A year of doors that opened onto other doors: the courses and help-lines, the services that couldn't help, a system that made me feel like a criminal for needing my own medicine, and the day I was afraid of the one doctor holding my supply.
Before the things that finally worked, there were all the things that didn't - a solid year of them. I was handed from service to service, or went hunting for help myself, and almost every door opened onto the same thing: another waitlist, another referral, another well-meaning person who had no real idea what to do with someone in benzodiazepine withdrawal. I'm going to walk you through them one by one, because the pattern is the story. In Australia, if your problem is dependence on a psychiatric drug a doctor put you on, there is no door with your name on it. There's only a corridor of doors, and every one of them opens onto another corridor, or leads nowhere.
It started gently enough. The first thing I tried was an online CBT course through MindSpot - the kind where you work through a module and then talk to someone for half an hour, once a week or every two weeks. It was structured and well-meaning, but very 'shallow': you'd do half an hour of a module and then wait a week or two for the next one, and the nice woman I spoke to really didn't give me any benefit. For what was actually happening to me, it was hopelessly out of its depth.
So I went looking for something more specific. QUIHN - the Queensland Injectors Health Network - came up because I was told they "had a nurse who helped people come off benzos." I called. They thought there might be someone like that at their Burleigh office, so I called Burleigh - where whoever picked up sounded as if they were, more or less, on holiday - and was told that the nurse (a man) had left, and there was now no one. That was the whole lead, gone in two phone calls. Later, in January 2024, I was still being bounced around their adjacent referral pathways - "GC Triage," waitlists for a "New Access Program," and the usual list of phone numbers (DV Connect and the rest) that have nothing to do with what's actually wrong with you.
Then, for once, the maze seemed to open onto something real. An online friend who managed an Australian anxiety and depression facebook group - who had come off benzodiazepines herself, though her background was alcohol dependence - contacted me privately and recommended Life Lived Well. Maree - a team manager who took me onboard - managed to arrange the thing I'd been begging the system for since the hospital: an actual psychiatrist appointment, bulk-billed, at their Burleigh Heads rooms - about two months away. By then my expectations were low, and a quick Google of the psychiatrist turned up nothing about her at all, which didn't help.
I waited a long time, in a room with people who looked far more 'addicts' in the classical term than me. When I finally saw her - an older woman - the substance of her advice was to exercise and live a healthier lifestyle. Then she tried to put me on mirtazapine. It wasn't the first time someone had reached for it: after Dr Fawzy, my GP in the Gold Coast, spoke to ADIS, they'd told him to give me mirtazapine too. Back then I'd sat with my mum and sister and thought it through, and from the groups I already knew it can be its own difficult drug to stop, so we decided against it. (That had become my rule after everything - whenever someone offered me a new drug, I'd go and check whether there was an "[that drug] survival" group on Facebook. There usually was, and quite often I was gaslighted to 'not listen to online groups'.) So I told her plainly that I knew mirtazapine could be dependence-forming and hard to come off. She waved it away: "Oh, it's a tiny dose - 25mg, as needed, well tolerated." Twenty-five milligrams is not a tiny dose. And when I asked her about CBD, she was against it - the evidence "isn't there," and as a psychiatrist she could only offer evidence-based treatments. CBD does have evidence, including trials. She simply didn't know.
By September the corridor had led me to AODS - the Alcohol and Other Drugs Service - which gave me "all sorts of referrals." Somewhere in there I was told that the Royal Brisbane Hospital runs an inpatient detox, and that I could go there. I didn't. After hearing from others what those places are actually like for benzodiazepine patients - rapid, brutal "detox" that has nothing to do with the slow taper a dependent nervous system needs - I am extremely glad I stayed away.
There was exactly one service that, when I called, sounded like it actually understood. Reconnexion, in Victoria, was the only place talking in the terms I'd painfully learned were right: reduce by up to 10% every two to three weeks (faster than the general 5-10% every 2-4 weeks rule, but at least in the same ballpark). They sent me genuinely useful information about coming off, and for a moment I felt heard. But there was a catch that summed up the whole country: their real program - weekly sessions with an actual taper coach - was only for Victorians. I was in Queensland, so I could have the leaflet, but not the help. (Much later, when I tried to work with them, it went sour - I tell that fuller story in Part 4.)
Running underneath all of this was a problem that never went away: simply getting the drug I was dependent on, so that I could come off it safely. Clonazepam is a Schedule 8 medicine in Australia - the same class as morphine - and the result is that a person who was carelessly made dependent on it in a month is then treated, for the next year, like someone trying to score.
