A taper plan that was wrong. A "healer" who exploded at suicidal people. A supplement guru with no reviews. And the one Australian service that actually called me back.
I need to go back a bit from the previous part and mention that after the first 'Setback' from the milk taper at %1 daily (Remember, it's a daily exponential decay function - kind of like compound interest - so not 30% but lower than that - but still much faster than recommended). I've been tapering now at a much slower 0.4% of the previous day's dose — which works out to roughly 10% per month. I already made a spreadsheet that was the base of my public tapering sheet I shared later. That's not fast. It's actually in the middle of the recommended range (5–10% every 2–4 weeks). So this wasn't reckless speed. It was textbook. But at some point it still caught with me. I didn't know yet that doing a daily microtaper is not really 'the solution'. After the first night I took agmatine I continued to take it daily until well after the end of the taper. I took 1.5 grams twice a day. It was the first supplement that had a profound welcoming impact on my symptoms - although just the physical ones - I stopped having the 'electricity' in my limbs and jelly legs since then.
At the end of May 2023, while I was joining new benzo groups to get more information, a woman I'll call Bella posted in one of them that someone had literally saved her from horrible withdrawal symptoms within days. This woman — Christine — was looking to help other people too. For free.
A lot of people jumped on this — 10 to 15 of us. People who were severely harmed. People who were suicidal. Me too. But I want to note that Bella had actually met Christine through a different health condition group, not a benzo group. Christine had no benzo-specific background. Yet she was certain she could cure everyone with her system. That was red flag number one.
Red flag 2: She wanted us on Telegram — a platform where you can delete everything without anyone ever knowing what was there. She set up voice calls every evening US time, which meant every morning for me in Australia. She said the calls would be recorded so we could catch up if we missed them.
I joined on the second day. On that call I met a very nice man I'll call Rob, whose mother — originally from Israel, let's call her Rachel — was in the group too, keeping an eye on him. Rob was very badly harmed with debilitating physical symptoms and strong anhedonia from a range of issues including psychiatric drugs. He was feeling suicidal and told me often that he wanted to un-alive himself.
At the beginning, Christine came across as strong-willed and smart. But even on that first day, the call that was supposed to be 30 minutes went on for hours. And what triggered me was when Rob — who was quite shy in the group — literally asked permission to ask a question. She said yes. He asked it. And then she blamed him for the call going over time. She humiliated him in front of everyone for asking a question she had given him permission to ask.
Red flag 3: The next day, when I logged on for the scheduled call, nobody was there. I found out the call had already happened — for hours — because she'd started chatting with some people earlier in the day when it was night time in Australia, and they'd just turned it into the official call without us. When I asked what they'd discussed: mostly ranting about COVID vaccines. She was strongly anti-vax.
She told us we needed to buy a juicer (for cucumber, celery, and lemon juice), a blood glucose measuring device, a blood pressure device. We'd need to eat certain foods and fast 16 hours a day.
The next day's call was supposed to be 30 minutes to an hour. It lasted up to five hours. I stayed on throughout my drive to a doctor's appointment and while sitting in the waiting room. During that time, I made what she considered a horrible mistake: I asked her, very politely — because I was already scared of her reactions — what her credentials were.
It's a completely legitimate question. But it triggered her massively. She got angry and defensive and didn't answer. Instead she spent about two hours telling her backstory — how she'd spent years trying to save her mother — which is fair enough, but she refused to give a straight answer to a simple question. Rachel actually contacted me separately during this to tell me my question was completely legitimate and that it made her wonder why Christine wouldn't answer it.
Red flag 4: The next day she told us to take one teaspoon of nutritional yeast every hour of the day. Nutritional yeast is healthy — full of B vitamins and minerals — but I did the maths. Her dosage would give me approximately 3,000% of my daily B-vitamin requirement. Some of those vitamins — B6 in particular — are actually dangerous in excess.
I asked two simple questions: does "every hour" mean 24 hours (since you can't eat while sleeping), so how many hours does she actually mean? And is it healthy to consume that much excess in vitamins?
I messaged her privately: "Why are you creating this drama in a group of suicidal people? Can you talk to me in private?"
Her response was a flood of anti-COVID-vaccine propaganda. For context: she had absolutely no idea if I was vaccinated, what my beliefs were, or anything about my views on COVID. We had never discussed it. The messages came completely out of nowhere. As far as she knew, I might have been anti-vax myself.
She then turned on Rob too. He'd asked her something — whether a supplement she recommended was healthy for him — and she had another meltdown. He begged her not to remove him from the group. I've spoken to him about this and he agreed for me to share this. The screenshots speak for themselves.
