The setup

I was always a bit of an anxious child and never slept super well. No major trauma, did fine in school, but it was never ideal, and I just lived like that because it was all I knew. Then in my late twenties I went back to school to do a specialized certificate while working at the same time, and the anxiety and insomnia got pushed pretty bad. Cue the death of a close friend, and it was all a bit too much. I was quite distraught, and someone told me I should talk to a doctor, which sounded like the reasonable thing to do. So I did. I was innocent, and I trusted the system.

The prescription

I walked out with a prescription for clonazepam. Looking back it is also strange that it was an everyday prescription and not as needed… oh well … I never got any warning about dependence, or that it should only be used for the short term, or that I should never stop it abruptly, and nobody suggested that maybe a person going through grief and burnout could benefit from seeing a mental health professional. Looking back, I don’t think my doctor was a villain, I think he did what the system trained him to do (and the system has a serious blind spot when it comes to benzos), but that’s exactly what iatrogenic means: nobody has to be evil for the harm to be very real. There is no evil here, but there is negligence, and want it or not, negligence causes harm all the same.

The honeymoon

And at first, it was marvelous. I slept, the anxiety quieted down, I seemed to have found myself again, so why would I ever fret? It came from a doctor, how could it be bad?

The next two years were quiet, the same little dose every day, nothing seeming wrong at all. What was actually happening during those quiet years, and how it all slowly fell apart, that’s the next post.