(Reposted) - Peterson Family Update June 2020

Hi there! I'm Michaela Peterson, Jordan's daughter. Just so everyone knows, this podcast was originally posted on my channel, so some of you may have already seen it. Dad thought it was a good idea to post it on his channel as well to increase viewership, and today's also World Benzodiazepine Awareness Day, so it seemed like a good time to post it.

The past year was absolutely horrible. Both mom and dad almost died repeatedly. Andre, my husband, and I have spent every day for the last six months trying to find my dad help, looking everywhere, traveling around the world. If it hadn't been for Andre, we wouldn't have made it. This was a difficult interview; it flattened both of us the evening we recorded it.

He's been in the public eye for years now, and we both thought explaining what's gone on in the last year could help other people avoid the same hell we've been through. We're gonna do another JBP update in two to three weeks on the Michaela Peterson podcast to keep people informed of dad's progress and maybe delve into his future plans. Please check out the links in the description and in the show notes to learn more about the topics we're about to cover.

Hi, dad.

Hi, kiddo. It's really nice to be doing a family update with you rather than about you.

Yeah, well, it feels like a good thing from this end of the universe as well.

Good. When was the last time you used a mic to record anything for YouTube?

Mm-hmm. Last fall. Likely early fall, maybe September.

It was long. Maybe, yeah, almost a year.

Yeah, a long time. So, it felt like a long time too. It felt like a very, very, very long time.

Yes, well, in the most Canadian fashion I can muster, what the hell happened, eh?

Right. That's what people were asking online, right?

Right. What happened?

Well, you know, an accident is when three or four or five unlikely things happen at the same time. And I would say happened... I mean, first of all, I spent last January with you in Zurich.

Yeah, but a hospital.

I wasn't in the hospital, but I was there most of the time.

You're in the hospital a lot.

I was in the hospital a lot, yeah.

Well, I had to feed you, you know me, or make food for you.

Yeah, so I was there, okay, through all of January. And you were getting some pretty invasive surgery done on your foot, and then your mom and I, Tammy and I, went to Australia and New Zealand for most of February, and that was actually not too bad a trip.

I felt all right, and she was feeling all right, but we knew her surgery for what was hypothetically a relatively treatable cancer was coming up in March, so that was hanging over our heads, although we weren't overwhelmingly worried about it.

And then she went and had her surgery, and then we were informed six weeks after that, after she had recovered but was still suffering some pain, that the easily treatable and non-dangerous, slow-growing malignancy that we were told she had was, in fact, something fast-growing with about a hundred percent fatality rate within a year, regardless of treatment.

Mm-hmm.

Like treating cancer, like yeah, so that was deadly. We got all... we were told that in about ten minutes.

And so when we were just expecting, well, if not a clean bill of health, at least a reassessment of what we'd already been told, she went in to have more invasive surgery, and hypothetically that would work, but it created terrible side effects, and that was the start of a whole other six months-long nightmare of trying to deal with surgical complications, which we did eventually resolve, but not until mid-August.

In fact, not and literally not until the day of our 30th wedding anniversary.

Yeah, so that was all hair-raising and stressful to say the least. I mean, you know I've talked about that, but we seemed to have a life-threatening emergency on Tammy's part for both every three days for about six months.

And then I had my own problem start to develop really, in any degree of severity, in about April, May, something like that.

I had been taking benzodiazepines since 2016, so why... before we get into there, what... why did you start taking benzodiazepines?

Well, over the Christmas vacation in 2016, you and I and Julianne and my son and Tammy went out to Vancouver Island to visit her parents and siblings. And when we were there, you and I and Andre, your husband, ate something that didn't agree with any of us and solved a very severe reaction to that.

I'm so on board, it was a logical conclusion, but I was... well, we have the same symptoms. I don't know if I was any more seriously affected than you or not, but I was freezing cold for about a month.

I couldn't get warm no matter how much I wore. I couldn't stand up without fainting. I couldn't sleep. I don't think I slept at all for something on the order of three weeks.

Yeah, people like you went on Joe Rogan and talked about a sulfite reaction you had and how you didn't sleep, and people commented that, oh, it's not possible to stay awake for that long.

But if you actually look into sodium metabisulfite allergies, the symptoms that we experienced aren't unheard of. There are people... it's also impossible to stay awake voluntarily that long. That's not the same as not being able to sleep. Those are very, very different things.

Whatever, it's possible that when I was laying there thinking I wasn't sleeping that now and then I drifted off and would wake up and not notice. I mean, I can't eliminate that as a possibility, but I can certainly tell you that I slept little enough so that it was exceedingly unpleasant.

