I’ve been taking Zolpidem for about 13 years now and suffer from addiction. I’ve sought treatment for this but it doesn’t work as now I cannot sleep without taking something. If you haven’t taken Z-type sleeping aids, I would definitely suggest not to start, as from experience the consequences outweigh the benefits. I’ve lost a considerable amount of friends/reputation/etc. from the abuse. Every experience that you hear about from sleeping aids, I’ve been through it (from the loopy fun to binge eating to weird sex to psychosis to crashing my car)
Take this with all the weight a message board advice from a non-doctor is worth but have you tried Trazodone instead? It’s used widely for sleep issues and it’s effective for many. And have you looked at something like Ketamine for a possible long-lasting solution?
I got a subscription for 1 package when I had major sleep issues as a young adult and i immediately wanted more. Best 2 weeks of sleep i ever had. Luckily the doctor did not allow another subscription
(Genuinely curious and not trying to downplay the seriousness at all)
What would happen if you took a month off work and all your obligations and stayed home and didn't take anything for a whole month? My understanding is the human body can't go more than about 10 days without sleep [1].
So I assume at that point you would fall asleep, and then over the coming ~20 days hopefully you could normalize it and get back to some kind of unassisted "regular" sleeping.... ?
I've had some weird side effects from Zopiclone. They're effective, even when benzodiazepines haven't been, but the side-effects are concerning. On multiple occasions, I've woken up and the room appears to bathed in a yellow light (even though no lights were on and it was still dark outside), and on a few occasions I've been looking at the time on my phone, blinked, and it's suddenly four hours later. I've no idea whether I just fell back asleep and checked the time again, four hours passed and I did _something_, or it just made me misremember the first time. They're not drugs I would use lightly.
Benzodiazepines on the other hand I've had no issues with (no desire/need to increase the dose, no withdrawal even when I've been taking them for prolonged periods, no side effects), but I don't find them as effective. I have seen the destructive effects they can have though - a family member had to taper off them over six months, and at the end she was cutting the smallest dose tablets into quarters as she still couldn't quite get off them.
Try getting prescribed seroquel instead. A lot more powerful, and will help you sleep. Less (known?) downsides as well. I guarantee you that you will be able to sleep with it.
To the people in this thread advocating antipsychotic medication for anything other than treating psychosis and as an adjunct for severe depression, don't. These medications are serious things for serious situations and can have unexpected effects on you mentally.
I went on them in my early twenties due to a nervous breakdown, and while they stopped the endless loops of thought and insomnia (I ended up sleeping ten hours a night without breaking a sweat), they reduced my libido, made me gain weight, and worst of all, robbed me of my natural sharpness and creativity. It was as if my brain had been wrapped in a layer of bubble wrap, and my ability to come up with those sparks of inspiration that you need to do intellectual work was almost extinguished. I'm 100% now, fully recovered, but it took me about 3-4 years to get back where I was before it all happened. If your doctor thinks you're right for them, go for it, but only as a last resort.
They do work, but they're the last tool in the box that you only want to use when everything else has failed.
Here where I live doctors prescribe anti-depressants like candies. They robbed me of two years of my life. The worst for me was derealisation and strong hallucinations. I started strongly believing that life isn't real, that what I am seeing is just a dream or that other humans are just objects that happen to move and speak. Hallucinations were crazy scary, like I saw things as if atoms of objects got magnified hundreds of times or everything was constructed of polygons (like you would switch wire frame rendering). Absolutely crazy thoughts like I was convinced that if I cut myself with a knife it will give me pleasure like scratching an itch. I had a couple of suicidal episodes and ended up in hospital. Somehow nobody connected that this could be anti depressants. I then stopped them on my own and few weeks later started CBT therapy. That fortunately was the most I needed to "repair" my thought processes. I am okay, but I sometimes have the flashbacks of what happened. It's just a reminder to stay away from these things. I understand this may help other people but it didn't help me. When I talked about hallucinations with the doctor he just prescribed a different one. Every 4-6 months I had a different one.
