Financial stress, a careless prescription, and a system that failed at every turn.
I'm originally from Israel. My name is Guy. I grew up there, finished a degree in computer science, moved to England for a year — couldn't stay because the visa situation didn't work out — and then applied to become a permanent resident of Australia. After a year of hoping and dreaming, I got the visa and moved out here in my early twenties.
I'm gay. I knew since I was about 14 or 15, and my family knew, but I had to hide it from most people for years. In Israel, especially back then, every time you tell someone you're gay, you're bracing for the worst reaction. It doesn't matter how many times you do it — the fear is always there. Coming out is not a single event. It's a series of small gambles with people you care about.
I served in the Israeli military, which is mandatory. It was deeply traumatic for me. I won't go into all the details, but the sleep deprivation alone — being on bases where you just didn't sleep, night after night — left a mark. One night without sleep and you can push through the next day. Multiple nights and you start to break down. I didn't know it at the time, but I was learning exactly what my nervous system would do to me again, decades later, during benzo withdrawal.
After the Army, I was severely depressed for about two years. Some violent incidents before that, when I was a teenager, had already taken a lot of my sunshine — as I like to say. The depression after the military took more. I came out the other side functional but dulled.
I have OCD. It wasn't always debilitating, but it was always there, and over the years it started to cause real problems — with family, with friends, with relationships. The thing about OCD is that the obsession changes. What you're fixated on shifts over time, so it's hard to pin down as one thing. I'd rather not go into the specific content because it involves my family and that's not fair to them, but it was enough to make me want treatment.
As a child I also had sleep paralysis, which was terrifying. I've been a light sleeper my entire life — I need a very specific setup to fall asleep: fully dressed, heavy blanket, aircon on the lowest setting, complete darkness, eye cover, earplugs or meditation music, and a CPAP machine for sleep apnea. This will matter later.
I've seen psychologists on and off since I was 15. I never found them helpful. In Australia especially, I found that several of them were — in my opinion — very unprofessional. Their own personal ideas about what's right and wrong were influencing the sessions more than anything I was actually saying. Some of them literally gaslit me. They didn't listen. I never stayed with any of them for long.
I've never used recreational drugs. Not once in my life, really. I tried pot once — did absolutely nothing. Alcohol makes me tired and I don't like the taste. Cigarettes were actually one of my OCD triggers — the smell, the littering, the selfishness of smoking around other people. Maybe I tried one once and it did nothing.
I was, by every measure, the last person you'd expect to end up physically dependent on a psychiatric drug.
My mother is a child and adolescent psychiatrist with 40 years of experience. She's always been cautious about prescribing — she knows the side effects, the addiction potential, and the limits of pharmaceuticals. She would give medication to patients who truly needed it — bipolar, severe cases — but she was never one to reach for a prescription pad first. She never prescribed benzos to any of her patients (she works with children and adolescents).
Growing up, our family occasionally used lorazepam (known as Lorivan in Israel, Ativan elsewhere) for acute anxiety — we had access to it. Maybe once every couple of months. It was low-dose and rare. My mother also used to recommend a supplement called Stabilium to her patients — it genuinely helps with anxiety and depression, isn't addictive, and has no real side effects. The problem is it's absurdly expensive and you need to take it consistently for at least two weeks before it works. I tried it a few times but never properly. That's a shame, because it could have saved me — and as it turns out, I'm taking it now and it's actually helpful.
At some point in Australia, my mum suggested I try Prozac (fluoxetine) for the lingering depression. It's the oldest SSRI — long half-life, relatively well-tolerated, fewer of the sexual side effects and weight gain that plague the newer ones. It didn't make me happy, but it made me functional. That was enough.
When my OCD started causing real problems in relationships, a GP switched me to sertraline (Zoloft). I don't even remember how the switch happened — it must have been a complete non-event, because I have no memory of any problems with it at all. The sertraline managed things well enough. Depression was in the background, but I was a functioning member of society.