It's a very long time to stay awake. And when we went back to Toronto, our family physician prescribed benzodiazepines, which are often used as a sleeping aid and an anti-anxiety medication, and something called zopiclone in moving, and I hardly took the EMA vein at all, maybe four or five times, but I took the benzodiazepine the way that it was prescribed to twice a day, 0.25 milligrams, and that seemed to bring the symptoms to a pretty rapid halt, which is also part of the reason I didn't need the EMA vein.

And then there were so many other things going on around me at that time that I never really thought about it again. You know, I thought that it was a relatively harmless drug, and I was taking it in a prescribed fashion at not too high a dose, and I developed symptoms that I now recognized were associated with its use: weakness on my left side and like a feeling of detachment from people around me, people I loved, some decrease in the ability to experience joy.

But it wasn't until much later that I actually associated it with the benzodiazepine use.

When?

Well, when your mom got so sick, my anxiety levels had been climbing up again.

Yeah, that was unbearable. I mean, the response I had if you’re told your parent or your wife of almost 30 years has no chance and is going to be dead in the next ten months, that's what we were told.

That surgery doesn't help and that chemo doesn't help and that this is a fast-growing cancer and you're screwed, no matter what, right?

What we heard in one day, anxiety went all over North America to New York and to Houston and to LA looking for different opinions before we decided to settle on surgery.

And everyone gave us the same opinion, yes, which was that nothing is going to help, but surgery was probably the best, the best low-probability bet.

Yes, so I asked my doctor to increase the benzodiazepine dose, but what seemed to happen as a consequence of that was that I just got more anxious. Like, so again in retrospect, it seems like I had a rather uncommon but not unheard of reaction to benzodiazepines where increased dose makes anxiety worse instead of better.

So then at one point, when things weren't getting better and Tami was still in the hospital, I was trying to take care of her. We had lots of help; I stopped taking them entirely and tried ketamine, which is a treatment for depression.

Well, that... neither of those were very good ideas as it turned out.

So I had to stop taking benzodiazepines entirely, the ketamine.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Then I didn't go... then I stayed off them for something approximating a week, not knowing that that was a very bad idea.

And I often think I should have known these things, because I did a lot of scientific research when I was a graduate student on alcoholism, and I knew that alcohol and benzodiazepines and barbiturates were all the same chemical class, at least in terms of their effect on neurological effects.

But what I knew about benzodiazepines was that they were comparatively safe compared to barbiturates, which they basically replaced.

But that's much less true than everybody who's taking them hopes, and they're very widely prescribed, and I don't remember what the probability of developing a dependency on them is.

If you take them for more than two weeks, it's 50%.

I believe it's something like 50%. Yeah, if you take them for two or four weeks, and over four weeks it's much, much higher. Most people prescribed them stay on them for life, and that could have something to do with the fact that they're very difficult to get off of.

Yeah, well, it was unbelievably unpleasant. I mean, it was unbearably unpleasant. And so I started stopping, started tapering off when Tami was in the hospital, but I couldn't push that too fast because it wasn't bearable.

And what do you mean it wasn't?

Well, my anxiety levels went higher than I'd ever... than anything I'd ever experienced, and I also developed this condition called akathisia, and the best way I can describe that is that it was like being jabbed with something electric or something sharp non-stop for hours for all the hours I was awake.

It was absolutely... I couldn't sit or lay down or stop moving, and even if I did get up and move, it wasn't like that made it better. I just couldn't stop doing it. It was horrible.

Akathisia is horrible. It's... well, it's like being whipped; that's another way of thinking about it. Although I really think, you know, this sounds melodramatic, but I think if I had to pick whipping or akathisia, that it would depend on how big a whip, but maybe not what an obvious choice has five pronged whips, yes?

Yeah, cat-o'-nine-tails; that might be worse, but it was plenty bad, yeah.

And so and things just fell apart more and more. Tami recovered rather miraculously in the middle of August, but I continued my sort of downhill spiral and ended up in a clinic on the eastern seaboard that claimed they could do a rapid benzodiazepine detox, which was a complete bloody lie.

Yeah, well, what we figured was, we didn't realize that there was this physical dependency until you stopped to try and do the ketamine, and then we tried tapering, and you couldn't stand it because of the akathisia, and so we thought, well, let's go get some professional help, right?

And well, I went to the clinic on the understanding that they could do a multi-day detoxification and treatment for withdrawal. When I got there, what they told me instead was that they'd substitute essentially... they'd substitute one benzodiazepine for another, which wasn't the least bit helpful because clonazepam was already a long-acting benzodiazepine, and they're easier to wean off than the shorter-acting benzodiazepines and they had nothing to offer.

Essentially, I came out of that clinic worse than when I went in.

So, like significantly worse?

