Hospitals and psychiatrists that didn't help. More drugs. A system built for paperwork, not people. And the slow, terrifying road to gain real knowledge.
Day two at my parents' house. The 5th of March, 2023. My mum managed to reach the manager of the psych hospital in Israel where she'd worked decades ago — a very senior adult psychiatrist. Let's call her Rachel.
Rachel was happy to hear from Mum after so many years. She listened to my story and assured her that 2mg of clonazepam "is not a lot" and "not a big deal" — I could just stop it. She suggested I take something to help me sleep through it, and recommended an antipsychotic called Entumine (clotiapine).
My mum was horrified. She called it a horse tranquiliser. But Rachel said a very low dose would just knock me out, and at that point, sleep was all I wanted.
That hope was crushed within hours. I Googled Entumine and couldn't find it available in Australia — only on overseas websites. I found out the generic name is clotiapine, and it's only available in a handful of countries: Israel, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Argentina, South Africa, and Taiwan. Not Australia. I'd naively assumed all drugs were globally available. They're not. We messaged Rachel back, and she suggested Seroquel (quetiapine) instead. Mum didn't like that either — she knew it could cause permanent involuntary facial movements (tardive dyskinesia) with long-term use — but we were running out of options.
This was the morning after the hallucination about the Indian reality show scammers — the night I described in Part 1. I was awake at 6:30am, counting the minutes until someone could help me.
I tried calling Telldoc who provided the psychaitrist telehealth meeting from Part 1. Couldn't reach them. Then I started calling Chemist Warehouse locations to ask about Entumine. Every pharmacist I spoke to was completely baffled. They'd never heard of it. We drove to a local chemist to ask in person. Confirmed: not available in Australia.
So we needed a script for Seroquel. I didn't have a proper GP at this point — I'd been bouncing between whoever was available. I'd visited a bulk-billing clinic on the Gold Coast back in January for gastro, and they offered telehealth, which meant they could help me now from Brisbane. The telehealth system was anxiety-inducing in itself — you make a booking but they can call anytime within a 3-hour window, so you just sit by the phone and wait.
I ended up with a GP I actually liked — one I'm still seeing to this day. He was kind, he listened, and when my mum explained the situation he agreed that Seroquel might help. He also gave me a script for agomelatine since I told him it had helped me sleep before. I only bought the Seroquel the next day — I still had agomelatine left.
But I was terrified to take either. I felt like I was on my last move in a chess game and every piece I touched could end it.
The next morning after another night of horror we went to the chemist. The pharmacist was lovely — but she handed me pages and pages of disclaimers to sign. Side effects. Warnings. Risks. Because Seroquel is an antipsychotic and they take it seriously.
I also learned, very quickly, that Clonazepam is a Schedule 8 drug in Australia — the same scheduling as Morphine. I didn't even know what 'Schedules' are. But what it meant was that getting more of it to do a proper taper was going to be a nightmare. I didn't know if I'd even be able to get a doctor to prescribe it. So on top of everything else, I now had to worry about supply - I was shocked that doctors won't do it even when the reason is not harming or even potentially killing someone in a Cold Turkey scenario!
I tried to contact Dr K — the clinic manager who'd prescribed the clonazepam in the first place. They told me it was a walk-in service, and since I couldn't physically get to the Gold Coast, there was no way I could speak to him. They literally blocked me from reaching him.
I need to describe what was actually happening to me at night, because it's the part that's hardest to convey and the part that traumatised me the most.
I'd black out — usually at the start of a setback — and then either slowly or abruptly wake up into pure terror. Half-dream, half-hallucination. Sometimes completely abstract: the kind of psychotic, formless fear I'd only experienced as a child with a fever above 40°C. Pure doom. I'd done something horrible — killed someone, or something that wouldn't even be objectively horrible but felt like the worst thing in the world. People were blaming me. I was going to pay for it. Prison. The end.
Sometimes I'd wake from this and not know who I was. I'd have to walk it off.
As described in Part 1: 5–10 seconds of seeing scenes with people, being able to interact with them, then the violent jolt to the chest. This could happen hundreds of times in a single night. After a while, the jolting started to physically hurt.
