Hi:

I've had to battle unipolar depression all my life. Fortunately,
Prozac has enabled me to live a fairly normal existence.

For medical reasons, I had to go off antidepressants for a time,
starting with fall of last year. As a consequence, in the spring
of this year I went through a bad depression. Worst experience of
my life; tons of anxiety. I went back on Prozac, but of course it
took a couple of months to kick in. In the meantime, my
psychiatrist gave me a prescription for clonazepam to fight the
anxiety.

Problem here was, I didn't realize that clonazepam was
habit-forming. Actually I did have an inkling, but I figured that
the doctor would never give me enough of a prescription for me to
develop a dependency. I also didn't realize just how severe the
habit is to kick. My take on the whole matter was, well, these
little pills are helping a lot, and even if they are
habit-forming they probably aren't so much so.

As a result, I took these things every night or every other night
for about three months. They helped me sleep, which was good,
because I hadn't slept for weeks. When they no longer helped me
sleep, I realized I was developing a tolerance for them, and so
had to make a decision, which was to either to increase the dose
or stop taking them. I chose the latter, since I realized the
former was a bad path to take.

As well, my old psychiatrist moved out of town, and the new one I
went to also mildly advised me to stop taking the clonazepam. So
I did, cold turkey. The doctor said he didn't think the
clonazepam would be a problem, but that it was a good idea to
stop, probably, just in case. So I did.

About a week later I started exhibiting some major withdrawal
symptoms. I've since educated myself all about clonazepam
withdrawal but at the time I had no idea why I was behaving as
erratically as I was. Suffice to say that I landed in a mental
hospital where I finally got a psychiatrist who knew enough about  
clonazepam to tell me that my paranoid behavior was due to
withdrawal.

The terrible, horrible paranoia and anxiety caused by withdrawals
lasted a couple of months, then finally receded. Still troubling,
however--and the point of this post--is that immediately after I
went cold turkey I started having whole-body twitches, sort of
mini convulsions. These would occur whenever I was drifting off
to sleep, day dreaming, or thought of a particularly disturbing
thought. They would maybe happen maybe twice a minute during this
time. If I was fully conscious and alert, I could go hours
without these involuntary spasms, but otherwise, they were a real
pain in the butt.

I'm using the past tense here, and I shouldn't be. I'm still
having the twitches. They will recede in frequency and magnitude
for a few days and then return. It's been since the first week of
June that I quit the clonazepam, and I'm still having these
twitches, here in September. I'm beginning to wonder if there's
been some sort of permanent neurological damage.

You might ask why I am posting here rather than asking my doctor.
Trouble is, no one seems to know a damn thing about how
habit-forming clonazepam is. I learned from a pharmacologist
buddy of mine that the original doc shouldn't have prescribed the
med for more than 10 days. Instead I took a 10-mg dose for three
months or so, almost daily, as I said. I can't get any answers.
The one guy who seemed to know the most about it--the
psychiatrist I saw in the mental hospital--doesn't have a private
practice and I am having trouble getting in touch with him. I
have heard that clonazepam withdrawal can take many months, so I
am not totally surprised that these twitches are still happening;
still, I am beginning to wonder if they will ever go away.

Any thoughts or suggestions on this?

Thanks.