Sadly, in a lot of places, antipsychotics from the 50s (i.e. Chlorpromazine) are the FIRST kind of therapy given, even to adolescent patients with "generic" depression, alongside SSRIs.
No consent given or asked for, let alone informed consent. You are told "take this".
This is not in circumstances of hospitalization, let alone involuntary hospitalization, but regular outpatient treatment.
People who are in a bad place generally don't research meds, and if they are not extremely uncooperative, or paranoid, will take them and the doctors' words at face value.
Consequences are severe and long-lasting.
Absolutely shameful and despicable. These doctors should be shamed by the scientific community for [almost] using prehistoric notions of "hysteria" to mistreat ilness by basically showing "see, he's not crying anymore! PROGRESS!" while pointing to a barely awake, sedated patient.
Any and all progress is usually SSRIs and psychotherapy, if available. Why do they give these antiquated meds that are not appropriate for the situation (i.e. CPZ) is beyond me. These are not psychoses, this is Episodium depressivum, gradus moderati .
Sorry, had to get that out. This is from personal experience.
>To the people in this thread advocating antipsychotic medication for anything other than treating psychosis and as an adjunct for severe depression, don't. These medications are serious things for serious situations and can have unexpected effects on you mentally.
The dose makes the poison. A small dose e.g. of seroquel, for a few days, has a great risk:reward profile for panic disorder
As said elsewhere in the thread, there are nuances even in pharmacology. Your situation sounds terrible, and I am very sorry you had to live through that. However, some anti-psychotics lack anti-psychotic properties in very low doses and are safe. But yes, as a general rule neither anti-psychotics nor z-drugs/bzo-drugs should be used for long-lasting sleep disorders.
Agree with this. I’m on antipsychotic medication due to psychosis and insomnia. Works great but there are a lot of side effects, which I take additional medication to correct.
Fear of losing natural sharpness has had me avoiding antidepressants, which I should probably be on. Just too much fear about losing edge for math/programming.
A man, 29-year old, with a history of alcohol abuse suffered from hypoxic-ischemic brain injury after choking on a piece of meat. After an initial, though slow neurological recovery, spontaneous movement and speech disappeared. The patient developed such a severe impairment of arousal that he required intensive auditory and tactile stimulation to maintain a wakeful state. No structural lesions were found using a computerized tomography (CT) scan to explain this secondary deterioration, and conventional EEG-recordings showed no evidence of epilepsy. After a stay in the ICU and neurology department, the patient was transferred to a nursing home without a formal diagnosis explaining his hyporesponsive state. A structural MRI at follow-up showed signs of diffuse atrophy without hydrocephalus.
Eight years passed without any further improvement and neurological follow-up. Eventually, a new nursing home physician with experience in hyporesponsive disorders took over the patient's treatment and performed a new neurological examination to find directions to improve his care. Upon clinical assessment, the now 37-year old patient seemed awake, but showed a complete lack of voluntary movement (akinesia) and absence of speech (mutism). More specifically, the patient showed no affective reactions, initiation of eating or drinking, and remained incontinent. Although the patient showed no signs of spontaneous speech or vocalization on request, he was able to respond to questions or commands with movements with a significant delay (usually a couple of seconds) and with evident ataxia and muscle rigidity. Despite his intact awareness, the patient's initiative was so severely impaired that he remained wheelchair-bound and entirely dependent on nursing care for all daily activities, including the need for enteral tube feeding.
It's incredible how little we still know about some things. They couldn't pin down a cause and this is apparently a significant detail as to why this patient was basically warehoused in a nursing home with no real treatment for literally years until they tried this new thing, which had some short-lived effects.
Several years ago I experienced a (thankfully temporary) severe reduction in brain function, for several weeks. I was shocked by the truly abysmal diagnostic capability of modern neuromedicine for anything less than large-scale physical trauma. In my case, they couldn't pin down a cause at all, except to say that the symptoms were consistent with a viral infection of the CNS. What virus? Who knows, we can only test for a handful of them.