This was new and deeply unsettling. If I closed my eyes for even a minute, the perception of my body would warp. My hands felt like they were trees. My body felt like it was in a completely different pose than it actually was. Worse — I'd feel like my body belonged to someone else entirely. Once it was a teenage girl. Once an old man. The moment I opened my eyes, I'd know exactly where I was. Close them again and the distortion would return immediately.
I knew it wasn't real. My critical thinking was still intact, thank God. But the sensations were powerful and relentless.
One night, instead of the usual movies, I had a rapid slideshow — pictures flashing in front of my closed eyes, fast and uncontrollable. I was so desperate that I took a crumb of extra clonazepam, maybe five or six hours after my evening dose. The pictures started to freeze — they slowed down but didn't stop. And then my thoughts slowed down too. My internal voice became sluggish, like it was stuck. I couldn't think at normal speed. That was one of the scariest moments of all of it.
Throughout these nights, I would sometimes wake my mum — I couldn't help it. I'd get out of bed, walk the house like a tiger in a cage, and when it became too much I'd fall on the ground in front of her. She was exhausted and started getting agitated with me — she didn't fully understand what I was going through. She begged me not to wake her. But one night she just covered me in lavender oil, sat next to me, and played her guided meditation for an hour or two. I didn't fall asleep. But having her there made me feel safe, the way you'd want your mum next to you when you're a child.
Since I couldn't enjoy anything, all I did was Google. Clonazepam. Paroxetine. Seroquel. Withdrawal. Tapering. The more I read, the more I realised how much conflicting information exists. Rehab sites saying taper in one month. Government sites saying two months. Others saying four weeks. Everyone had a different number and none of them seemed to understand what I was going through.
Eventually I found the Ashton Manual and the Benzodiazepine Information Coalition (which I don't recommend.. but it did help me understand things better at a time). That's when things started to shift. Real information. Real guidance. People who actually understood.
My mum started giving me magnesium glycinate and other supplements she uses. They didn't help much.
As for the Seroquel and Agomelatine — the Agomelatine did nothing at all. The Seroquel worked partially for one night: I didn't have the running thoughts, but couldn't actually fall asleep. The second night it didn't help at all.
On March 6th I tried calling my health fund and Telldoc again. I begged to speak to the telehealth psychiatrist I'd seen — the one-off appointment from before. They wouldn't let me. I Googled her name, found the main clinic she works at in Melbourne, called the secretary, explained it was urgent, left a message.
She never called back.
On the 7th of March I had to adult. I was trying to remortgage my house - that started a few weeks before, with a very street smart mortgage broker (most told me they can't help me) - so the remortgaging drama was unfolding in parallel. ANZ's mortgage department — entirely staffed from India — worked 3pm to midnight Australian time. They handled everything badly. It took months. My mortgage broker was a lifesaver in the end (we went with a different banking solution after ANZ broke me and said No after months of assessments and getting 'Yes' at every stage) but had a habit of saying "I'll call you in half an hour" and never doing it. So I'd sit by the phone, chemically anxious and justifiably anxious, waiting for calls that never came.
Somewhere in those early days I discovered MH Call — Mental Health Call — a Queensland Government crisis and mental health service. Unlike Lifeline, they have an Acute Care Team that gets to know you personally. They're linked to hospitals in south-east Queensland: RBWH covers Brisbane, a separate service covers the Gold Coast. This geographic split would cause problems later.
On the morning of March 9th, after another completely sleepless night, I tried to call them. They're supposed to open at 8am. I called 13 times in 45 minutes. Nobody answered. I called the Gold Coast service in desperation — they apologised but said they couldn't help me because I was in Brisbane. Just bureaucracy. At 8:47 someone finally picked up. They acted like it was a shop that opened late.
That same morning — March 9th — my sister said: "I'm taking you to the hospital. We're getting answers. This has gone far enough." She dropped the kids at school and drove me to RBWH.
I remember it was raining. I was in the passenger seat and the city I'd lived in for twenty years looked foreign — like I was in England, not Brisbane. Everything felt weird.
We explained my situation to the triage nurse. We were moved inside fairly quickly — and I realised I wasn't in a normal ER. This was a mental health ward. Lots of beds with curtains, crammed into a small area compared to the Gold Coast Hospital's much newer, spacious setup.
