Clonazepam (Klonopin, Rivotril)

Do you take a single dose before sleep sort of thing, or do you take a couple/few days worth?

 

Yes and people need to be informed but not scared.

 

If my tinnitus reaches severe levels and this lasts for more than 2 or 3 days, then I will take 2x 0.5mg of clonazepam day or night. Usually this will calm the tinnitus down over 3 to 24hrs. I don't usually have to take another dose but have done occasionally.

People that are against taking clonazepam have their reasons and some are justified. However, when tinnitus reaches severe levels and this is sustained, it can be very debilitating to the point where some people have tried to cause their own demise. I would prefer to take clonazepam periodically as I have done for the last 8 years, and have had no problems with it, rather than endure the torment of loud intrusive tinnitus from which there is no escape!

Michael

 

I'm having a tough time getting Valium or Clonazepam, so I'm suffering with a weird hissing/ringing with no escape but sleep. Hearing aids/maskers do nothing to help. Got a feeling it could be partially neck caused but not real sure as I have some HF hearing loss too.

 

This person got the most relief from his tinnitus with Valium:

http://tinnitushomepage.com/treatment/

 

@just1morething, you can invite this guy (tin@tinnitushomepage.com) to Tinnitus Talk and ask him to tell use how his tinnitus is today.

 

Okay I can try to email him and see if he replies. My noise and neck is bad right now, so my concentration levels are poor.

 

I would guess he knows of TT. There is a lot of negativity lately that can affect one's fragile mental state of mind.

 

If patients experience tinnitus, anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsiveness, these conditions can form a vicious circle and exacerbate one another. Tinnitus is not always the starting point of this cycle; it can begin at any point and progress in any direction. In most cases, patients experienced some degree of anxiety, depression, or obsessive-compulsiveness before their tinnitus began. However, tinnitus can increase the severity of existing psychological disorders or tendencies.

http://www.tinnitusjournal.com/arti...eness-in-a-populationof-tinnitus-patients.pdf

 

Good to hear that you are feeling better. If possible, try to regulate the dose of Clonazepam for the body will quickly get used to it and it will no-longer have the same effect of reducing the tinnitus. When this happens the tendency is to increase the dose and unfortunately dependency can set in.

I was prescribed Clonazepam in 2010 and advised by my ENT consultant and GP to only take it when my tinnitus is severe as it can have unpleasant side effects if taken too often. Fortunately I have never had a problem with it in 9 years, and regard it as a lifesaver that brought me out of the depths of despair when nothing else worked. I am taking it less and less; perhaps 2x 0.5mg tablets for one to three days now every 6 to 8 weeks.

Best of luck
Michael

 

Yeah, I know the risks of benzos pretty well, but in fact I was stable on a dose of Klonopin for many years and the reasons I went off didn't have anything to do with it having lost efficiency -- so I've been down this road before, and I know my body pretty well. I actually removed my original post here because I don't really want to encourage this road; my benzo story and reasons for taking them predate tinnitus by a long time.

I also don't want to imply that it silences my tinnitus the same way it does for you, it definitely doesn't. More or less makes me feel like my old self, though...

 

So I found out a while ago that clonazepam reduces my tinnitus if I take it before bed. Like, a lot. No, I don't mean "I'm less anxious and don't focus on it so my brain lets it fade into the background", I mean "depending on the dose, the main shriek gets so quiet it's barely noticeable in an averagely loud environment, I have to look for it to find it". What a dumb world we live in. There's an effective treatment to my T - too bad it's highly addictive, loses its effectiveness in a few weeks and causes serious tolerance/addiction issues. Meh. This sucks

 

Hi @Helheim -- It appears you can take it occasionally, which might be enough to give you temporary respites. -- I just made a post last night in which I speculated lithium may have the potential to be a substitute for taking benzos. Here's a LINK in case you'd want to check it out. -- @Michael Leigh

 

Thanks, I'll check it out. It's been really frustrating. After about a year and a half of getting intrusive tinnitus it jumped to another level after an ear infection and it hasn't really gone down, clonazepam seems to be the only thing that helps and I'm SO done with it lol.

 

"Addictive" is a loaded term. Reading about benzos on the internet is a lot like reading about tinnitus; you tend to just read the worst of the worst.

Benzos are incredibly likely to cause a pretty significant tolerance after a period of long term use, and this tolerance necessitates a slow withdrawal should you stop taking them, and can lead to bizarre, unpleasant, and in rare cases incredibly severe symptoms. (I should know, I've withdrawn twice -- and am in the "severe" camp, rare or not).