My GP, Dr Fawzy, at first told me his clinic "doesn't write scripts for benzos" at all. Months later he agreed to. But the whole experience - having to ask, repeatedly, for a medicine I physically could not stop without - made me feel like I was being naughty. Like I was the problem, rather than the prescription that started this. And most of all it made me scared, because I had already met in the forums and groups people who were CTed, something that should be criminal! Even my current doctor has a sign at his clinic: "No Schedule 8 drugs prescribed". It makes me angry every time I see it.
It all comes down to QScript - Queensland's real-time prescription monitoring system for schedule 8 drugs - and its red / orange / green flags. From talking with a pharmacist friend who told me how it works from his side - as well as other Australian benzo friends - I have learned that my own medication history was being scored like a credit rating, and that the wrong colour could mean a doctor refusing me. It got me really stressed.
When you are already in withdrawal, the idea that supply itself could be cut off at any moment is its own kind of torture.
And it cut both ways. The very doctor who started all this - the one who handed me 100 tablets at the beginning - later refused to give me any more, telling me, in effect, that "they won't let me prescribe it anyway soon." In other words, the monitoring system became his reason to cut a dependent patient loose, rather than a reason to taper me safely. Meanwhile my regular GP, under the exact same qscript regime, went on to prescribe monthly with proper reviews for more than a year. Same system, opposite response. The difference wasn't the rules. It was whether the doctor in front of me chose to actually care for me through them.
What got me through those early weeks was a friend. When the senior psychiatrist who'd once run my mother's old hospital in Israel suggested a tiny dose of clotiapine (Etumin) to help me sleep (in Part 1), we couldn't get it - it isn't even approved in Australia. Two Israeli doctors we'd known and been fond of from before any of this (and who knew each other from their studies in Israel) tried to help me track it down: one who had settled in Brisbane - I'll call him Jim - and another who'd come over a few months earlier and has since returned to Israel. That search is how Jim came to understand what was happening to me.
Then came the day I realised I might not be able to get my next dose of clonazepam at all. As I've mentioned, I'd been reading in the groups about people forced into cold turkey, and what it did to them. The thought that doctors here simply wouldn't prescribe the drug I was now physically dependent on sent me into a panic - I told my sister, in despair, that I wouldn't even be able to get more. It was my sister who said Jim would help; they live close to each other. And he did.
He wrote me two scripts - one for the 2mg, one for the 0.5mg - by hand, on a piece of paper, signed, with his doctor's credentials, and handed them to her. My sister asked me: if you go and fill these now, will you relax? I said I would. There was a small, privately owned pharmacy nearby where she'd once filled her own Ativan script; she took it in, it worked, sent me a photo, and I finally breathed. Jim told me honestly that he didn't know the local rules for these medicines, and that it would be safer if he gave me a script each month.
I was enormously grateful - and also frightened that I might be putting him at risk by asking. That fear is exactly why I eventually pushed to get my own GP, Dr Fawzy, to take over. And here's the part that still galls me. There was a phone line - ADIS, I believe - set up to advise on exactly this situation. But they would only speak to the doctor. They flatly refused to give me any information directly, as though I were mentally incapable of understanding my own treatment, and only my "carer" was fit to be told. It was only after I begged Dr Fawzy to ring them - which he did eventually, later, not while I was sitting in front of him - that the advice finally came through: a taper like mine could take more than a year. They didn't explain (or he didn't understand) that it's 10% of each PREVIOUS dose, but they did tell him 10% a month at most. The same facts I'd been saying for months, suddenly credible - but only when a doctor said them to a doctor. Hearing it from an "official" mouth gave Dr Fawzy the cover he needed to prescribe monthly, with reviews.
Getting the prescription was one battle. Getting actual help in a crisis was another - and it produced the single worst episode in all of this. First, the names, because they're built to confuse. On the Gold Coast, "1300 MH CALL" and the "Acute Care Team" (ACT) are the same service - the 24/7 mental-health crisis line. (In previous parts I've talked about my experience with them in Brisbane. To make things more difficult than they should be - they are a different team in each 'area' of Queensland even if that means there are different teams every 20kms, so in effect your address and where you call from physically determine who you'll engage with, even if your address changes like mine did - from my sister's place in Brisbane back to the Gold Coast.) The Alcohol and Other Drugs Service (AODS) is a separate drug-treatment team, based at Southport - literally, as I'd be told, one floor above. ADIS is just the statewide phone line. It was confusing the hell out of me.
