Dr. Patricia Halligan and Shane Kenny discuss the epidemic of overprescribing benzodiazepines that's causing human suffering of epic proportions and derailment of human lives for decades.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
Welcome to Recovery: The Hero's Journey. I'm your host, Dr. Patricia Halligan. Several of our episodes have focused on the epidemic of overprescribing of benzodiazepines — that's Valium, Xanax, Klonopin Ativan, and Z drugs, Ambien, Lunata, and Sonata. The percent of long term benzodiazepine prescriptions have increased over the past 10 years. The dosages are increasing. So one third of all opioid overdose deaths in America involve benzodiazepines. Xanax is implicated in one third of suicides. People can be severely injured by therapeutic doses of benzodiazepines that is taking their medication at therapeutic doses as prescribed and suffer a myriad of painful disabling side effects while trying to stop and can be left with longstanding or permanent neurological damage. This is an epidemic causing human suffering of epic proportions and derailment of human lives ongoing for decades. Yet little or nothing has been done to stop this plague by those with the responsibility and the power to do so.
My guest today is a man who is trying to change that. Shane Kenny is a broadcaster and a journalist who worked for 30 years as a frontline presenter and editor for RTE, the Irish national broadcaster. In 1989, he won the Irish national media award for supreme contribution to Irish journalism. During the years 1994 to 1997, he served as press secretary for the Irish government before returning to RTE. In 2003, he established his own independent media business in production and training. From 2005 to 2011, he was also director of public affairs and member of the executive board of Dublin City University. The last three years, unable to work because of serious illness caused by being treated with Valium for Meniere's disease, Shane started working on his unique documentary, The Benzodiazepine Medical Disaster in 2014, while still very ill and continues to suffer from the disease caused by the drug to this day. He joins us today from Achill Island, which is off the west coast of Ireland. Shane, thank you so much for joining us today. I'd like to honor and thank you for all the work that you've done and continue to do on behalf of people around the world harmed by the overprescribing of benzodiazepines. Welcome.
Shane Kenny:
Well, thank you for having me on your show.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
I've only been to Ireland once. Now it's three summers ago, my daughter came to me and said mom, I'm gonna have a small wedding in a castle in Ireland. So I thought I was lucky with a small wedding, but it ended up in a castle called Castleknock outside of Dublin. And what a beautiful country you have.
Shane Kenny:
Well, thank you very much, indeed. And this is a lovely part of it. Anyway, and you have watched the documentary that I made Benzodiazepines: The Medical Disaster
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
I have. And I recently rewatched it and I just absolutely love the passion behind your film. And I also love your style. You're refreshingly honest and straightforward in your delivery. You say things that need to be said. Why do you think that government bodies, health services, medical authority doctors and academia have not reacted appropriately to this benzodiazepine medical disaster?
Shane Kenny:
Well, I find that profoundly disturbing and shocking. It's an epidemic in the United States. It's a pandemic all over the world. The benzodiazepine medical disaster, there are dozens of activists, campaigning groups all over the world about this and in the United States some very, very good ones in your country. I want to put it in relief with the current COVID-19 pandemic and the vaccine experts say there is a one in a million chance of having a blood clot with the J & J vaccine (Johnson and Johnson) and a one in 100,000 chance of a clot with the AstraZeneca vaccine. The evidence we've got from the clinical work of professors, Heather Ashton, and Mike Malcolm later on benzodiazepines is that there's a one in three chance of patients sustaining serious health impairment with benzodiazepines.
If they take it for more than a few weeks, four at the absolute most. When it happened first to me, I couldn't believe the level of medical ignorance there was about something so serious that it was a threat to my life. My general doctor, first of all. And then my consultant said they knew nothing of such injuries from benzodiazepines. The consultant who prescribed Valium for Meniere's disease tried to deflect it by suggesting that it was something else. And that's a very common and ignorant reaction by doctors, I'm afraid. I've come across it across it hundreds of times over the past 13 years that I've been both affected by and researching benzodiazepines. After I spent two months in the famous national urology hospital in central London I got a written report saying that I was suffering from benzodiazepine withdrawal syndrome.
And that's the only time that the doctors faced up to the truth. I interviewed these two doctors two professors, Heather Ashton and Malcolm Lader in 2014. And one of the reasons why I wanted to do it before my health had recovered at all, and it was quite difficult to do that, was because they weren't being replaced. These were two psycho pharmacologists who had devoted a very great deal of their lives. Heather Ashton, practically her whole career to investigating benzodiazepines and trying to help people who were suffering from them. And I found it extraordinary that they weren't being replaced and that health authorities were doing nothing to abase this pandemic.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
And it's still the same today. As an addiction psychiatrist, my office is inundated with desperate people banging down my door saying, please, please help me get off Xanax, help me get off Klonopin and help me taper off Ativan. These drugs, they're worsening my depression or I'm developing panic attacks in between my doses. I'm taking it as prescribed. And you know, I don't think clearly anymore. I'm fuzzy headed. My memory is disturbed. I'm running a company. I had have a gentleman who just had to recently retire prematurely before the age of 65, because he had been on Klonopin for two years and it just destroyed his memory and his executive functioning ability and what the patients tell me, I liked what you brought up Shane. I like this medical ignorance as a big part of the problem.