So, all that is true, and quite noncontroversial. The "loses its effectiveness in a few weeks" is a lot more debatable though. I was on Klonopin for something like 6 years, daily dose, for perceptual issues and anxiety when I was 20 or so. I don't know that this actually did me any favors because of brain development at the same time, but the point is that the drug never stopped working, and the reasons I went off it had nothing to do with it not working anymore (quite the contrary, it was working smashingly, which was one of the things that made it difficult to withdraw. That said, there were certainly side effects and good reasons for wanting to go off it).

That was 15 years ago; lately, I am back on daily clonzepam, because at this point the quality of life gains outweigh my concerns about what's going to happen 10, 15, 20 years down the road. Tinnitus is not the only (or necessarily main) reason I'm on pills, but if Mutebutton figures their shit out and sells me a device, I will be tempted to look at tapering again.

tl;dr this is a very personal opinion, I think benzos are super dangerous and sketch and most people who take them are not nearly enough aware of the risks, but I also think there's a lot of misinformation and paranoia about them online, and there certainly is some subset of users who taken them for years or decades without losing their minds or having the drug stop work. In my ~6 years of use, I never had to escalate the dose.

edit: all that said -- as someone else on here put it, "if you're using benzos to treat a problem, it means that you're already dealing with something that can't be fixed". My own history with all this stuff is muddled, and I would certainly encourage anyone who possibly can, to find drug-free ways of managing their lives. Because I have been through the whole withdrawal horrorshow twice, it's a little easier for me to feel like I'm making an "educated" decision, because I remember, like, being up at 3am, sweating with pinprick pupils, trying to build a faraday cage around my bed. I got through that period, it lasted close to a year, but I got through it so I could do it again if I had to.

 

Well as a matter of fact you are not the only one who doesn't hit tolerance when I look at the user reviews on drugs.com who have been taken clonazepam ten years and more .

https://www.drugs.com/comments/clonazepam/

 

Right -- it's a total crapshoot. Some people are able to take benzos for decades, have them be helpful, and even stop without too much fuss. Other people go into paradoxical hell states when they're only 6 months in, have to suffer terribly to get off, and end up feeling permanently traumatized by the experience.

90% of the people who use them forever or just don't have problems withdrawing, don't show up online. My dad took 4mg of Kpin for ~6 years, stopped cold, felt "a little weird for 2 weeks" and then was fine. Then he went back on 2-3 years later, and when he tried to go off again it was a totally different deal and he spent a year tapering it slowly. That said, at no point during any of that did he read or write about it online, because that didn't seem useful to him.

As with tinnitus, the benzo accounts you read the most online, are the people with the worst symptoms and the worst outside life support to help them manage it. That doesn't mean that benzos are safe, or a good idea for people in general to take (they're not, they are very dangerous). It's just a calculus of misery, though. At this point in my life, I believe that I'm better off medicated in this way, than not. If there's a price to be paid for that down the line, well, then there will be a price to be paid -- in the mean time, I need to support my family and I very much want to enjoy the time I'm spending with my tiny daughter that is not time I'll ever get to have back again -- so I am just doing what makes sense as far as living the most balanced, joyful life I can right now.

Again -- my history with benzos is very long and complex, so is my history of ICD9 codes, and I do not think that daily benzos are a reasonable solution to most people for whom tinnitus is their primary and only complaint.

Pretty sure my doctors would not want me on Klonopin forever if tinnitus was my "only" problem -- they really don't want me on it as it is (and I don't want to be on it, but, again, it's a math equation).

 

I see , I think your father had so much trouble the second time due to the kindling effect .

For me it's good to know benzo's are available if things ever get worse because they gave me immense relief before .

 

Eh, I tried to avoid taking benzos for a long time but this Christmas period finally got to me and I gave in - in three weeks, I went from 0.5 mg Rivotril knocking me out for most of the night and beautifully suppressing my T the next day to barely even feeling its effects, so I'm understandably a little bummed lol. I'm happy for people who don't build up tolerance at the speed of light but I'm also kinda envious.

 

It certainly may be that it just doesn't work the same way for you, but you also didn't really explore dosages much.

0.5 does very little for me, some improvement for a couple days, then it tends to actually make me edgier. Ramp the dose to 1.0, 1.5, 2 and it's a different story -- and I was on 2mg for 6 years and never had to increase the dose or anything.

I try not to log in here much, but once I'm a few months down the road of regular use at a higher dose, I'll pipe in to let y'all know how I'm doing, anyway.