Here's what I know now that I didn't know then: antidepressants can be just as hard to stop as benzodiazepines. The psychiatric establishment just gave them a better PR department. They even invented a special term — "discontinuation syndrome" — to avoid calling it what it is: withdrawal. A 2019 study in the British Journal of Psychiatry found that 37 out of 42 withdrawal symptoms listed for benzodiazepines were also reported for SSRIs, and the researchers concluded that calling only benzos "dependence-forming" while exempting SSRIs made no scientific sense. Offidani et al. (2013) went further, suggesting that newer antidepressants used for anxiety had "similar, if not more pronounced" dependence problems than benzodiazepines.
I got lucky with Prozac — its extremely long half-life (2–6 days) creates a kind of built-in slow taper. But not all antidepressants are Prozac. A co-student of mine in my Peer Mental Health Support studies struggled for years tapering sertraline — the same drug I came off in six weeks without a problem. Paroxetine and venlafaxine are even worse, with some of the highest reported withdrawal rates of any antidepressant. The same is true of antipsychotics and Z-drugs — all of them can produce protracted, debilitating withdrawal that gets misdiagnosed as "relapse" or a "new condition" rather than what it actually is: the drug leaving your system faster than your brain can readjust.
By mid-2022, I was tired of the sertraline side effects — emotional blunting, weight gain, feeling like I was swimming through life on autopilot. I told an after-hours GP about it. She suggested agomelatine, selling it as a new generation drug that doesn't need to be tapered and doesn't cause the same issues as SSRIs. It sounded like a no-brainer upgrade.
And I never really questioned it. She knew that other drugs cause dependence — that's exactly why she was steering me away from SSRIs and toward something that, according to the studies, didn't have that problem. I trusted her on that. I had no reason not to.
I tapered the sertraline over six weeks. Easy again. When I hit zero, I had a few days of restless leg syndrome — legs literally dancing in bed. The GP offered 5mg of diazepam (Valium) to get through it. I took it for about a week and stopped without issues.
The agomelatine itself was remarkable for one thing: sleep. The very first night I took it, I fell asleep and woke up eight hours later. That had literally never happened in my adult life. I blacked out and surfaced eight hours later with no memory of dreams. It was eerie but incredible.
But then came the financial crisis of late 2022. Interest rates exploded after the pandemic. My fixed mortgage term was ending. My crypto mining equipment lost two-thirds of its value. Airbnb hosting — which I hated — was no longer viable. A tenant in Brisbane was causing property damage and fighting over the bond. Bills were stacking up.
The agomelatine couldn't touch that level of stress. I'd never had an anxiety attack before, and I didn't even know the difference between anxiety, a panic attack, and an anxiety attack until it was too late.
I went back to my GP — the good one — in January 2023 and told her the agomelatine wasn't managing my anxiety. She agreed to switch me back to an SSRI. I asked to wait two weeks for the agomelatine to clear first, but she said it wasn't important since they work on different receptors. She also prescribed lorazepam — 100 tablets.
When my mum and sisters heard, they were like: "Oh my God, now you are our Lorivan god." In Israel, lorazepam comes in a proper box with warnings on it — 28 pills. Even the diazepam the other GP had given me before came in a box of 14 pills. Here in Australia, they handed me a jar of 100 with no warnings, no information, nothing. Just a jar. It's a completely different attitude to the same drug.
So I stopped the agomelatine. The taper — if you can even call it that — was incredibly crude. Half a pill for a bit, then off. My GP didn't think I needed to taper at all, and honestly, neither did I. This was supposed to be the safe drug. The one that doesn't cause withdrawal.
Within days I was in freefall — deeply, terrifyingly depressed. Crying constantly. The financial stress was still there, the tenant problems were still there, and now I had no antidepressant in my system at all. The lorazepam helped me sleep but did absolutely nothing for the depression. I was barely holding it together.
It's only recently that I've started to seriously consider whether stopping agomelatine so abruptly was itself a trigger for the catastrophic state I ended up in. At the time, nobody — including me — thought twice about it.
Even the Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines (Horowitz & Taylor, 2024) — which I have a lot of criticism of in my review — put agomelatine in its own category: "Minimal/lowest withdrawal risk." Their evidence? Essentially one study: Montgomery et al. (2004). That study treated patients with agomelatine for just 12 weeks, abruptly stopped it, and only monitored for 2 weeks afterward. Only 88 agomelatine patients were in the discontinuation phase.
