answered a few of the questions, which had more than one possible real answer due to my issues varying somewhat over time and with my mood.

 

The only thing that wasn't a laugh was that these classifications are the ones from DSM-IV!