Only a week after the meltdown with me, she closed the entire group. Blamed everyone in it. These were people who were suicidal. People who were non-functional. People who had been cold-turkeyed. She gave them hope and then ripped it away because she could not accept that she had taken on something way over her head. Due to her personality, she could not admit fault or even apologise. She didn't refer anyone forward. She just shut it down.
You don't give someone hope and then take it away like that.
Bella later told me she was sorry she'd ever introduced us to Christine, that her own withdrawal symptoms had actually come back, and that Christine was "a bit nutty, to say the least."
On my birthday at the end of June, I went to the new Costco that had just opened nearby. I wore an N95 mask — I'd been wearing masks since before they were compulsory in Queensland, and I didn't care about looking different. But there were masses of people, some visibly sick with respiratory symptoms. One woman handing out samples was obviously congested and sniffling. And then I stood in the hot dog queue for half an hour, packed in like a rock concert.
Two days later: a cold. And stupidly, I didn't stop the taper. I was only cutting 0.35–0.4% daily, much slower than before, so I thought I'd be fine. I also — still influenced by Christine's advice — started juicing cucumbers, celery, and lemon like my life depended on it. Full of good stuff, right?
What I didn't know then: I was effectively detoxing myself. I was going to the toilet five times a day. And ten days after getting sick, three days after feeling "better," it all came crashing back. The anxiety. The insomnia. The doom nightmares. The closed-eye hallucinations and delusions.
I went to my sister's for the third time. But this time, even my safe space didn't fully protect me. The nightmares persisted in the guest room. I remember pointing a crystal at the door during a hallucination that someone was there, feeling victorious, telling whatever it was that I wasn't afraid.
I had to stop the taper. I felt completely defeated — cornered from both sides, like escaping a monster while walking a thin line between distant buildings, where anything could topple me.
During the Costco setback I discovered Reconnexion — the only dedicated benzodiazepine taper support service in Australia. Based in Victoria, funded by the Victorian state government (not federal, which is the problem).
When I called them, for the first time in this entire nightmare, someone in Australia actually followed a slow tapering approach: 10% off every two to three weeks. The woman was compassionate. She listened. She sent me resources I didn't have before.
But because I'm in Queensland, I couldn't access their benzo coaches for physical or telehealth sessions — those are only for Victorians. I could call with questions, and they wouldn't discriminate on that, but the actual support program was off-limits.
Months later, they called me out of the blue just to check how I was doing. No other service did that — except the original telehealth service through HIF when I was in hospital.
April 2026 Remark: Unfortuantely, like many other 'professionals', organisations etc, Reconnexion really disappointed me recently. I emailed them about me and how I really want to be able to do something similar in QLD or provide services for them, and told them about my GTT software that could help so many people they are helping. I waited and waited and received no reply (not even an acknoledgement they received it). I tried to call them twice and both times I was re-directed to voicemail. I left a message first to contact me and got no response.
After a few days I left a much more stern message saying that it's very disappointing that I don't even get an acknoledgement or anything like that. The next day they left me a very disappointing short message that they don't really want to deal with me (in a more 'polite aussie' tone) from a lady who didn't even left her name. I left another message asking for a reconsideration and to email me back so I'll have at least a chance to talk to them. Once again they called me instaed of e-mailing back, left a message with no contact details from an unknown person saying the same thing. I have tried calling again and again - and every time it rings for a bit and you are diverted a few times and end up in a voicemail prompt. If I were someone who needed help, I would have been very discouraged. I was always answered on the phone in the few times I called originally, and like I said, I was also followed up despite not even being a Victorian.
Let me explain something technical, because it nearly ruined me and it's actively harming people right now.
For the sake of practicality - The right way to taper is an Exponential decay/Hyperbolic taper - which means you cut a percentage of your current dose each time. So for example - 10% of whatever you're on now, wait, stabilise, then 10% of the new (lower) amount (or change the % if the previous cut was too harsh, or higher if you didn't even feel it and you want to go faster). The cuts get smaller in absolute terms as you go down, which matches how the brain actually responds to dose changes. Mark Horowitz as far as I know coined the term Hyperbolic taper. It's based on his theory that the receptor occupancy of psychiatric drug doses follow a very similar 'graph' to the Exponential Decay graph. So in practical terms - it's the same thing, and I use 'Hyperbolic' because it became a common name for this method, not because I think it's the right name.
A Linear taper means you cut the same fixed amount every time: 100, 90, 80, 70... all the way to zero. This is easier to calculate and much faster but catastrophic in practice, because the last cuts represent a much larger percentage of what's left. Going from 20 to 10 is a 50% reduction. Going from 10 to 0 is a 100% reduction. Your brain doesn't care about the absolute number — it cares about the percentage.
I have a whole lot of issues with Mark and made a review of the Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines he co-wrote.