Anna Lembke MD who's the medical director of Stanford addiction medicine. We were talking and we both agreed neither one of us was taught anything about the harms of benzodiazepines at all during our med schools or during psychiatry residency. So no education about the harms of benzodiazepines. We were taught how to prescribe, but not how to de-prescribe. And I think your point about doctors not understanding the problem, I see it every day. And it's not a rare problem. So I love that you compared it to the the pandemic. It's a big problem. It's not rare. And the suffering's been ongoing for decades.
Shane Kenny:
Exactly. And I think it's because these drugs were invented first of all, towards the end of the 1950s and and then changed into the 1960s. I mean, the kind of tests which had to be done on medications, which were visited on people then were incredibly slight. Professor Malcolm Lader makes quite something of that in, in the documentary. But despite that, despite that there was I think as you have seen, there was a a survey done by Leo Hollister, Dr. Leo Hollister in 1960. Yep. and 1961 the first benzodiazepine was launched on the world Librium by Roche in 1959, 1960. And he, you know, felt that it needed to be tested and, and, and that, you know, that it couldn't be entirely safe as people were representing it.
And he, of course he, he fed it to I think there were patients in a military hospital in California almost a prison, you know, but I mean, there were patients who he, he had access to and as later said it was, we would consider it kind of an unethical thing to do today. But he, he, he gave triple a normal dose of Librium to the patients in the, in the hospital to a selected group of them gave them for three months and then abruptly stopped of course, to see what the effects of that would be. And of course it was pretty traumatic for, for the people who'd been taking the drugs. A number of them had seizures and they had all kinds of symptoms presenting at that stage. And he wrote up a very expos, light touch report on on what he found, but the, the, the medical establishment and the, and the drug companies didn't react to it at all. You would've imagined that in, in this situation where people had seizures after the drug was stopped, that that would give them some pause, but absolutely none.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
It, it is shocking. It boggles the mind. I was recently watching medicating normal, the documentary from 2020 and Robert Whitaker, who I know you're familiar with. He was talking about a Xanax study that was done in the eighties where they basically showed that Xanax decreased people's anxiety and panic at the four week mark, but they suppressed the remainder of the research conclusions at the 14 week mark, after people had been taking Xanax for 14 weeks, the anxiety had ridden risen considerably, and that was suppressed, was not made public knowledge. I, I'm not sure why the drug companies were so invested in suppressing the information about the harmfulness of benzodiazepines. It is shocking. I agree with you there.
Shane Kenny:
Yes. I think Robert's work has been amazing actually in, in, in this field of psychoactive medicines. He he also runs Mad In America, the website, of course which publishes a lot of material on this in fact published an article of mine last November, December about the, the FDA's news stand on benzodiazepines, which I want to talk about at some length. But I, you know, he, he, he really is to be complimented for for what he has done. There's no doubt about that. I wonder you, you, you, you have, have you seen the article? I did for Mad In America and other websites about the FDA's new stand on, on benzodiazepines, because I mean,
It, it, it's extraordinary to me that an organization like the, the FDA which has a responsibility for looking after people's health and safety in relation to drugs that they could do an investigation of of, of people who've made complaints to their site. There are over well about 300,000 complaints that they've had since they first started getting these kind of complaints about benzodiazepines 300,000. It's an enormous number and people that's and time to sit down and
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
and that's only the reported number. How many went unreported?
Shane Kenny:
Yes, I, I I'm, I'm sure there's a lot more mm-hmm, <affirmative>, there's certainly a lot more people who have been been affected by, by Benzodiazepines, but I mean, the, the, the critical thing was that they, they didn't investigate the 300,000 complaints. They did a subset of 104 cases which they said you know, covered some of the main aspects, but that leaves something begging I'm afraid. But what they did find, even in this 104 cases was some very dramatic things about benzodiazepines in particular, what I consider to be the really, really serious issue, which the FDA and other health organizations have never confronted. And that is that the side effects can continue for years and years and probably permanently, but certainly possibly permanently. We just have no studies done on the kind of damage and harm that have spin on to people over very many decades.
And of course people don't understand, doctors don't understand sometimes they've shut their ears to people coming into their surgeries, complaining about the drugs that they've been prescribed, causing them these problems. They refuse to believe it. And in some cases, of course, as you know they throw the patients out, literally they, they, they won't they won't treat them. Yes, but I mean, the, the, the, I, I want to read the words mm-hmm <affirmative> which they, the FDA itself used please in describing what they found that people had suffered severe withdrawal side effects that had lasted from weeks to years, weeks to years that's long term harm.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
It's, it's devastating. And what does this cause? How does this derail the patient's lives?