Yes, onto more sedative-like drugs in order to dampen down the akathisia symptoms, right?

Which wasn't helping much, given the fact that the benzodiazepines were causing the akathisia.

Yes, yeah, so and then I went back to Toronto.

That's November, Nova.

And things maintained their downhill trajectory, apart from the fact that Tami was recovering quite nicely, which, of course, was great, but then I ended up in the hospital in Toronto, and the hospital I ended up went in was also worse than useless, yes.

So, and I don't remember this part of it.

From December 15th onward, you and Andre, your husband, took me out of that hospital, and we went to Russia, of all places, near Moscow, to try a treatment offered by a clinic there that used... they use proper fall index tour.

Right, right, proper fall too, as a heavy, heavy sedating agent.

It's basically made me unconscious for nine days.

Yeah, so you were completely out for nine days.

Well, I also had pneumonia, which I developed apparently in the hospital in Toronto.

Oh, yeah, it was quite entertaining, the whole string of events.

We got questions about, you know, why on earth would you go to Russia when you could get, you know, world-class care in North America?

And the reason for that was because we had tried the Ashton protocol, switching over to Valium. We tried the Ashton protocol, and lots of people have success with that, although it sounds horrible; lots of people don't have success with it.

Yeah, I put out a... the first family update we did was when you went to the first rehab center in the states.

And after I put that out and said this is what's going on, I had hundreds, if not thousands, of people respond telling me how horrible benzodiazepine withdrawal could be, how they couldn't work, how they were pacing around their backyards for a year, and they basically said just keep him alive.

Make sure he... psychiatrists that I spoke with said, you know, when I asked him how long the... it's easy it was likely to last, they said, well, it could be two years.

And I thought no one could live like this for two years.

It's like you can't live for two years if you're being constantly prodded with something excruciatingly painful on a moment-to-moment basis.

It's just not... there's no escape. There's no relief.

That's just not possible, wasn't possible, or...

I mean, the reason I did survive certainly wasn't because I was enjoying my life.

The reason was is that I had family that I was very attached to and friends who went above and beyond the call of duty helping to care for me.

But the experience was intolerably dreadful.

And it's so strange; we're now in Serbia, weirdly enough, in Belgrade, of all bloody places, and we've been here about two weeks and went to yet another specialty clinic run by an anesthesiologist, and they modified the medication that I was taking in Florida, which is where we were last, and I don't know.

I can't understand it, but virtually all my symptoms have disappeared.

I'm still weak; if I get up and walk around, I don't have my stamina, but I can think clearly.

I feel I'm back to my regular self, such as that is, yeah, during the mornings and during the days.

I can work, you know, it's very surprising to me that this happened so rapidly, but it has.

And that's why we're doing this podcast and, yeah, hopefully the last, but Tami is coming. She's been... I haven't been with her for more than a few days since the middle of December, and that was partly because I was in bad shape and she wasn't in good enough shape to be patient with me.

She almost died like every day for six months, like you said, and you were in... you were suffering so much that anyone around you suffered.

Yes, because of how horrible it was to watch.

It was horrible.

So just to back up a bit, you went to a hospital in Toronto, and they were going to make things worse rapidly.

They weren't willing, because of your akathisia, which was making you crazy, they weren't willing to slow taper you down.

They just wanted to stabilize you by keeping the benzodiazepines there, so Andre and I found a clinic in Russia that would actually put you to sleep using proper Falls so you wouldn't have to suffer while they took the benzodiazepines out and doing a detox, or at least you'd be unconscious for that period of time.

And doing a detox on benzodiazepines isn't recommended. You're supposed to do a slow taper, but your akathisia was so bad that even staying at the same dose was dangerous, right?

So we needed to get rid of that, so we spent time in Russia, managed to get it out, and it was... or, well, you guys took a big risk taking me out of the hospital in Toronto, which nobody recommended.

The psychiatrist certainly weren't in favor of it, and taking me somewhere as foreign as Moscow and attempting this generally unadvised treatment was all surreal.

Yeah, what was terrifying.

And when I woke up, so as I said, that was complicated by the fact that I had developed pneumonia in both lungs, but when I woke up, I was first catatonic and then delirious.

I can remember the delirium that lasted a whole day consisted of a sort of dreamlike hallucination that I had been kidnapped by...

You were... you were delirious for nine days?

Nine days, yeah, nine days.

You remember the last day?

Yeah, I remember that I was kidnapped by people, oddly enough, who lived in Florida, and they were like very rural backwoods people.

Landlord... tree people.

Root Florida tree people, yeah, and that they were gonna keep... the leader of this little gang who kidnapped me was gonna kill me because the leader was going to kill me because he wanted to impress his girlfriend.

And it was a very, very vivid dream that I had while I was awake.