The irony is that the Maudsley's own central argument is that older studies underestimate withdrawal because they were short-term and biased. They say this repeatedly for SSRIs and other antidepressants. Yet for agomelatine, they rely on exactly that kind of study — short duration, short follow-up — and conclude it's basically safe. They even admit there are "informal reports of patients experiencing withdrawal effects" and that "no neuroimaging has been conducted" to determine agomelatine's receptor occupancy. Their taper schedules for agomelatine are based on "the average trajectory for other antidepressants" because the actual data doesn't exist.
I don't know if the agomelatine studies are tainted in the same way as the SSRI studies. But I do know that the Maudsley applied a different standard to this drug than to the others — and that I crashed hard within days of stopping it.
My mum told me to go to the hospital. In Israel, if you show up with an acute psychiatric crisis, you'll eventually see someone — it might take a while, but you'll be seen. We assumed it worked the same way here.
On a Wednesday in late January, I drove to Gold Coast University Hospital — seven minutes from my house — and asked to see a psychiatrist. They told me to wait in the ER. So I waited. And waited. I watched people far sicker than me come and go. Being in the hospital made me feel safe, so I actually calmed down — which probably worked against me.
After five hours, a staff member told me it had been a mistake: they don't do walk-in psychiatric assessments. Nobody should have told me to wait. He tried to explain that in Australia, GPs handle mental health — not hospitals, not psychiatrists. I was furious. I tried to advocate for myself — I can't wait six months, I can't pay $600, I just need someone who knows what they're doing. It didn't matter.
I left the hospital defeated. Then I remembered — it was a Wednesday, and my GP works the after-hours clinic on Wednesdays. It was already late, but I had nowhere else to turn. So I drove to the clinic, deflated but hoping she could at least get me started on the SSRI.
She wasn't there. She was sick. Her replacement — let's call him Dr K — was a doctor I'd seen before and didn't trust. He'd come straight from a hospital shift, visibly exhausted — literally falling asleep during our consultation. He asked me four times why I was there. I later found out Dr K was actually the manager of the clinic.
Here's the kicker: he prescribed the 2mg tablet instead of the 0.5mg, because — his words — "it costs the same, so why not?" So "half a pill to a full pill" meant 1–2mg per dose, one to two times a day. That's up to 4mg of clonazepam daily.
At the time, I thought I'd hit the jackpot. We were out of lorazepam, I already knew most Australian doctors won't prescribe benzos, and here was a doctor handing me a massive supply. I just didn't understand what I was getting myself into.
Let me translate what his prescription actually meant, using the Ashton Manual equivalences (0.5mg clonazepam ≈ 10mg diazepam):
| Drug | What He Prescribed | Diazepam Equivalent (Ashton) |
|---|---|---|
| Clonazepam | 1–2mg, 1–2x/day | 20–80mg diazepam/day |
| Maximum implied | 4mg clonazepam/day | ~80mg diazepam/day |
| What I actually took | 2–2.5mg clonazepam/day | ~40–50mg diazepam/day |
He also suggested mirtazapine or paroxetine — or possibly both, I don't fully remember. I went home with a mirtazapine script that I never actually used. I sat on it for two weeks, then went back and got paroxetine from him instead. Polydrugging — starting a new antidepressant while simultaneously loading someone with benzos — is widely discouraged. Nobody mentioned this.
I did try to ask the right question. As I was leaving, I said to Dr K: "You know the paroxetine is going to take six to eight weeks to work. I've already been on the clonazepam for two weeks. I know you're not supposed to go over four weeks. Is that OK?"
He looked back at me with a smug half-smile and said, in the most casual tone imaginable: "Worst case, we'll taper you."
I didn't challenge it. Maybe my mum was wrong? He looked so confident. And I'd already tapered off sertraline in six weeks without a problem — so I assumed that's roughly the timeline and method. I didn't know how lucky I'd been with sertraline. Knowing what I know today, I would have never taken a benzo for weeks if I knew what awaited me. I would have also never taken another SSRI ever.
