For example anti-anxiety meds in particular are easily addictive and very difficult to withdraw from. That just creates another set of problems in addition to the original one.
If you take ANY medication that can be habit forming, it is not a good idea to abrubtly stop taking them.
I'm not telling any of you to do this, but I can tell you that this worked for me when I wanted to stop taking klonapin, years ago. I would be fine for the first couple of days, then I'd feel really weird. So I asked my pharmacist what to do.
This is what the pharmacist told me about how to stop taking them nearly painlessly. he was an older, more mature man with many years of experience. He said, "People go about getting of these medications the wrong way. They want to be off of them yesterday, so they just stop taking them. What you need to do is to get off them slowly.
You do it this way: fill your prescription and and take 3/4 a dose for the entire bottle. (So if you take three .05 mgs of let's say lorazepam, then you break it in half and then break one of the halves in half. ) You take 3/4's of .05 mgs each dose. Then when you are out, you go down to half of a .05 mg tab each dose. When that bottle is empty, you go down to 1/4 of a .05 mg three times a day. When that bottle is finished, you go to 1/4 of a .05 mg tablet two times a day and then you begin to cut back to one time a day and then you go to every other day. He told me that even if takes you a year, it is the best way he has seen to go off a medication like pain medication or a benzodiazapene. Then you take it only as needed.