Thanks for that excerpt. The part I found most terrifying is that not only was the patient given no real treatment, but "Eight years passed without...neurological follow-up", meaning even an examination to see what his status was.
Ah, the video at the bottom of the paper is really emotional! I hope they can figure out how to prolong the effects. Still, an hour of lucidity and verbal communication and a stroll every few weeks and a visit with the family is infinitely better than nothing at all.
My sister suffered severe TBI from a car accident for 15 years before she eventually passed last year. It was pretty shocking to witness the lack of knowledge in regards to how the human brain works, and more specifically lacking in how to heal/treat an injured brain.
Immediately following the accident, we saw other patients in the same condition as her and tracked their progress for comparison sake. The common theme was that patients either made significant progress (with motor skills, talking, etc) within the first 0-3 weeks, or not really at all. It seemed like once scar-tissue started forming in the brain, critical brain connectivity began to get blocked (not necessarily broken). If we can better understand the underlying mechanism behind the "signal blocking" vs "signal un-blocking" aspect seen using this drug in TBI patients, it would be a huge win for all brain related conditions.
The underlying mechanism is well known: it activates GABA (inhibitory) receptors causing cells to hyperpolarize. We have all kinds of receptor activators/deactivator drugs, the problem is the brain is complex and we don't know where/when/how to use them to achieve desired effects.
Things like these makes me realize how little we know about the functioning of brain. Manipulating brain digitally would be perhaps one of the biggest technological revolution after industrial revolution.
We know very little about how the body as a whole functions, especially from a systems perspective. Sure doctors can set bones and give you drugs that are in many cases the physiological equivalent of a sledgehammer, but try asking them what the mechanism of action is of those drugs, or you have Crohn’s or rheumatoid arthritis or insomnia or pinched nerve pain in your back. They have no effing idea.
I saw a paper describing a clinical trial of a device which electrically stimulates the median nerve to reduce the severity of tourette's symptoms.
This would be game changing to the Tourette's community. It is so much more than just a speech or tic disorder, and to give the worst affected sufferers their lives back (by reducing the impact of disinhibition, etc) is a fucking miracle.
Sometimes I wish I was smart enough to have gotten involved with things like neuroscience. I watched part of a lecture on certain brain functions a good while back, regarding the mechanics of various mental illnesses, and it was incredibly fascinating. Such a powerful organ that we simply can't understand well enough.
Reading the HN title, I was immediately reminded of the Oliver Sacks book Awakenings[1]. He discovered that the drug L-DOPA could temporarily awaken encephalitis patients from a coma-like state. I wonder if the article's title "Awakening after a sleeping pill" is a reference to that book.
There's a House M.D. episode about this. It's one of my favourite episodes, but if you weren't already following the show it wouldn't be the best one to start on, as it involved Wilson doing a lot of analysis on House's way of thinking which you'd lack context on.
Out of curiosity, I brought this up to a professor in 2009. Examples were circulating online back then regarding Ambien and lock-in syndrome with similar temporary reversal effect.
Got basically told off with denial and laughs.
Experts often get stuck on this point where their ego supercedes any notion of new science, exploration and potentially disruptive information.
Found out promethazine (over the counter antihistamine) can make me sleepy after trying to use it to help with virtual reality sickness.
I've recently started taking it a few times a month to help out when I am having poor sleep, in an attempt to kick me back into a decent rhythm.
Reading the experiences in this thread of people using Seroquel or Zolpidem and their negative reactions - I am feeling a little sketchy about my crutch.