I knew I was in the hospital at the same time. I was just one of them.

And I also remember that when I first woke up, I was irate because I had been being secured to the side of the bed because apparently I was tearing out the IV tubes that I was connected to because I didn't want to be in the hospital.

I had no idea why I was in the hospital or where the hospital was or where anybody I knew was.

We had to back up a bit again. We had agreed when you were in the hospital in Toronto, like our whole family had sat down and agreed that the best option was this rapid detox in Moscow.

And you'd been part of that discussion, but when you woke up after the detox in Russia, you couldn't remember any of that.

Right, I remember being really angry with you when you first showed up because they were very limited.

Yes, but I didn't know that it was this... oh man, it was so awful.

We ended up in like the outskirts of Moscow in a clinic for severely ill people, yeah, and it was like Soviet-ask guard guarded, so the visiting hours were two hours.

From driving... how far are they to come and visit?

I was like two hours each way.

Right, right, and in Moscow winter, winter in rough traffic, in bad weather, yeah, to visit an ICU that was full of people who were in very rough shape, including me.

Oh yeah, you fit right in when you first got there.

And at first it was like, oh my god, we brought dad to Moscow and destroyed him.

Well, that's what the doctor told you, wasn't it?

The first said that, oh yeah.

Under I couldn't even... like, there was one day that was so bad I couldn't go in and Andre went in and they said, you know, why are you here of all places, in Russian?

And Andre said, there was no one to help him in the West, which there wasn't.

We looked everywhere, right?

And we tried to clinics and talked to multiple psychiatrists, and none of them could help, and she said, great, you've brought him here to die.

So, and that was, you know, the scary thing about the hospital you were in in Toronto is you had pneumonia that wasn't picked up until we got to Moscow.

So when you arrived in Moscow, you had a fever and pneumonia in both lungs.

And so when they sedated you, we had to intubate you during the sedation because of the pneumonia.

So we weren't getting care anywhere, and getting off of benzodiazepines almost killed you.

On the place in Russia, managed to stabilize you.

What it was?

Yeah, to some degree.

Like, I didn't have... easier was much reduced.

Yeah, when the benzos were finally... so they did some plasmapheresis as well to get rid of the benzodiazepines in your blood because the half-life of benzos is so long that even when you stop taking little dates of that particular kind, you get... early it takes a really long time for it to get out of your blood.

So one of the things they did when you were under was plasmapheresis to get rid of all the benzodiazepines so when you woke up, the only good thing that had happened was you weren't taking benzodiazepines and you weren't a Cathisia.

Okay, we're totally screwed, but you weren't a Cathisia.

Right, yes, and that was a great relief.

And then we went... when we went to rehab center for a while in Moscow, that was less medical and more physiotherapy-yeah-oriented.

And for a while, I couldn't... I couldn't type because I couldn't remember how to put my hands on the keyboard.

I couldn't walk up and down stairs because I couldn't see the stairs properly.

I couldn't do up buttons, and one night I got up to use the washroom and then came back into my bedroom, and I couldn't remember how to lay down.

I tried for about 40 minutes; I couldn't remember the sequence of actions that would enable me to lay down.

So this was probably two or three in the morning.

I ended up calling for a nurse so that the nurse, who was a very helpful person, could come in and tell me how to lay down.

So that was very strange, kind of cortical blindness.

So I stayed in there for what, two weeks?

And then we went to Florida, where we thought it would be sunny and easier to recover, which might have been.

But when I was in Florida, the aunt, my anxiety levels were... I wasn't akathisic most of the time, but my anxiety levels were unbearably high, and that finally got so bad that I had family members there who were taking care of me.

You were there, of course, and Andre, but also my parents, my sister, some friends, Tami came for a while, my son came for a while.

But it got to the point where it was obvious that just the care of family members, no matter how well-intentioned, wouldn't be sufficient, and it was just too much to ask of people.

The responsibility was too great.

And so that's when we... you and Andre had been communicating with the Serbian medical clinic for about six weeks, something like that.

And they'd been quite helpful.

Five months.

Okay, well, this is partly why we're doing this together is because I don't know all the facts at hand.

Yeah, but they were helpful.

They were helpful; Andre managed to get in touch with this clinic in Belgrade, where it's not at least people who are treating you. It's not run by a psychiatrist; it's run by an anesthesiologist, which seems to be how you need to be treated.

Well, it's working for... it seems to be working for me at the present anyways, and that's the best we've got, and it's pretty good because I felt better.

Probably I felt better... see, the thing about the benzodiazepines too that I didn't really understand until I began to decrease their use, I was very... I had become quite isolated from my family members.