I decided to call the Acute Care Team after hours if I felt stressed - because it felt better than Lifeline: they keep a file on you, they know who you are when you call - so you're not starting from zero with a stranger every time. So one night, distressed, and worried as they have 1.8 out of 5 stars in google reviews, I called them for the first time on the Gold Coast, and I got a man who sounded old and grumpy and more or less yelled at me, "why was I wasting his time??". I told him that this was exactly what the Google reviews said about them, that someone had literally written never to call here if you're suicidal. Something shifted the moment he realised I could see - and review - how he was treating me. They did a phone intake and asked me to come in a few days later. Then made me wait twenty minutes past the time. This is not a dentist. Whoever is sitting in that waiting room is, by definition, in crisis.
When I mentioned I'd already contacted AODS (they'd asked if I had) and been told flatly they couldn't help me, the ACT worker looked worried and said that wasn't good enough - they work one floor above, she'd go and talk to them. And sure enough, a short time later AODS rang me back.
This time it was the soothing voice of a female doctor who worked there - one of those voices that talks to a grown adult in crisis as if he were an upset child, presumably believing it's calming. But it worked on me to start with. "How can I help you?" she said, and I told her my story, and how difficult it is to get help. She then said - "we can take over from Dr Fawzy and help you, and you taper at your own pace?" I said yes. Of course I said yes. It was the first time anyone official had offered to actually carry some of this and help me! I felt relief.
Then it unravelled, over the course of a single afternoon. Maybe one or two weeks after, a support worker from Life Lived Well - an older, easygoing Aussie bloke, kind enough, though I didn't feel a connection (which is why the team manager took over, more about it later) - had come by for a return visit. Two hours before that visit, though, the AODS doctor rang back: actually, she was sorry, but after discussing it with the team they could only do it a few ways - either Dr Fawzy kept prescribing and they "helped," or they'd prescribe and taper me but I'd have to collect the dose from the pharmacy daily, like an addict, over eight weeks - linearly - 0.25mg reductions. Think about it, she said. I was already anxious and upset when the Life Lived Well worker arrived, and I apologised for my mood - and explained what had happened.
And then, while he and another worker were sitting there, AODS rang again. The same doctor, the same sing-song "oopsy-daisy" voice: they'd just had another meeting of all the doctors - I heard that and thought they'd changed their mind and they WILL help me - and actually my only option was their way - 2mg down to zero in eight weeks, 0.25mg steps, collected daily. Take it or leave it. The reason? They only had so many resources and couldn't support me beyond that window - the unmistakable subtext being that other people needed them more than I did.
By then I was panicking for a different reason too: I was sure that if I refused, I'd somehow be "tagged" - that the refusal would follow me through qscript and a doctor would use it against me later - or that Dr Fawzy prescribing me would no longer be an option! The phone was on speaker so that the workers would hear it too. I asked her if that meant the Dr Fawzy option couldn't help me?? but she said 'oh no he can, but we won't be able to help then'. I was confused and distressed. I told her I'd stay with him. The fear stayed for quite a while though.
What stayed with me most wasn't the AODS doctor. It was the people around me who were kind and embarrassed and useless in the same breath. The Life Lived Well workers looked caring for the situation but not necessarily angry at the people on the phone - they offered no 'we'll talk to them' support, and no help beyond more referrals. And that, really, is the whole story of these services: in all of it, nobody ever once said, "This is wrong. You are being mistreated, and I am going to move heaven and earth to find you a real solution." No one advocated. They referred to whatever they already knew (mostly illegal substances and alcohol rehabs, and other organisations).
Now that I've done my Certificate IV in peer support, I know that this is basically what they learn to do, on a very basic level. I have a lot to say about the curriculum of this course, and the limitations of working as a peer support worker in QLD 'officially' for NGOs, which I'll save for another post.
Credit where it's due: when the easygoing worker turned out to only be available in the mornings - my worst hours - because he himself worked limited time (many of the staff there have been through their own hard things), the Life Lived Well team manager, Maree, a really lovely lady, stepped in because they were short-staffed. Most of what she could do was refer me on and visit - she wasn't permitted inside the house (a safety policy, I gather, around lone visits to men) - but she'd sit with me on my front balcony in the afternoon sun, which genuinely helped me, or in the little park behind my house. It wasn't a solution. But it was a person, showing up.