For the love of god - Please don't follow his tables in this book. They are NOT hyperbolic or exponential. They are a 'compromise' based on 'available tablet sizes' and ignores the tail of the taper that needs to be dealt with carefuly, because he ignores the cheap, common tool most people use - the jewellers (mg) scale or the 'jump dose' that Dr Ashton specificed for Benzos. The best way to calculate the taper and dynamically change it is to use my software (GTT).
When I started offering my exponential taper spreadsheet to people in the groups, I noticed something disturbing. People were asking questions about David Jones' water tapers — "take 1ml out of 300ml every day" — and the maths didn't add up. That's a linear taper. A straight line to zero. It goes against everything the group's OWN guides say about the exponential reduction (Mark Horowitz didn't 'invent' this method, it was known much before his book and Dr Ashton herself created tables that were 'crude' versions of it, in her Benzo tapering tables, before the Internet, Amazon/Ebay and cheap jewellers scales were available).
When David had helped me months earlier and I'd asked about my milk taper, his answers had been cryptic and confusing. Now I understood why: we'd been speaking different languages. I was doing a hyperbolic taper. He was describing a linear one. He didn't understand what I was doing, and I didn't understand what he was doing.
In any case, I started offering my Google Sheets tool in the comments. I thought people would be grateful — there was NOTHING else like it (all I could find in google were a few 'linear' excel tapers). Instead, my posts started disappearing. And then one night, I was banned from Beating Benzos entirely with no warning. I made a whole video about this and will post it here too as an article in time.
After being banned, I took my spreadsheet to other groups. Benzo Warriors watched my video explaining it, were impressed, and adopted it as their official tapering guide. I was even told they'd had to rescue people from David's tapers before.
In Benzo Recovery and Existence, another Benzo group (that was great until it wasn't thanks to another angry admin..) one admin responded, praised the tool, and added me to a small video chat group of other benzo-harmed people. We did almost daily video calls — sometimes for hours — just to pass the time and be there for each other. The people in the group were mostly older women (seem to be the main demographic group most harmed by Benzos who were as common as SSRIs are today at the end of the last century, despite their issues being known since the 1970s) from all walks of life, social backgrounds and different countries. It wasn't always healthy — we'd trigger each other sometimes, all being in withdrawal — but having people who understood what I was going through was worth more than any therapist who told me to do breathing exercises.
During this period I also tried hypnotherapy — six sessions, $1,200 AUD. I wanted someone who'd understand my specific issues, including being gay. The hypnotherapist I chose was young, kind, and supportive, but I don't think he was very competent. He never got me deeper than a light meditation-like state. We used the classic induction technique only once. Before him, I'd called an older hypnotherapist who got angry that I was asking questions before booking — not exactly the energy you want from someone who's supposed to help you relax.
I also tried a self-hypnosis track specifically for benzo withdrawal, but the script was bizarre ("the benzo is a bad guest in your house"). Tapping (EFT) didn't help much either.
What did help, surprisingly, was Qigong. My mum recommended it — she does it every Monday with a group. I found a YouTube channel with quick morning practices for energy, and it genuinely helped after tough nights. Still surprises me.
Around the same time as the Christine saga, I found videos by a man named Peter Smith. He ran a channel about managing bipolar and other mental health conditions through supplements rather than drugs. He'd made a specific video about benzo withdrawal management.
He came across as a quirky Englishman — genuine, passionate, quirky, clearly believed in what he was saying. He talked about how psychiatry was essentially based on substances discovered by accident, with mechanisms nobody fully understood. He presented studies. He had a website (half-finished) with research. He had a book on sleep that was apparently quite good from the reviews.
When I'd asked about him in Beating Benzos before being banned, Rosalind had immediately said he was "a very dangerous man" and closed the thread. By this point, her disapproval was almost a recommendation. If she hated him, maybe he was worth a look. Black-and-white thinking — withdrawal does that to you.
The red flags were there: no Google reviews despite decades of practice, almost nothing about him online, people in the groups barely knew who he was. But I was desperate. I'd tried everything else. I was in the worst place I'd ever been.
I emailed him. He replied days later — compassionate, honest about not having a quick fix for the night terrors, but saying he could help recalibrate my stress responses through brain training exercises and supplements. He offered to adjust his schedule for my Australian timezone.
That was the beginning of the Peter Smith saga. It deserves its own chapter — and it'll get one in Part 5.
Everything I went through — two years of it — was a brutal, accidental education. I learned more about benzodiazepine pharmacology, tapering methods, supplement interactions, and the failures of the Australian mental health system than most GPs will learn in their careers. Not because I'm special, but because I had no choice.
I'm not a doctor. I'm a peer worker with lived experience who was failed by every system that was supposed to help, and who refuses to let that happen to anyone else if I can prevent it.