We waited hours. At some point, a teenager who was sitting near me listening to music before — who'd looked completely normal, just sitting there with earphones — was moved to a bed and started screaming "Get off me! Get off me!" behind closed curtains. Nobody was in there with her. She was hallucinating I assume. A guard stood outside her room, like it was an unpleasant chore. The doctors walked past looking grumpy, as if it was her fault she was like this, screaming just to annoy everyone. Nobody rushed to help. I texted my sister: "You're lucky you're not here."
Same problem as GCUH: by the time someone saw me, I'd calmed down. Being in the hospital gave me hope, which made me feel better, which made me look fine.
Around 3pm, a young and quite arrogant doctor came to see me. I described everything — the hallucinations, the terror, the chest jolts, the electricity, the body distortion, the insomnia. He latched onto one thing: the chest jolts. "That's called a hypnic jerk," he said. "It happens." He literally printed me a page about hypnic jerks. The hallucinations? "Hypnagogic and hypnopompic." Normal. Go home.
He didn't mention withdrawal. Not once.
He said I wouldn't see one. But he offered to consult with the hospital pharmacist, and maybe they'd talk to a psychiatrist and make a plan.
So I waited. Eventually a doctor, a pharmacist, and someone I assumed was a psychiatrist — I was never introduced — stood right next to my bed. They talked about me. Not to me. About me. I was lying in a hospital bed in a tiny curtained space while they stood over me with a piece of paper, making notes. The presumed psychiatrist occasionally glanced at me like I was a specimen in a lab.
They left. The young doctor returned with the verdict: go back to 2mg of clonazepam daily. Continue the paroxetine. Wait until you're stable. Then start tapering.
No actual taper plan. No timeline. No follow-up appointment. General advice and a discharge.
My sister and I already knew that's what they'd say. But hearing it from the hospital at least confirmed we were on the right track.
While at the hospital, I also received the report from the telehealth psychiatrist via E-mail — exactly a week and a day after our session. Despite telling me in the appointment that I could drop by 1mg, the written report said they should "taper it off." No taper plan was included. I thought: why didn't you tell me that when I could actually have asked follow-up questions?
After the hospital, my sister took charge. Plan: go to my baby sister's place first (she works near the hospital) to get her car, drive to the Gold Coast with her to get the cat and my things, then come live with my sister for a while. Mum needed rest. (I have two sisters, one 4 years younger, and one 20 years younger, which I refer to here as my baby sister).
That's what we did. I got the cat, packed up, and settled into my sister's spare room. I set it up the way I needed — fully dark, air con on — took the 2mg, and for the first time in 7 days, I slept. Badly. I woke at 4am. Maybe four or five hours total. But it was something. And no hallucinations.
I stayed at my sister's for weeks. It was hard. I couldn't enjoy anything - full anhedonia. I felt like a burden. Constant fight-or-flight. I'd lie on the couch next to her while she worked from home, and the only relief I found was closing my eyes and just resting near her. But even that made me feel guilty — like a grown man shouldn't need his little sister to feel safe, doesn't work and just looks and feels bad. It took a LOT of will to shower in the morning. My facial hair was white. I felt very ugly.
Two days later I went to the pool with her and my nephews. I couldn't enjoy it. I found myself in the outdoor shower area, crying my eyes out where they couldn't see me. I always tried to hide the crying from the kids. I love my nephews and didn't want to upset them — though the withdrawal had flattened my feelings so much that "love" was more memory than emotion. Clonazepam makes you emotionally dull. Withdrawal makes it worse.
I developed agoraphobia. I couldn't leave the house. When I walked, I had to hold the wall — either I lost balance easily, or my legs felt like jelly. It's known benzo withdrawal symptoms. It's also what causes elderly people on benzos to fall.
My mum swore by an acupuncturist she knew, so my dad drove me to see him in Kenmore. He was kind and honest — said he didn't know exactly what to do but could work on certain points. He was also 50% more expensive than normal acupuncturists, which added financial anxiety on top of everything else.
When I lay down and closed my eyes during the session, the same toxic hallucinations started. I told him straight: "I'm closing my eyes and I'm having hallucinations." After the session, something truly bizarre happened — I felt like my energy body had expanded to about two metres around me. I'd never felt anything like it before or since. Walking felt strange and unpleasant, like I was taking up too much space in the world. I also went to a Reiki healer she and my sister used to go to, but that didn't help either.