I didn't fully grasp how potent clonazepam is. Per the Ashton Manual, it's roughly twice as potent as lorazepam milligram-for-milligram — so my 2–2.5mg daily was equivalent to 4–5mg of lorazepam, a huge jump from the 1mg of lorazepam I'd take once every two months. I was taking 1mg during the day and 1–1.5mg at night, thinking I was being conservative. In reality, I was heavily sedated and possibly making my depression worse through the combination of drugs.
Walking on the beach became a daily ritual — not for the scenery, but because it was the only place I felt safe enough to cry. I used to joke: "I'm going to the beach to cry like a bitch." Humour was all I had left.
My mother eventually figured out how much clonazepam I was actually taking and begged me to stop. This was around the 1st of March — roughly one month since I'd started.
Around the 1st of March — roughly a month since I'd started the clonazepam — my mother figured out how much I was actually taking and begged me to stop. I told her I couldn't just stop cold turkey after a month. She said: "At least drop to 1mg, once a day." I agreed.
A few days earlier, I'd had a one-off telehealth appointment with a psychiatrist — arranged through a leftover pandemic-era mental health service from my health fund. I'd told her my whole life story over an hour. All I really wanted was confirmation from a psychiatrist that the dose reduction was safe. She said yes, try dropping to 1mg. No follow-up was available. That was it.
So I dropped to 1mg once a day, in the evening. I was already feeling terrible — still deeply depressed, still anxious, still not sleeping well. But what happened next was something else entirely.
A few days into the reduced dose, I went to bed as usual. I put on a guided sleep meditation — someone talking you to sleep, which I'd tried as something new. I fell asleep.
I woke up after about one hour to what I can only describe as insanity.
I had no idea who I was. I was in absolute terror — not fear, not anxiety, terror — like I'd been dropped into a different universe where I was someone else and everything was doomed. My vision had narrowed to a slit, like looking through a letterbox. I could barely see. And there was a voice — not an external voice, but my inner voice had been hijacked — telling me things that made no sense. Telling me to sell my blinds. There were other things too but that's what I remember. It was like a fever dream, except I was standing in my bedroom, awake.
I got up and walked the hallway. I live alone — just me and my cat. Little by little, reality came back. But it wasn't instant. A minute in that state is an eternity.
It was around 1 or 2am. I didn't want to do it, but I called my mum. I'm a compassionate person — I didn't want to wake my poor mother — but I was genuinely scared. I thought I might need the psychiatric ward.
She talked to me. She listened. And then she said something that probably saved me, or at least felt like it: "You're talking normally. You sound fine. I can understand you. I think you're okay. Try to go back to sleep and we'll talk about it tomorrow."
So I tried. And every single time I closed my eyes, the hallucinations started again.
These weren't the gentle hypnagogic images I'd had before — the little movies of trains going through cities that play behind your eyelids just before sleep. This was completely different. The moment I closed my eyes, I'd start seeing something like a movie — not scary figures or anything like that, just scenes with people — but I could interact with them. It wasn't like being pulled into another world. It was more like watching a film except you're somehow part of it. And then, maybe five or six seconds after it started, the jolt would come.
Every time: a violent slam to the chest, right in the centre — like a bolt of adrenaline hitting me. The images would vanish instantly and I'd be wide awake again, heart pounding. It hurt. And after each one, I didn't want to close my eyes again.
I could not fall asleep.
When morning came, my sister took control. She'd done this before — she's four years younger than me but she's saved me more than once through this. She said: "Guy, pack yourself up. Come to Mum and Dad's."
My sister said to pack everything — she and my mum were going to come pick me up. But then she said it would take two hours, and by that point the adrenaline of having a plan had woken me up. I packed everything and told her I'd drive to them.
I packed everything I needed. Left the cat with a mountain of food and water — she'd go outside but she had a trauma from another cat so she'd use the bathroom inside. I was worried. I wanted to set up a camera. I didn't know when I'd be back.
