Fellas, you have to tone it down with voicing your opinions in such a manner; "those people are stupid", "This whole long acting benzo withdrawal is retarded and wrong.".
The issue with BZD's withdrawal is a well known and studied medical phenomena. Nobody on this forum is going to outsmart decades of clinical practice of psychiatrists and researchers dealing with this issue no matter how strongly or bluntly you voice your opinion.
The issue of long HL BZD's vs short HL BZD's is well characterized and it mostly pertains to whitdrawal/rebound anxiety which is due to much quicker onset, harder to control with shorter HL BZD's. Moreover, some BZD's have a higher response in dopamine transmission elevation. Alprazolam for instance, can be notably dopaminergic for some people, while clonazepam will hardly ever have present with such pharmacodynamics.
Most lay persons when they use for instance xanax, have a much higher chance of quickly redosing when the rebound anxiety happens. People have busy life's and aren't too focused on what's going on in their head, and when the rebound anxiety happens, redosing can be instinctual, and often is.
The other issue is the aformentioned accompanying dopamine response. If there is a very small time window between ingestion of a compound and a subsequent dopamine response, the said compound will have a much higher addiction profile. This is precisely the reason why coke is so addicting when insulfated but not nearly as much when taken per-os. The phenomena described is dopamine's habituating nature. It's pretty simple: whatever you're doing when the large dopamine release happens, you become habituated to that action. In the case of a quick onset dopaminergic drug, one simply becomes habituated to the action of taking the drug. But if dopamine release happen an hour later, the brain doesn't put the two and two together and you become habituated to whatever you're doing when the "dopamine hits". This is how you get accustomed to things you're too lazy to be doing, like studying for instance: you start studying, you take your stimulant and 45m later when it hits and you're still studying, simply put, your brain remembers pleasure = studying.
It is very much true that there is great variability in individual response to BZD withdrawal (physical symptoms and anxiety levels) but this has nothing to do with the users "stupidity" and much to do with individual neurobiology/biology. Clonazepam is one of the BZD's with the cleanest withdrawal profile and is also often used to help patients wean off of alprazolam or some other shorter acting BZD's. If one is so inclined to use BZD's, it's one of the safest options and is basically the only thing I agree with in the above posts.
@readalot I'm interested in hearing more about your story of ssri's and then ending on using clonazepam 3 x a week. What was your experience with using the ssri? Have you achieved relief?
. But they say it’s supposed to be great so maybe it’s just me.
