Please don’t worry, I’ve looked into this carefully and I know exactly what I’m doing. At this stage, I would rather accept the risk of tolerance and dependence if it gives me back even a small amount of quality of life — being able to watch a little television, talk with my family, or tolerate stimulation better — than take nothing out of fear of benzodiazepines and spend my entire day lying in the dark waiting.
I also see a huge cultural gap between some of the discourse I read online and medical practice in France. Here, bromazepam, for example, is still prescribed quite commonly for sleep problems or anxiety in relatively young adults. In my own family, both my mother and my grandmother have taken a small dose of a benzodiazepine for decades without constantly having to increase it.
As for me, I’ve been taking the same very small dose every night for more than a year to help me sleep, without needing to increase it. For a long time, I was heavily influenced by alarming stories online, and at times I was more afraid of taking a benzodiazepine than of the consequences of repeated sleepless nights.
Looking back, in my situation I would rather sleep properly thanks to a small dose than go through repeated nights without sleep and risk getting worse, as has already happened to me when I was afraid to take this kind of medication.
Of course, everyone should be free to make their own choices while being fully informed of the risks. And yes, it would obviously be ideal to have a medication that could provide some of the benefits of benzodiazepines without the issues of dependence, tolerance, or withdrawal. But the benefit-risk balance is not necessarily the same for everyone, especially depending on the dose, the duration of use, and above all each person’s clinical situation.
Thank you in any case.