Careful with antihistamines. I've abused diphenhydramine in the past. Like crazy amounts each night. And I know at least 2 other addicts who have as well - one even claimed they shot it lol... so it can be addictive (and slightly physically addictive hard to get sleep until after 'withdrawals' end).
it helps 'slow down my thinking' and just kind of nod out to nothingness when taken alone. and combining with other drugs/alcohol amplifies
I feel like it has permanently worsened my memory. For sure brain fog is definitely noticeable for weeks after stopping.
There are also a few scary articles I've read linking to alzheimer's/dementia. It kind of makes sense from my limited wikipedia understanding of brain chemistry that blocking Acetylcholine would have long term effects. amped up version of this action is used to kill people vx seren etc
im sober from everything now. but every once and a blue moon i'll take diphenhydramine if i'm having serious insomnia.
one night feels restful. after that it just exasperates & continues the cycle. It also is hard to take just one, I literally have to buy a travel pack, take one, throw the rest away or i will keep taking them until they are gone. annnnd now i want one to zone out. don't abuse drugs kids!
Different drug and underlying affliction, but the film "Awakenings" is worth watching if this story piques your interest. It's a true (though highly dramatized) story. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099077/
What happens when the sleeping pill wears off? Does the patient revert to his previous state until administered another dose, or does a single dose permanently change the patient?
> After consultation with his family, a single dose of zolpidem (10 mg) was administered by the nursing home physician. This dose is frequently used for patients with persistent hyporesponsive disorders (Bomalaski et al., 2017). Within 20 min, the patient started communicating spontaneously, asking the nurse how his wheelchair was to be operated, and requesting fast food. He managed to walk while being supported by the staff and phoned his father, who had not heard his son's voice for years. Despite evident retrograde amnesia, going back three years before the brain injury, and an apparent hearing deficit, he was cheerful, alert, and showing interest in the people and objects surrounding him.
> Two hours after zolpidem administration, he gradually fell back into his diminished motivational state.
They can be a lifesaver for an informed patient, though. I suffer from occasional insomnia (about once a month -- if working too late, got too emotionally invested in something, or if accidentally drank too much coffee), and Ambien has been incredibly helpful. I wouldn't dare take it on even a weekly basis, though.
Even though I haven't had any side effects, I still hide my car keys before taking it after having read stories of people driving while asleep on Ambien.
Zolpidem, I use this pill to sleep and works fantastic for me. My MD told me that regular use could lead to dementia and the risk for addiction is considerable. I've tried antidepressants to sleep but always wake up with a headache, the feeling of it it's not great either. But with this one, never had an issue.
Ever tried Hydroxyzine for sleep? It's an anti-anxiety med that was prescribed to me for insomnia after zolpidem and the other popular non-benzo hypnotics had the opposite effects on me.
Hydroxyzine works ok for me. Not great. Flexirol + hydrocodone work fantastic for me, but that's not a viable option.
A really fascinating book is just waiting to be written taking into account the brain wave pattern understanding from research that's occurred over the last few years.
My guess is the damage was primarily on the conscious parts of the head, my guess is the sleeping pill (I'd wager canibus may also work) allows the more unconscious "dream-like" side of the brian to temporarily fill-in on executive functions.
So at least some people who have been declared “brain-dead” and had their organs harvested could have been brought back (albeit temporarily) with a shot of Ambien? That’s... disturbing.
bxtt|5 years ago
in3d|5 years ago
domano|5 years ago
grecy|5 years ago
What would happen if you took a month off work and all your obligations and stayed home and didn't take anything for a whole month? My understanding is the human body can't go more than about 10 days without sleep [1].
So I assume at that point you would fall asleep, and then over the coming ~20 days hopefully you could normalize it and get back to some kind of unassisted "regular" sleeping.... ?
