I TOOK UP TO 30 SLEEPING PILLS A NIGHT

An addiction to prescription pills stole 10 years, friends, jobs and home.

How an addiction to sleeping pills stole 10 years of my life

Four car accidents, three jobs, two disastrous decisions and a family intervention is what it took for Bella* to admit she needed help. Last year, after 10 years of battling an addiction to prescription sleeping pills, she checked herself into rehab in desperation, accompanied by suicidal ideation. A decade of enslavement to a smorgasbord of benzodiazepines and sedatives had rendered her a wreck. Friends wondered how she had managed to stay alive at all, given the number of falls and car accidents she’d had.

In 2005, at the age of 32, Bella was an investigative journalist. Life was good, except she was suffering from debilitating insomnia: her brain would just not switch off. She was referred her to a psychiatrist, who prescribed a cocktail of sleeping pills, anti-anxiolytics and tranquillisers. What Bella now knows, but which neither her GP nor psychiatrist raised, is that these drugs are highly addictive and highly reactive with alcohol.

Within the year she was enslaved. She had recently been diagnosed with longstanding Bipolar 2 and was desperate to overcome the rapid-cycling, incapacitating illness. Initially, the medication seemed to be working, but then the effectiveness wore off, and she again found herself tossing and turning, unable to switch off. The inevitable increase in dosages followed. By the end of 2010, she was up to a box of 30 Zopivane a night.

She tried to go off the Zopivane, but after months of severe sleep deprivation and accompanying panic attacks, she asked her GP for another prescription for a sleeping pill. He gave her one: three Zolpidem per night, on a six-monthly repeat basis.

She got some sleep by trebling the dose to nine, but to make up for the balance of the month, she had to consult other doctors to obtain prescriptions from them as well.

Within another year, she had developed such a tolerance to sleeping pills that she couldn’t sleep at all, no matter how many she took. And that was only the beginning of her real battle.

‘I kept hoping something would just knock me out so I could sleep and get back to work. I didn’t have the luxury of taking time off to go ‘cold turkey’ or develop a normal sleeping pattern, something I’d last had so long ago I couldn’t even remember what it felt like,’ says Bella. But what she experienced included common and dangerous side-effects, like sleep-driving. ‘Instead of putting you to sleep, the pills merely erase your short-term memory. You do and say things you have no recollection of, and the evidence of the sleep-eating and sleep-driving piles up in the kitchen and at the panel beater’s.’

Over time, Bella’s bizarre behaviour alienated friends and family. She lost jobs, and made appalling decisions that had serious long-term repercussions.

At last, out of options, she checked into rehab. Astonishingly, along with all the other addicts, Bella was given a night-time Xanax – a variant of the very thing she was trying to quit. So even this last resort didn’t help.

Ultimately, it took a move to another town – a very small town, with no doctors or pharmacies – and a family intervention to convince Bella to beat the pills. Caring neighbours and friends finally took the decision

❛By the end of 2010, she was taking up to 30 Zopivane a night.❜

to contact her parents to intervene. They gave her an ultimatum: one last chance to stop the pills, or become a ward of the state. After illustrating to her that a fatal car accident was merely a matter of time – and that it would either cost her her own life or someone else’s (which would mean lengthy jail time), Bella realised how out of control the situation had become. She has been clean since the beginning of the year. Still, there’s no guarantee she is safe. ‘I will always be in danger of giving in,’ says Bella. ‘I can never again trust myself to see a sleeping pill and not take it, even though I know that my tolerance is so high that no amount of them will make me sleep. There is no way out of my mind any more. ‘Right now, things are going well. I’m doing a lot of physical work and that seems to help me sleep. I’m optimistic, but I need to be on my guard all the time. Sleeping pills are an escape mechanism, as most drugs are, and I need to learn to deal with anger, boredom, depression, insomnia, and even over-thinking, in other ways. Sleeping pills are not the answer: they destroyed 10 years of my life.’ * Not her real name