One more, because it's the one that got under my skin. Earlier on - after a crisis, before Life Lived Well - someone from one of the services rang me, genuinely excited, to tell me about a brand-new place at Robina: the Mental Health Crisis Stabilisation Unit, an open, welcoming place you could walk into more or less anytime, with sofas and food and people who would help. It sounded like exactly the thing that didn't exist for people like me. I couldn't drive - I was deep in an insomnia setback - and it's 20km from my home - so my sister drove down from Brisbane to take me. Robina is a small hospital, and the place was its own building, set apart from the main one. The one mercy: parking was only $5.
They checked us with a metal-detector wand and spoke to me very gently, so as not to frighten me: I could leave whenever I wanted - I'd just need to tell them, and they'd open the door for me from the other side. First, though, I'd be wanded for metal, asked to check in anything I was carrying, and I couldn't get out without a staff member letting me through a separate door. But all of it with a smile and compassion. The nicest jail I've ever been in. The people I spoke to were young and kind - peer workers or students, I think. There was food in the fridge, deep comfortable sofas, and a huge flat TV playing, of all things, looping footage of ocean waves (which I thought was really tacky). Someone took down my story (which by this time I had told for the 100th time - it was getting very taxing to keep telling it to everyone I spoke to) and said he'd try to find me someone to talk to. For a moment, I felt like I was in the right place; it felt good and comfortable - and it cracked my cynicism wide open. I actually teared up and told my sister: I think this is what I've wanted this whole time.
Then a middle-aged blonde female nurse took me - alone, without my sister - into an 'interview room', and gave me precisely no help. I told her my story again. And when I explained the financial stress driving my taper, and that I can't work, she completely ignored my story, or that I was addicted to a Schedule 8 drug, and said, "Well, why are you trying to taper? 2mg isn't a lot." The instant she said that, I knew she had no idea what she was talking about. So I tested it: fine - then will you dispense it for me? No. "Then how, exactly, are you helping me? You don't want me to taper, you tell me 2mg is nothing when it's an enormous dose, and you won't write me a script - so I'll be forced into cold turkey within months." (This was before Dr Fawzy took over my prescribing.) I asked to see a psychiatrist, not a nurse. "Not going to happen, sorry." Too busy in the ward.
That was the end of my patience. I left the room in distress. I went back out to the kind young staff and told them (well, more like yelled at this stage) what had happened - and once again, instead of getting angry on my behalf, or advocating, they told me they'd see what they could do but I still needed to get my vitals done. I did it, reluctantly; the nurse taking my obs said helping with any of this wasn't her role, only the measurements. I waited a bit, and again got that 'embarrassed', 'sorry we can't really help, but here are referrals' (they had a whole section with pamphlets of organisations like PCCS and Wesley Mission). I told my sister we were leaving - except you can't simply leave: they'd taken our coats, which had to be retrieved first, and we had to be let out. Humiliating. I never heard from them again.
One small thing stayed with me. While I sat there, a strikingly beautiful young man came down from the ward upstairs and was given headphones with calming music. He looked straight into my eyes, without a word. In another version of that day I might have spoken to him. But I was too busy leaving in anger. On the drive home my sister said, gently, "We knew it would be another disappointment, Guy. They're all mediocre/disappointing in this country, don't you know this already?" She was right. They were.
On 7 October 2023 I was having one of my bad days - holding the dose, not being able to even taper a little as I was so scared of the night horrors that will follow. I was, as usual, out the front of the house on the small deck, in the partial afternoon sun, counting the minutes, scrolling my phone. Chest anxiety never left after the last setback, despite holding for more than a month. I was probably after my NA Sunshine Coast online meetup (more on that in the next parts), and maybe also the video with my benzo lady friends. I was mostly scrolling my facebook and youtube feeds and reading the news or obsessively reading forums and groups and researching potential remedies. Then, around 2:30pm, the Israeli news website Ynet began reporting in a small 'news strip' that something was happening in the south; after a period of no missiles or burning 'arson kites' from the Gaza strip into Israel, suddenly Ashkelon (my hometown and about 10km away from Gaza) was being attacked again. And then more news came about potential terrorists crossing into Israel. Then suddenly it became more and more dramatic. I'm Israeli. But I'll be honest about my own reaction, because pretending otherwise would be a lie: in that first afternoon it was mostly a distraction from my own private hell, and I felt almost nothing. I left Israel at twenty-two - more than half my life ago - and I had no close friends left there. I also left bitter, as many do, but in the years after I became indifferent to the country, other than missing badly the real 'i'll be there for you' friendships I could only really make with mostly other people from my home country, childhood places, cultural holidays and food. In any case though - in withdrawal I simply had no emotional reserves left to feel with. What I remember most is the shock that came afterwards, once we realised the horrors that were happening in the south, and the complete and utter lack of response or help from the military, while the reporters who were shocked too were getting SOS messages from residents there being butchered and the 1000s of 'Nova' trance party goers being gunned down in the fields of the south. My family and I glued ourselves to the coverage from opposite sides of the world.