When I arrived at my parents' place and saw my sister, I started crying. And I didn't stop. We went to the pool — my parents have a pool, which is one of the nice things about their place — and I sat there and cried and cried and cried. Then my mum came out and we talked about everything that was happening.
She said: stay here, you'll feel safer. But stay at 1mg — it's a poison, and if you can get through this without increasing the dose, that's the best outcome.
I was willing to try. But it wasn't my bed. The aircon was loud. And I'm a very particular sleeper — I need to be fully dressed, covered in a heavy blanket, aircon on the lowest setting, earplugs or meditation music, eye cover, and my sleep apnea machine. Sleeping somewhere else was hard even before all of this.
The same pattern continued. I couldn't sleep. I would count the minutes. Walk the house. Sometimes I'd wake my mum, hysterical — just falling in front of her saying I don't know what to do.
At some point I increased to 1.5mg because I was desperate.
My sister suggested sleeping with the light on and the TV on — she said my other sister (twenty years younger) always sleeps like that. I tried it one night. I normally need complete darkness, but I was willing to try anything.
What happened instead: we'd been watching this reality show about arranged marriages in India — genuinely interesting show. And because I was in permanent fight-or-flight mode, my brain took that and ran with it. I started hallucinating that the people from the show were trying to scam my parents out of all their money. And I was the only one who could see it, the only one fighting them.
Part of me knew it was complete bullshit. But the hallucinations — they weren't suggestions, they were forced into my mind. Like being mind-raped. You don't want these thoughts, you don't want these images, you don't want these beliefs, but they fall on you and you can't push them away. The night ended with me mentally fighting these scammers because they were winning.
And then there was the electricity. Waves of it, running through my entire body — like pins and needles amplified a hundredfold. Like being electrocuted. I actually spoke to someone today — someone far more harmed than me — and when I described it, he said: "You finally gave me the word for it." That's what it feels like. Electrocuted.
I became hypersensitive to everything. Noise. TV. Any kind of stimulation. My parents would watch Israeli news and I couldn't even look at the screen. I couldn't watch anything with drama in it. Which also meant I was incredibly bored — so I had nothing but time to sit with what was happening to me.
None of us really wanted to believe what we were reading when we Googled the symptoms. But it was all there.
Looking back, there are things I now know that could have changed this entire trajectory:
Physical dependence can form in as little as 2–4 weeks. The old guideline of "2–4 weeks is safe" is dangerously vague. For some people, dependence starts forming within days. The fact that I'd never had issues with any substance before was irrelevant.
Clonazepam is not lorazepam. I didn't understand potency equivalence. The doctor prescribed 2mg tablets and told me to take half to a full pill, once or twice a day — that's up to 4mg of clonazepam, or 80mg of diazepam on the Ashton scale. I actually took 2–2.5mg daily (~40–50mg diazepam equivalent). Either way, a massive dose for someone who previously took 1mg of lorazepam once every two months.
The correct tapering rate is whatever percentage works for you — up to a maximum of 10% — of the current dose (not the original dose), cut only after you've stabilised from the previous reduction. That stabilisation period could be anything from 7–10 days to more than a month. Not a 60% cut overnight. Not a linear reduction. Not "just stop." This applies to benzos, but as I now know, it should apply to antidepressants, antipsychotics, and Z-drugs too.
It's not just benzos. The entire class of psychiatric drugs — antidepressants, antipsychotics, Z-drugs, gabapentinoids — can produce severe, prolonged withdrawal. Benzos just have the worst reputation because they got labelled first. The research shows the withdrawal symptom profiles are nearly identical across these drug classes. The only real difference is that benzos got called "addictive" while antidepressants got called "discontinuation" — same suffering, different marketing.
Polydrugging makes everything worse. Starting a new antidepressant while on a benzodiazepine creates a tangle of effects that's nearly impossible to attribute to any single drug. Every symptom becomes ambiguous.
The Australian mental health system has catastrophic gaps. A psychiatrist shortage, $500+ consultations, 6–12 month waitlists, and GPs who are neither trained nor equipped to manage complex psychiatric medication — it's a system that turns manageable problems into crises.