One of the things I want to mention — because it shows how wrong this all felt in my body — is what it was like to take the clonazepam each evening. In the first month or two, before tolerance set in, I would literally feel it flowing through my body. A wave of relaxation that wasn't relaxation. My mum once asked if that was a nice feeling. No. It felt fake. Poisonous. Like feeling a toxin move through you and knowing it's doing something to your brain that you can't undo.
On the 11th of March, I made myself drive to Indooroopilly Shopping Centre — a place I'd been to hundreds of times. Driving was hard. Walking through the big halls, even with barely anyone around, I was on the verge of tears. I was so relieved when I got home.
I started doing a little more each day. Short runs near my sister's place - not pleasant but I made myself do it. Then my new tenants in the Gold Coast House's granny flat needed small things done — furniture moved, a closet reassembled. My sister encouraged me: "Face your fear. Don't develop a phobia for your own house."
So I drove the 85km back. Mum and my sister called me throughout the drive to keep me going. When I got there, I managed to look and talk normally to the tenants. I did the jobs. And driving back, I felt a tiny bit more like the person I used to be.
Because I'd been discharged from RBWH, the Acute Care Team wanted to follow up — which is what happens after a mental health ward discharge in Queensland (Even after a few hours) . A mental health nurse and some social workers visited me at my sister's on the 15th of March. They were young, kind, and asked questions. They seemed to know a bit about benzo tapering from reading. The nurse even said I knew more than the doctors did — something I'd hear again and again from others, and which never stopped blowing my mind.
At this point I was taking three-quarters of my pill at night and a quarter during the day. The nurse suggested — out of her own logic, not really out of knowledge in my opinion — that I take the whole dose at night since sleep was my main problem. This was actually controversial: when tapering, it's generally better to split the dose. But I was too scared to change it back later, so the single evening dose stayed until the end of my taper.
They also connected me with Richmond Fellowship Queensland, which runs a "Hospital to Home" service — a support worker to help with daily life after discharge. Shopping, outings, sometimes cleaning. I was initially dead against it. I didn't see myself as someone who needed that. But my family convinced me: if the help exists, use it.
However, the support worker — let's call him Alvin — was flaky. Sounded very old, wasn't on my wavelength. When I had to reschedule our first meeting (the bank had sprung a house valuation on me with three days' notice), I couldn't reach him. I called and texted. Nothing. Two hours after the scheduled meeting, someone from the office called to say it was cancelled because he wasn't feeling well.
But there was also a bureaucratic nightmare: Richmond Fellowship could only help me in Brisbane, not the Gold Coast. Same region - literally 30kms between the councils. Different jurisdictions. So it didn't matter at the end:
At the end of March, my sister said I was well enough to go home. I wasn't sure I agreed — still agoraphobic, still anxious. She was right that I couldn't stay forever. She had kids, a job, a life. But I felt very scared.
Before leaving, I drove to a car park in Mt Gravatt and sat there crying. When she told me it was time to go, I cried more. Being there, she'd watched her older brother — the one who was always strong — fall apart over and over. It traumatised her too. Benzo withdrawal doesn't just happen to the person taking the pills. It affects to everyone around them.
Meanwhile, one of the things that withdrawal does is strip away your ability to stand up for yourself. My self-esteem, my self-love, my ability to advocate — all gone. I was a shell. When the nurse from my Telldoc service called me out of the blue while I was at the hospital, I could barely hold a conversation. I just said "yeah, hopefully they'll help me" and hung up. I really wanted to yell at her for the psychaitrist's no contact after reaching out. I had no strength to express anger.
I drove back to the Gold Coast. Prayed I'd sleep. And I did — a little. Staying on the same amounts rigidly, I was slowly stabilising.
By April, something shifted. I started feeling genuinely better. Not just coping — actually good. There was even a family fight in Passover and I was the calm one. The Zen one. My family didn't understand how I could be so composed after everything.
But I was still on 2mg of clonazepam. I was scared to stay on it, now 3 months or so, I knew I needed to start tapering.