[1] https://www.healthline.com/health/healthy-sleep/how-long-can...
stordoff|5 years ago
Benzodiazepines on the other hand I've had no issues with (no desire/need to increase the dose, no withdrawal even when I've been taking them for prolonged periods, no side effects), but I don't find them as effective. I have seen the destructive effects they can have though - a family member had to taper off them over six months, and at the end she was cutting the smallest dose tablets into quarters as she still couldn't quite get off them.
jeron|5 years ago
peteretep|5 years ago
mancerayder|5 years ago
BuzzwordBingo|5 years ago
smabie|5 years ago
cobolcowboy|5 years ago
I went on them in my early twenties due to a nervous breakdown, and while they stopped the endless loops of thought and insomnia (I ended up sleeping ten hours a night without breaking a sweat), they reduced my libido, made me gain weight, and worst of all, robbed me of my natural sharpness and creativity. It was as if my brain had been wrapped in a layer of bubble wrap, and my ability to come up with those sparks of inspiration that you need to do intellectual work was almost extinguished. I'm 100% now, fully recovered, but it took me about 3-4 years to get back where I was before it all happened. If your doctor thinks you're right for them, go for it, but only as a last resort.
They do work, but they're the last tool in the box that you only want to use when everything else has failed.
intricatedetail|5 years ago
milankragujevic|5 years ago
No consent given or asked for, let alone informed consent. You are told "take this".
This is not in circumstances of hospitalization, let alone involuntary hospitalization, but regular outpatient treatment.
People who are in a bad place generally don't research meds, and if they are not extremely uncooperative, or paranoid, will take them and the doctors' words at face value.
Consequences are severe and long-lasting.
Absolutely shameful and despicable. These doctors should be shamed by the scientific community for [almost] using prehistoric notions of "hysteria" to mistreat ilness by basically showing "see, he's not crying anymore! PROGRESS!" while pointing to a barely awake, sedated patient.
Any and all progress is usually SSRIs and psychotherapy, if available. Why do they give these antiquated meds that are not appropriate for the situation (i.e. CPZ) is beyond me. These are not psychoses, this is Episodium depressivum, gradus moderati .
Sorry, had to get that out. This is from personal experience.
elevenoh|5 years ago
The dose makes the poison. A small dose e.g. of seroquel, for a few days, has a great risk:reward profile for panic disorder
jaijaihanuman|5 years ago
kayodelycaon|5 years ago
argella|5 years ago
costcopizza|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
DoreenMichele|5 years ago
A man, 29-year old, with a history of alcohol abuse suffered from hypoxic-ischemic brain injury after choking on a piece of meat. After an initial, though slow neurological recovery, spontaneous movement and speech disappeared. The patient developed such a severe impairment of arousal that he required intensive auditory and tactile stimulation to maintain a wakeful state. No structural lesions were found using a computerized tomography (CT) scan to explain this secondary deterioration, and conventional EEG-recordings showed no evidence of epilepsy. After a stay in the ICU and neurology department, the patient was transferred to a nursing home without a formal diagnosis explaining his hyporesponsive state. A structural MRI at follow-up showed signs of diffuse atrophy without hydrocephalus.
Eight years passed without any further improvement and neurological follow-up. Eventually, a new nursing home physician with experience in hyporesponsive disorders took over the patient's treatment and performed a new neurological examination to find directions to improve his care. Upon clinical assessment, the now 37-year old patient seemed awake, but showed a complete lack of voluntary movement (akinesia) and absence of speech (mutism). More specifically, the patient showed no affective reactions, initiation of eating or drinking, and remained incontinent. Although the patient showed no signs of spontaneous speech or vocalization on request, he was able to respond to questions or commands with movements with a significant delay (usually a couple of seconds) and with evident ataxia and muscle rigidity. Despite his intact awareness, the patient's initiative was so severely impaired that he remained wheelchair-bound and entirely dependent on nursing care for all daily activities, including the need for enteral tube feeding.
