Death Grip Read Online Free PDF Page A

see in his half smile that he didn’t quite believe me. I explained the situation as best I could, emphasizing that I could not return to the doctors. I laid out the specifics to strengthen my case. Barely anyone around me knew what was going on. It was too complex, too convoluted, to be elevator chat, so I mostly kept mum about my situation; besides, I needed time more than I needed friends’ well-meaning platitudes in order to heal.
    I’d taken my final dose of nortriptyline only a week earlier, a twenty-five-milligram capsule washed down after dinner. Psychiatrists at Johns Hopkins had prescribed the pill to treat major depression, though it had served mainly to mask anxiety caused by the cessation of benzos nine months earlier. That last nortriptyline brought to a close a checkered fourteen-year history with crazy pills: Had I been lucid enough to do the math, I would have realized I’d been on thirteen psychiatric medicines in as many months. Now I’d entered a rawer, more fragile epoch, the underlying benzo withdrawal kicked into hyperdrive by this final chemical insult. The worst, ongoing benzo symptom had been hyperventilation, which left me wheezing, irritable, and in physical distress. The overabundance of CO 2 set my muscles on fire, and only increased the constant, black, gut-piercing terror. I couldn’t walk up hills, and could spit out only three or four words at a time, punctuated by flurries of weird, shallow, triplicate yawns that worsened as my nortriptyline dose declined. I slept with my mouth duct-taped shut and nostrils opened with breathing strips to promote diaphragmatic breathing, in the hopes that my body might find equilibrium. It didn’t, and would not for some time. I was not safe out in the world, but neither did I have real refuge—especially not in my bedroom, alone with my ex-junkie’s guilt and self-hatred. I needed time, distraction, and somewhere to lie low, but it wasn’t happening. No one would let me. I’d tried to tell a few friends, family, and coworkers of my plight even as some urged me to “get help,” “go back on the meds,” and exploit my “support network.” But the support network—of therapists, doctors, and hospitals—had, through chemical paternalism, helped orchestrate this undoing. In fact, the only people who’d verified the reality of my experience were people who’d been through it themselves, ex-patients and survivors of benzodiazepines. It hadn’t been the doctors. It was as if I had vertigo after an hour strapped to a merry-go-round, but everyone I lurched toward for help asked, “How can you have vertigo? I don’t see any merry-go-round.”
    There is no merry-go-round.
    Imagine that you have been poisoned for years but have eventually come to realize the mechanism. And you know that, given time and a safe harbor, your system will normalize. But no one believes you because the poison is medically legitimized. In fact, the withdrawal symptoms themselves mimic the very conditions—anxiety, depression—for which the medicines were originally prescribed. They mimic conditions you’ve tussled with your whole life, only amplified so profoundly—a banshee howl piped through a bullhorn—that you can no longer function. Which is sure proof that you mustn’t stop your medicines, because your original condition is worse than ever. In fact, you may need new pills, and at ever higher doses.
    It is a tough cycle to break.
    Mind you, I don’t have these fits anymore. Writing this seven-plus years later, it would not occur to me to behave this way. I go about my days assuming sanity, climbing again, taking long walks with Clyde and my wife, Kristin, and our little boy, Ivan. Working, writing, being a husband and father. The madness is as remote, as hypothetical, as the ice rings of Pluto. And it’s all because I stopped listening to the doctors and started