Yeah, right; it was not... most noticeable, I would say, in my relationship with my son, but it was like there was a barrier up between me and people.

It was noticeable!

It was noticeable; I thought I attributed that to strange twists and turns my life had taken in the previous two or three years because there was no shortage of strangeness on that front.

But, and then also I had two strange muscle weakness that plagued me, and I now realize in retrospect that that was all a consequence of benzodiazepine use.

So using him... well, this is part of the reason we're doing this, this podcast or video is, well, to let people know these are very widely prescribed drugs and they are not safe to take for more than two weeks or a month at the absolute maximum.

And if you take them longer than that and you end up addicted, you're going to... or dependent, which means that you'll suffer withdrawal symptoms on their cessation.

You are gonna be one sorry person!

Some people, you know, have a better time of it when they stop their use than others, but enough people have a terrible time so that it's an absolute... it's a medically-induced epidemic.

It's a complete bloody catastrophe.

Here, it's probably worse than the opiate epidemic, and that's really saying something.

So, and I don't know if I'm out of it or not, you know.

I mean, I have a hard time believing how much better I feel than I did two weeks ago.

It's... it doesn't seem plausible.

So, you know, it's possible all the things will just deteriorate for me again, although I wouldn't, I don't feel like that at the moment.

I feel like things are put back together in an important way.

Fortunately, one thing I've been able to continue doing through all of this is I'm writing a new book, and it's due in the middle of July, and that's going quite well.

And I was able to do that even when I was in these different clinics, hospitalized in all these different clinics, although I don't think I did any writing in Russia.

No, not till the very end.

Yeah, at the very end, you did before we went to Florida.

Yep, you were editing.

Yeah, well, I remembered one other thing we were gonna discuss.

You know, some people... okay, first of all, I've had a tremendous amount of support from family members and friends, like really.

I mentioned this earlier, but it's worth mentioning again—people have gone far beyond the call of duty to help me and Tami and I in the last year and a half, and there's been an unbelievably massive outpouring of public support, which has really taken me by surprise in some sense because, you know, it's one thing to express your condolences if you're discussing someone who, like my wife, is suffering from something clearly of her... that's clearly not of her making, cancer for example.

But a dependence is more ethically questionable, right?

Because you think, well, everyone thinks, well, you know, what did the person... the person obviously made some errors in choice that contributed to this, and that's a reasonable objection.

But despite the fact that there are many people who found that their opinions didn't align with mine, let's say the proportion of negative comments I got about what I was going through was very small.

So that was really something.

But nonetheless, one of the things I wanted to talk to you about today was the fact that what's the old saying? Physician, heal thyself, right?

I wrote a self-help book; I'm a psychologist. It's like, well, why the hell didn't I see this coming, and why wasn't I more cautious?

And I think those are reasonable questions.

Why should people take it?

Well, then that's the next question: why should people take anything I say seriously because of that?

And I guess what I would say is if you're gonna wait to learn from people who don't mistake, don't make mistakes or don't have tragedy in their life, you're gonna spend a long time waiting to learn something.

And the second thing I would say is in my lectures and my writings, I've never suggested that I was anything other than one of the people who also needed to learn these lessons.

So I included myself in the population of people who needed some moral improvement, and then the last thing would be you have to make that decision about whether or not to attend to anything that I'm doing based on your own judgment about what I've done and said.

And if you find that that's not convincing, then that's your prerogative.

If you find that it's useful, then, well, I'm delighted by that, obviously, and that's as much as there is to say.

Well, I think one of the points of doing this podcast was to inform people so that other people don't have to go through the same thing you went through because watching it from the outside was the worst thing I've ever seen, definitely, and hopefully educating people on the dangers of this.

Well, that's saying something, because when you awake when they replaced your ankle last year in January...

Oh yeah, but that was like, there was still an element of... yes, I was awake when they replaced my ankle because I was trying to avoid the general anesthesia because I didn't want the general anesthesia hangover.

I should have just done the general anesthesia, which is something I realized when they were hammering my ankle, but yeah, watching you in... how long you've been in pain has been significantly worse.

And I did want to mention too, because people are going to be wondering why didn't you again... why you didn't get more help in North America, and one of the reasons was, oh, we went to Russia.

We successfully got dad off with benzos, which two clinics in North America hadn't been able to do.

We did manage to do that, and the damage that the benzos had caused and the detox caused was significant, but there wasn't any akathisia, so they brought you back to Florida because we thought there's no point in leaving you in a center somewhere, right?

You can come back; you can stay with family, and we can just wait, and maybe it's gonna take two years.

It looked like it was gonna take a really long time if you were ever going to recover fully.

We thought, well, just... it'll be more comfortable in somewhere like Florida, and we waited, and it probably was.

