Save the prescription pill victims

FIoNA FreNCH’S story makes for shocking reading. For 40 years, the social scientist from edinburgh was given repeat prescriptions for benzodiazepine drugs to treat her epilepsy. These tranquillisers, which include brands such as Xanax, restoril and diazepam (formerly known as Valium), are commonly prescribed by GPs for pain, anxiety, sleeplessness or depression.

They also have a muscle relaxant effect, which is why Fiona was given them because her type of epilepsy caused short, shocklike jerks.

Because benzodiazepines (nicknamed ‘ benzos’) are highly addictive, under long-standing guidelines, patients should be put on such drugs for only four weeks. Long-term use can also lead to problems with memory and concentration, anxiety and depression as well as sleepiness and unsteadiness.

But as the Mail has previously highlighted, thousands of people are being prescribed these drugs for months and even years.

Fiona, 61, was on the drugs for four decades.

‘The doctors I see these days seem very puzzled that I was ever put on them at all,’ she says.

But she’s paying the price, for the medication has caused her mental and physical harm.

‘My adult life has been destroyed by these drugs,’ she says.

To add insult to injury, when Fiona managed to wean herself off this medication (like many others, she had to go it alone, as there is virtually no support for innocent drug addicts), she suffered terrible long-term withdrawal symptoms that doctors suggested were all in her mind.

Hers is hardly a unique experience. Up to a third of those who quit benzodiazepines experience bizarre symptoms, according to Malcolm Lader, emeritus professor of clinical psychopharmacology at the University of London Institute of Psychiatry.

And yet, too often these patients are told their symptoms are ‘medically unexplained’ — or even a sign of mental health problems.

Fiona was on a teacher training course at university when she was diagnosed with epilepsy at 19 and put on benzodiazepines.

‘Within two months of starting I made my first suicide attempt. I suddenly felt desperate and wanted a way out,’ she says.

‘ I couldn’t explain why my personality had changed so suddenly and dramatically.

‘I would spend large chunks of the day asleep in bed and developed a fear of being alone.

‘I was told that my symptoms were that of depression, and I believed it. I kept taking the tablets, thinking they would make me better. It never entered my head that it could be the drugs that were making me ill.’

In her 20s, having had to drop out of her course, she managed to get an administrative job. ‘But I never