I'm aware of one study which looked at a combination of clonazepam and gabapentin for tinnitus with one-year followup and found that the relief was maintained for 12 months in a majority of people who responded to it at all; I'm also aware of another study looking at clonazepam and severe insomnia which concluded that the beneficial effect was maintained for years in a majority of users.

Basically, benzos do a ton of different things, and the body becomes more or less homeostatic to them at different rates, and differently in different people. It's basically guaranteed that if you take them for a while you will become physically dependent and have an unfun time withdrawing, but whether or not that's worth the tradeoff seems pretty personal.

edit: I should also be clear -- I haven't been on daily benzos in 15 years, and I'm assuming it's 50/50 that this could go sideways. I am actively living my life in a very reduced, calm, regimented way with very regular exercise and meditation, because if I have to bail on this and go back off the Klonopin, it's going to be extremely unfun and I will need every tool I have at my disposal...

 

Well, I found a doctor that was willing to prescribe me clonazepam as an emergency go-to measure when I have a bad spike. I don't even know yet it will actually do anything for me (as in calm my tinnitus) as I haven't tried it yet. Certainly the studies and people's feedback seems to support this...

I'll be trying 0.5mg tonight to see what happens.

 

Yes, can you be more specific in regards to what kind of lithium; orotate or aspartate, do you get it from a doctor, or a health food store (a simple supplement), and what is the dosage?

 

For the past several years, I've used both the orotate and aspartate, by Solaray (5 mg 1-2x/day). I don't know that one is better than the other, which is why I tend to alternate. I recently read a fairly lengthy article by someone who overcame their CFS (link below w/ product recommendation), and credited lithium supplementation with being critical for their recovery. -- I've mentioned in several of my posts that there's a fair amount of overlap beteween CFS and tinnitus, so what helps one condition has a good probability of helping the other condition.
.........................................................................

Which brand of lithium is the best?
Lithium orotate is not the only bioavailable form of lithium. Liquid lithium gluconate is popular in France from what I heard, and lithium succinate has been studied in Russia for its superior antioxidant properties. There’s also lithium aspartate and lithium arginate sold online with very low doses of elemental lithium.

My current choice of lithium orotate brand is NCI Advanced Research for three reasons:

1. 1. It’s the only one that comes in a tablet form and is easy to cut in half or quarters. A lot of people will fail their lithium trial because they don’t start low enough.
   2. It has a special type of filler (Avicell) that allows for extended release which also makes it more gentle. All other brands are immediate release so they are not as gentle.
   3. It was developed by Hans Nieper who probably knew more about lithium orotate than anybody else since he was the one who originally discovered it. Peter Millar who is known online as “the lithium doctor” also thinks it’s the best one.

For those who are extremely sensitive and can’t tolerate even the lowest dose of lithium orotate, a good starting point can be this brand of lithium arginate, which is just a tiny fraction of the typical dose of lithium orotate and is also highly bioavailable.

 

Who has had experience with with Clonazepam + Gabapentin combo?
Doc just gave me Phenazepam to try and it seems to lower the head noise a bit.
I have an appointment today to try to find other meds for me.

 

If I want to be honest - if I didn't know that even worse tinnitus can be an effect of benzo withdrawal, I'd go "screw the consequences" and take them forever. As it stands, well. I will try to admire them from a distance lol.

 

I do from in the past. I currently have Diazepam 10 mg and no Clonazepam. I do have Gabapentin 300 mg also that I usually take with the Diazepam. Gabapentin helps me with some spinal pain also. I've been experimenting with some
liquid Potassium and Magnesium somewhat too. Usually mixing them with orange juice. Everyone is different so you have to experiment and is better to be under a Dr.'s supervision.

I've posted this several times and spoke to Dr. Shulman years ago. High levels of stress probably affects your tinnitus also. Probably multiple things contributes to tinnitus severity in many cases besides inner ear damage. I seem good atm but can be quite unstable. Good luck with your appt.

http://www.tinnitusjournal.com/articles/gabapentin-and-tinnitus-relief.pdf

 

Reasonable, though cases of permanently worsened tinnitus are generally the result of cold-turkey or overly rapid withdrawal.

I think your caution is wise though; I wish I didn't take so many of these, but the difference in my quality of life is night and day...

 

well, a month later, back on daily KPin for the first time in many years and so far I feel amazing :-P

 

Oh rip lol. Best of luck to you. I've been experimenting with the sulpiride/hydroxyzine combo I saw a few studies about on the internet and combined with the benzos, they've been working well - I managed to cut my Rivotril down from 2 mg/night to 1 mg and I'm planning to drop to 0.5 mg soon.

 

@linearb Glad to hear your doing well man life is too short
Stay Strong