Yeah, well, Moscow winter was a little anxiety-provoking, other than the medical experience you were going through.

It was a little anxiety-provoking, so there was Florida, and then the pandemic hit, so we didn't... we weren't really able to go anywhere.

And Andre and I spent months looking for a place that would take you and actually treat the neurological damage done by the benzodiazepines because this wasn't like I was when I was 17 and had my ankle and hip done.

I took oxycontin, a high-level, high dose of oxycontin for a year, and getting off of that, I experienced physical withdrawal, no psychological withdrawal.

So, I'm like, lots of people aren't aware of the difference between psychological and physical abuse, the difference between abuse and dependence.

Yeah, and physical withdrawal means your body gets used to the drug that you're on, and when you take it away, it’s as if your body is missing something.

Yeah, so with...

Yeah, so it's actually difficult to find... it's nearly impossible to find physicians that know how to treat neurological damage done by benzodiazepines.

It turns out we couldn't find anyone in North America, and we contacted places because being treated in North America would be easier than being treated in somewhere that the main language isn't English, right?

And so it took us five months of negotiations to find the clinic in Belgrade where there was an anesthesiologist who could treat you, and thank God that he apparently knows what he's doing.

And then we got here two days after Serbia opened.

So we weren't waiting around like twiddling our thumbs trying to figure out what to do with you.

We were actively looking for physicians that could help you, but there weren't any.

And we were absolutely terrified that we'd bring you to a psychiatrist in North America or a center there, and they'd say, his anxiety is through the roof, put him on benzos, right?

And then that would have been terrible.

So we did look everywhere, and it's been very complicated.

Yes, that's for sure.

And it's been very complicated, and so, you know, maybe we've... well, we're confident enough that we've come out the other side of it at least to some degree that we were willing to risk making this interview, this video.

So yeah, you know, the reason we're doing it, apart from telling people that they should be exceptionally careful with benzodiazepine prescriptions.

And like a very large number of elderly people are prescribed benzodiazepines, most of them women, but plenty of men too.

And that you do that at your peril; it also increases the risk of dementia quite substantially.

So that's a lovely additional benefit.

So watch it... it... it’s a catastrophe that benzodiazepines are being prescribed the way they are so broadly.

And so there’s that, but then also we felt that, because I don't know how you’d say it, because people have been party to my certain elements of my private life—me too—there’s perhaps that it was morally obligatory to bring people who were interested up to date on what’s occurred.

So, so far, so good.

You know, it's been nice to see you and Andre get a break for at least a couple of weeks, and it's been really nice not to be terrified out of my mind for... I mean, in Florida, the best I ever got was not petrified with anxiety but close to it.

Yeah, I had that for a few days in a row, a couple of times.

But here, and has a tremor in my left hand.

Yeah, one of the things with benzodiazepine dependence is it increases your seizure risk after you stop taking them.

So this is how serious— to give an example about how serious this physical dependency can be— is for some people, even on a low dose of benzodiazepines, if they become dependent on it and stop, they can have seizures.

That's how intense the brain changes can be.

So, you on each seizure increase the risk of the next one.

You've been at a seizure risk for six months.

You're still... if you're not on anticonvulsants, so then you have tremors everywhere and you're a seizure risk.

That's ridiculous for six months after taking, after stopping.

Well, that's right, because I completely thought it was interesting too because I was so appalled by what the benzodiazepines had done that, well, I went from four milligrams a day to zero last May, and that wasn't tolerable.

So I went back up north; part of the reason you did that is people would be like, why would you do that?

You're supposed to taper.

First of all, if you don't know about benzodiazepines, it's not obvious that you have to taper.

But we... you have also went to a psychiatrist to deal with your worsening anxiety that you thought was mainly attributed to mom's cancer, and his suggestion was triquetamin and stopped the benzodiazepines.

So that was the first psychiatrist we tried.

Yes, right, and we went to... we saw at least five of them in different areas before we got to Russia.

So it's not like we didn't give North America a good try; it's just you... I mean, you ended up... you got worse and worse.

More psychiatrists; their generally insisted on doing was quote “treating the underlying problem,” unquote, when the underlying problem was benzodiazepine withdrawal, not some other issue.

Yeah, they didn't know what to do with benzodiazepine withdrawal, so they tried to treat something they didn't know what to do with that didn't exist.

Yeah, at least in all probability, didn't exist.

Yes, you got treated by... what? You went to two different clinics, and then multiple other psychiatrists, and they tried to treat your underlying problem, yes, which we had to have huge arguments about— no, this isn't an underlying... there's no underlying problem; this is a benzodiazepine dependency, and we need to get him off of it.

But he can't tolerate it because of the akathisia; so how do you make him more comfortable while he's waiting down?