The 'good thing' about this is that I felt that I belonged again. Suddenly many people were in mental distress, so there were WhatsApp groups for people to share, even an Australian/Israeli group that did night time zoom meditations for people in Israel using the time difference so it would start at 6 or 7AM in the morning in Australia for people who can't sleep due to the anxiety and trauma. On the other hand, my 'inner child' felt frustrated and even a bit bitter. Everyone, including family and people in the local jewish community, were completely devastated and barely functional due to things that happened on the other side of the world, and looked for the comfort of community, while right under their nose, someone was struggling so much and yet I had to fight my own battle with no one really helping him fight for help or justice. Now I know what I'm writing is not 'the objective truth' - it's a very personal, intimate and 'selfish' point of view, and might even be insulting for those who WERE around, just not to the level I wanted them to be, but that's how it felt on a very 'inner child' level. And while I wasn't super involved in the jewish community, I did confide in a couple and a friend who were in leadership roles in the local Israeli/Jewish community and they never checked up on me after I did that - despite knowing very well I was in trouble - before 7/10. I was not close to them, even though one of them 'courted' me before as a friend and wanted to get closer to me, and I can only assume they thought to themselves - "Oh jeez, this dude is fucked, let's not get a healthy head into a sick bed". There's a stigma to people who take psychiatric drugs.
What did horrify me though? Thinking about how awful it might be for the kidnapped Israelis if they were in fact dependent on a psychiatric drug like (or any other drug) while in the tunnels with the beasts that took them. Terrified, some witnessing their family slaughtered or burned to death AND in withdrawal and god knows what they do to them on top of that. I think we even talked about it in one of the Israeli witdhrawal forums.
* I wrote a very long passage about the recent conflict itself but decided to delete it - I'm not going to litigate the politics of it here. For the sake of what I'm trying to do I wish I could just keep my nationality(s) out of my story; we are all brothers and sisters when it comes to the harm done by the medical establishments around psychiatric drugs. But in and out of the context of my experience of this as an Israeli - so much hatred became sayable, almost overnight, about Israelis and Jews that I could write a whole book trying to pre-empt how this passage will be read - and I'd still be misread by someone. All I'll say is that it's a VERY complicated, multi-layered historical, political, cultural and social subject, and most people have never learned the history of it or have lived experience, and yet they judge me much more than they would judge anyone from another controversial country like Russia, for example, despite the Russian-Ukrainian war being WAY MORE black and white. So I only mention my home country because it affected my withdrawal and sadly could have had a serious impact on my care, if it wasn't for the morals and values of my GP:
You see - my GP, Dr Fawzy, is Egyptian, as are most of the doctors in his clinic. And at that moment when it happened - my entire fate sat in his hands - if he chose to cut me off from clonazepam, I genuinely did not know what I would do; he had all the power. In any other circumstance, if I'd been well, I would never have played the "I have to trust him, he took an oath, he's my doctor" mind game - I'd simply have seen someone else. But I couldn't. I was completely dependent, on him specifically, with an appointment a week away to get the next script. And so, in that raw, frightened state - with random people, Arab or not, suddenly becoming extremely antisemitic out of nowhere, openly and almost proudly, and with the news screaming and my supply hanging by a thread - I was scared. Luckily, everything turned out fine - he was fine, friendly as usual, my care continued without a hitch. But the fear was real, and it was the fear of a person who had no control left over his own survival.
If that admission offends a doctor reading this, I'd gently point out two things:
1. I was in an anxiety loop already from the meds, catastrophizing everything and being paranoid with a hyperactive amygdala.
2. It was a legitimate fear. I was put in this position by doctors. I also saw other GPs before in the Gold Coast and their level of professionalism was mediocre at best (one didn't know what PrEP was, another was always grumpy with me, etc.). Of the GPs I saw across this whole ordeal, I'd say most of them were poor. I no longer hold the profession's "professionalism" as some untouchable thing - and that loss of faith, too, is something a careless prescription did to me. And I was in an anxiety loop already from the meds, catastrophizing everything and being paranoid with a hyperactive amygdala.