When Parker Posey’s character Victoria Ratliff first uttered “Lorazepam” on The White Lotus, I used to be flooded with emotions that ranged from wistfulness to horror. Whereas some viewers have been curiously Googling “What’s Lorazepam?” I used to be wide-eyed and on excessive alert, questioning: How would the favored present painting a girl who was clearly hooked on—or at least, reliant on—the prescription drug that nearly ruined my life?
My relationship with the benzodiazepine Lorazepam, often known as Ativan, started after I was a youngster: To start with, after I was prescribed the benzodiazepine drug by my psychiatrist for my paralyzing anxiousness, there have been no warning indicators of its harmful unwanted side effects. I took it on an “as wanted” foundation after I felt the fear of a panic assault approaching—like when boarding a aircraft (I used to be additionally on antidepressants and in remedy). It labored like a appeal, virtually instantly calming my frayed nerves and queasy abdomen. I carried the Rx bottle in every single place “in case of emergency,” my prescription security blanket.
It wasn’t till virtually 18 years later, after I had my second baby, a daughter born in 2018, that Lorazepam grew to become a “downside” for me.
Benzodiazepines have been prescribed to deal with extreme anxiousness, panic, and sleep issues in addition to seizures for the reason that Sixties—the drug tells your mind to launch a neurotransmitter known as GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), which calms your physique and thoughts, in addition to generally leads to drowsiness. “Outdoors of the hospital, these medication are typically prescribed for anxiousness issues that don’t reply to different medicines,” says Daniel Morehead, MD, the Director of the Grownup Psychiatry Residency Program at Tufts College in Boston and creator of Science Over Stigma. “Nevertheless, Benzodiazepines shouldn’t be a primary line of therapy for extreme anxiousness,” he explains. “They need to be used together with an SSRI, discuss remedy, train, and different coping methods corresponding to meditation.”
This drug class colloquially known as “benzos” is a managed substance and consists of Xanax, Klonopin, Valium, and Lorazepam or Ativan. Benzodiazepines have change into polarizing within the psychiatry world—particularly prior to now few years as an growing variety of individuals take them: The proportion of adults in the US who stuffed a prescription per yr from 1996 to 2013 elevated by about 30%, with an estimated 92 million benzodiazepine prescriptions have been distributed in 2020 based on the FDA. They’re additionally extra ceaselessly prescribed to ladies, attributable to greater charges of tension issues.