And there was... they had no idea what to...

That’s right, that was something they had been very good at this clinic.

Yeah, and advising you and me, for that matter, for the last few months while I've been trying to, yeah, my head screwed on straight again.

Yeah, they tried helping us from afar, but we needed more help than that.

So I guess one of the things we've learned from this is there may be ways to treat benzodiazepine withdrawal, right?

That we're not aware of in North America.

That I'm aware of?

Yes, there may be ways.

We'll talk about this again at some point in the relatively near future aspect when we're more certain that what is happening to me now is working.

Yeah, it's only been two weeks, and like it looks great.

I'm in way better shape; sense of humor's wrong; you can listen to music.

You're writing every day.

Yeah, and I can write; I can create not just edit.

Yeah, yeah, it's a real relief to get my love for music back, and it's like a switch being turned on because it was gone completely, and now it's back completely.

Very, very strange.

So, yeah, so well, we will talk more about what's helped if we know that it's helped.

Yes.

Then we could suggest to people what might be tried in the absence of any other options, what they can talk to their doctor about.

But I'd like to reiterate, you know, I don't remember what I think— it's one prescription either in seven or one prescription in nine in the United States is either for opiates or benzodiazepines.

So that's a huge... obviously, a huge proportion of the prescriptions, and it's very probable that someone in your family is currently taking benzodiazepine or will be prescribed them in the future for long enough to develop a dependence.

It's like people need to know this; it's not good.

Those drugs are for short-term treatment of stress-induced anxiety or for surgery.

They are used in surgery and things, right?

Yeah, but as a long-term treatment, they are a complete catastrophe.

Yeah, and not everybody... like, you know, there'll be the person or two that will say, well, I took them and I got off of you, and that's true.

But if you... it seems if you look at the statistics, if you're older, then it's harder; you're more likely to form a dependency.

Right, and maybe that's because your brain isn't as plastic; maybe it takes just longer to heal from them.

What's also true of opiates, like not everybody who takes opiates for a long period of time develops a pronounced dependence.

There's lots of individual variability, but the risk is still extremely high.

Mm-hmm.

I had people message me after the video in September, saying they'd gotten off of multiple drugs and that benzodiazepines had been the most difficult by far.

Mm-hmm.

People with experience with opiates as well or heroin or something said benzodiazepines wasn't completely doable.

I'd had bouts of depression before... before last fall, let's say, in my life, and I would have to say those were among the worst experiences of my life.

But I'd have to say that after searching long and hard for something that was worse than depression, I finally discovered it in akathisia.

His depression was... remember we talked about that, right?

And because you had suffered bouts of depression as well as the arthritis, one definition we'd agreed on was that being depressed was like hearing that your dog had just died.

Yeah, remembering that continually, and that's way... yeah, you thought that, and there was a dog you actually liked a lot.

You thought, well, that’s bad, but it's not nearly as bad as depression.

Not even close, right?

Not even close!

I thought it was going to be as bad, but then my dog died, and I was like, nah, depression is way worse!

Sucks the joy out of absolutely everything!

Can't even see colors vividly, like the joy out of seeing colors, which you don't even think there's joyous as I did with that.

But right, because well, with severe depression, you lose positive emotion and gain a lot of negative emotion.

But with this akathisia, it was like all of the negative emotion associated with depression plus a very high level of anxiety plus no positive emotion at all plus the inability to ever relax, even for a moment.

And so it was... yeah, I wouldn't recommend it.

Yes, watch the hell out for, they're probably not your friend, or if they are, they're not your friend for very long.

And one of the weird things, I was prescribed lorazepam for sleep.

I didn't take it very often because I found it didn't work very well, thank goodness.

But the funny thing about them, especially at a low dose, is they don't, or they didn't for me anyway, induce any type of euphoria.

So when you take an opiate, when I took the oxycontin, I didn't like it, but there was some sort of high that had to do with the pain medication.

But with the lorazepam, there was just an absence of something.

So I think it's probably a sneakier drug to be on, right?

Because I think that's partly why I didn't notice what it was doing to me, too, is that there was no immediate effect in the day of taking it.

I mean, I stopped having that terrible reaction that we attributed to food, and so that eliminated the insomnia and the anxiety, but there was no noticeable effect from the benzodiazepines.

And so I know, just never paid any attention to them, and never occurred to me that they could be causing me serious long-term damage.

You'd also taken SSRIs for over a decade, yes?

Depressant anti-anxiety medication.

It turns out those are not the same medications.

I even knew that to some degree because I knew that SSRIs, the antidepressants, were much more effective long-term treatments for panic disorder than benzodiazepines, you know?