It's incredible how little we still know about some things. They couldn't pin down a cause and this is apparently a significant detail as to why this patient was basically warehoused in a nursing home with no real treatment for literally years until they tried this new thing, which had some short-lived effects.
centimeter|5 years ago
andrewem|5 years ago
ComputerGuru|5 years ago
ianai|5 years ago
sho|5 years ago
tantalor|5 years ago
treatment effective in the short term, but only in a small proportion of cases (estimated at around 5%)
feanaro|5 years ago
tedd4u|5 years ago
muzika|5 years ago
casefields|5 years ago
madarco|5 years ago
jb775|5 years ago
Immediately following the accident, we saw other patients in the same condition as her and tracked their progress for comparison sake. The common theme was that patients either made significant progress (with motor skills, talking, etc) within the first 0-3 weeks, or not really at all. It seemed like once scar-tissue started forming in the brain, critical brain connectivity began to get blocked (not necessarily broken). If we can better understand the underlying mechanism behind the "signal blocking" vs "signal un-blocking" aspect seen using this drug in TBI patients, it would be a huge win for all brain related conditions.
cblconfederate|5 years ago
madcow00|5 years ago
doitLP|5 years ago
monkeydreams|5 years ago
This would be game changing to the Tourette's community. It is so much more than just a speech or tic disorder, and to give the worst affected sufferers their lives back (by reducing the impact of disinhibition, etc) is a fucking miracle.
the_only_law|5 years ago
TaupeRanger|5 years ago
numpad0|5 years ago
Nextgrid|5 years ago
jetrink|5 years ago
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awakenings_(book)
mdoms|5 years ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_Coma_Guy
neuronic|5 years ago
Got basically told off with denial and laughs.
Experts often get stuck on this point where their ego supercedes any notion of new science, exploration and potentially disruptive information.
apatheticonion|5 years ago
I've recently started taking it a few times a month to help out when I am having poor sleep, in an attempt to kick me back into a decent rhythm.
Reading the experiences in this thread of people using Seroquel or Zolpidem and their negative reactions - I am feeling a little sketchy about my crutch.
opiate_addict|5 years ago
it helps 'slow down my thinking' and just kind of nod out to nothingness when taken alone. and combining with other drugs/alcohol amplifies
I feel like it has permanently worsened my memory. For sure brain fog is definitely noticeable for weeks after stopping.
There are also a few scary articles I've read linking to alzheimer's/dementia. It kind of makes sense from my limited wikipedia understanding of brain chemistry that blocking Acetylcholine would have long term effects. amped up version of this action is used to kill people vx seren etc
im sober from everything now. but every once and a blue moon i'll take diphenhydramine if i'm having serious insomnia.
one night feels restful. after that it just exasperates & continues the cycle. It also is hard to take just one, I literally have to buy a travel pack, take one, throw the rest away or i will keep taking them until they are gone. annnnd now i want one to zone out. don't abuse drugs kids!
tyingq|5 years ago
copperx|5 years ago
canada_dry|5 years ago
[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalitis_lethargica
TedDoesntTalk|5 years ago
mikeyouse|5 years ago
> Two hours after zolpidem administration, he gradually fell back into his diminished motivational state.
ve55|5 years ago
teej|5 years ago
xwdv|5 years ago
kneel|5 years ago
pcurve|5 years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUnBPOO9Qmw
artur_makly|5 years ago
here is just a list of shit to be prepared for when you take them for more than a few short weeks:
https://youtu.be/IKNzL-eU650
please be VERY careful. ive been on then for years and it is a nasty and very long detox process.
copperx|5 years ago
Even though I haven't had any side effects, I still hide my car keys before taking it after having read stories of people driving while asleep on Ambien.
mariopt|5 years ago
uberduper|5 years ago
Hydroxyzine works ok for me. Not great. Flexirol + hydrocodone work fantastic for me, but that's not a viable option.
ed25519FUUU|5 years ago
smabie|5 years ago
someperson|5 years ago
loceng|5 years ago
AllegedAlec|5 years ago
therealbilly|5 years ago
foxhop|5 years ago
layoutIfNeeded|5 years ago
hikerclimb|5 years ago
[deleted]
demostanes|5 years ago
[deleted]
PIKAL|5 years ago