But it's quite shocking to me actually that I didn't know—despite my professional specialty—that I had no idea how catastrophic benzodiazepine use could be.

Yeah, well, psychologists don't... aren't psychiatrists; psychiatrists prescribe medication; psychologists counsel, right?

But it's still useful to keep up on the relevant literature, now you know?

Yes, well, no, I definitely I don't think I'll forget that, yes.

So, you know, it's funny, maybe we'll stop with this.

Once I started to decrease my use of benzodiazepines, I was never tempted to go back up, except right at the beginning when I went to zero.

And I had to...

Well, you were gonna have a seizure.

Yeah, it wasn't good.

You... I couldn't even communicate with you, but I thought after I got out of the Russian hospital that someone... even if someone put a gun to my head and said take this, yeah, I wouldn't.

Well, then, like, I think I really think that for me, that it's no overstatement—that for me the consequence of benzodiazepine withdrawal were worse than death.

So, yes, that's what it looked like from the...

Ah, yes!

Well, it... you know, you don't want to say something like that lightly, you know, but there were lots of times, plenty of times when it would have been preferable, as far as I could tell, just not to be there than to experience what I was experiencing.

When you're in pain, people who are in... I mean, being at a certain level of pain is like that, right?

If you're walking around, you know, anything over really like a seven or an eight, you can't stand it.

Yeah, so that's what it looked like from the outside.

Um, well, the other thing that the benzodiazepine withdrawal did that was absolutely dreadful was produce a sense of timing distortion.

So this was really obvious when I first woke up in Russia.

Like the first day that you and I could speak again, you were wheeling me around in the aisle of the corridor of the intensive care unit.

We were gonna wheel... I was gonna be wheeled around until it was time for time to eat, and I must have asked you how many times in ten minutes what time it was; probably every 45 seconds.

Yeah, probably something like that.

Yeah, and that's because for me, it felt like, you know, what substantial amount of time had passed—an hour, or two hours, something like that; some terrible amount of time.

And so, not only was I in pain and experiencing extremely high levels of anxiety, the duration of time had extended so that it was really unbearable.

It was like the days were just lasting forever.

And that's thank... that actually disappeared quite a bit as the akathisia disappeared, and it isn't the case now, thank God, but it was brutal.

It's funny, even now, you know, because it's somewhat stressful to have this conversation, I can feel if I lift up my eyes, my eyebrows a bit, like you might when you're interested in something, I can feel the tremors and tremors in my forehead.

And that's partly stress induced, so we should probably stop talking.

Yeah, okay, we can call it a day.

Yes, well, it was good to be able to sit here and have this conversation.

We're gonna go eat a steak; that's the theory.

Okay, all right, well thank you for talking with me.

Wow, thanks for being here; it's been a healthier... thanks for your help, do you?

Yeah, well, I'm gonna give up, and now we're in Belgrade.

And seem to have found an answer; thank God.

Thanks for listening!

I've linked everything we talked about in the description: the rare type of cancer my mom had, sodium metabisulfite allergy symptoms that caused the original prescription for benzos, papers on paradoxical reactions to benzos, benzo statistics on dependency, information on akathisia, something everyone to be aware of, and other people's experiences with benzodiazepines.

What my dad went and is going through isn't as uncommon as we're told.

Benzodiazepine withdrawal can be a life or death situation.

If it doesn't make the people who suffer through it so miserable they're suicidal, they could be at risk for seizures.

Many people do not make it.

My dad was forced to detox because the akathisia caused by the benzos was intolerable, and we had to abandon the prescribed tapering approach after many excruciating months.

Detoxing from benzos is dangerous; it nearly killed him.

But the state the benzodiazepines had put him in was more dangerous, and this isn't too uncommon.

Most of the celebrity deaths we hear about are benzo-related.

We're told about the opiates involved in these cases, but benzos aren't as commonly mentioned.

Heath Ledger, Amy Winehouse, Michael Jackson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Whitney Houston, Tom Petty, Anna Nicole Smith, all had benzos related to their deaths.

When you look at what happened to these individuals, you might think, well, that couldn't happen to me.

But don't be so sure; we had all the resources we could have, and it took us over a year to remove the drug and stabilize my dad so that he could function again and not feel like he was in hell.

He still has neurological damage from the benzos, and it's been six months since he stopped taking them.

He's still at a risk for seizures.

Fortunately, we found world-class physicians who are treating him properly now; it was not easy to locate these people.

Who would have guessed they'd be in Serbia?

We are going to disclose what's helping my dad once we're more sure that the treatment is really working.

Hopefully, this podcast will help other people avoid the horror my family has had to experience and is still experiencing because of benzodiazepines.

There are hidden dragons everywhere; I'm just thankful my dad is back.

Talk to you next week!