Shane Kenny:
Well I mean, you know, there's an awful lot of people who are like me. I mean, it put an end to my entire career. You know, I was still continuing to broadcast regularly. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> I was the director of public affairs in Dublin city, university. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> one of the leading technology technology universities in Ireland. And I also had my own media business in production and training and everything went in, within six months of me being affected. Most people would find it hard to conceive of how awful it is to be affected by these drugs, which I've damaged the central nervous system and your, your entire central nervous system is malfunctioning. And you are living in that body. As Dr. John O'Connor an Irish doctor and expert on benzodiazepines told me his phrase for it was that your body becomes your own torture chamber and all of your sensations, you know, sound touch the sensation on your skin inside your body with your veins. It's like having a continuous electric shock, or certainly it was for me.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
Oh, that is, that is torture.
Shane Kenny:
Absolute torture and there's no way of stopping it, you know I mean, people who give electric torture to prisoners, mm-hmm, <affirmative>, they have to go away and eat sometimes, you know? Yes. And they stop, but there is no stop. And that's one of the reasons why people take their own lives.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
It's unbearable, isn't it?
Shane Kenny:
It's completely unbearable. Yes. For years. It, it very nearly was like that for me. And thankfully a friend of mine called me, I was here on this island at the time a friend called and he was so shocked after our conversation that he, luckily for me his brother was my neurologist and he got off the phone to me and got onto the neurologist who then got onto me at this stage. I I had been off, I had, I'd gone through my first withdrawal mm-hmm <affirmative> and I had stopped the drug for five months. I had tapered I'd followed all the protocols mm-hmm <affirmative>. I had tapered very slowly from a very small dose of Valium six milligrams a day down to three quarters of a milligram over six months. Wow. And at that stage I stopped, it certainly was extremely damaging to me in the sense that I lost the ability to walk properly during that time, because the pain in my legs was just so bad. So I, I got to the end of the six months, I was at three quarters of milligram. I was given an assurance. It can hardly be doing very much to your body at that stage. And I stopped and within seven days I had a seizure.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
Oh, how terrifying
Shane Kenny:
It, it, well it was utterly terrifying. I had a seizure at about two. It woke me up, first of all. And I was literally frozen from my head to my feet and I couldn't move in bed. And of course, normally if such a thing happened to you, you feel you could ring the emergency number, you know, for emergency help mm-hmm <affirmative>. But I couldn't do that E even, you know, I had a mobile phone be beside the bed. I would've been able to, to dial 9, 9, 9 is our emergency number mm-hmm <affirmative>. But I couldn't do that because I knew at this stage that the, the likelihood of someone seizing a se having a seizure, they were likely to give me a benzodiazepene, I'd be dealing with people who would a have very little interest because they're so busy, they'd be trying to get through the workload. And they wouldn't know any better.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
No, they wouldn't. Oh, oh.
Shane Kenny:
So I had to, I had to sit in my bed for six hours until things started to unwind a little bit
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
It's terrifying when the whole medical community doesn't know how to treat this and you become your own best expert, right?
Shane Kenny:
Yes, yes. Yes. Well, well, undoubtedly that's the case in fact Heather Ashton, when she was dealing with her clinic setting up her clinic, she, she ran a clinic. Of course we haven't mentioned that for, for 12 years in Newcastle panty in the north of England specifically treating people with benzoin problems and trying to help people to get off them because people desperately wanted to stop taking these drugs. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> it has often been said, you know, that that they create a craving, of course they don't create any kind of a craving, which is like, what people get for alcohol or heroin or cocaine. The craving is for something that will avoid them having to go through these terrible withdrawal symptoms.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
They, they really just wanna alleviate the withdrawal and they desperately they wanna get off these benzodiazepines... that's it, these are not people that are addicted.
Shane Kenny:
And, you know, it's not just what I've been describing already, you know, but there are whole range of symptoms. You know, tinnitus, you can get numbness, you can get burning pains in your limbs. You can get inner trembling, vibration very strange skin sensations, muscle pain weakness, everywhere, painful cramps jerks, spasms, stabbing pains, these electrical, current I talked about. And you know Heather Ashton found when she opened her clinic first, all of her patients, all of them had difficulty walking.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
And these are patients with oftentimes no prior psychiatric history to speak of. They're just the worried well and their doctors. That's,
Shane Kenny:
That's correct.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
You know, some something for a normal day everyday anxiety little bit of work stress maybe tension in their relationships, a little bit of anxiety. This is normal life, but were you, were you told about the possible side effects of long term neurological damage or a severe protracted withdrawal syndrome when you were prescribed Valium for many years?
Shane Kenny:
No, not, not only was I not given any kind of warning. He said, Valium. I only had a vague idea of, of this, but I said, isn't there a problem with Valium? And he came back at me and said, you know, it's the most malign drug. And it is very good for this man's condition. And in fact, he said, it could act as a preventative if I took it for a period of time.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
sign me up. I, I would've taken it, sign me up. Right. I mean, you, you rely on your physician for accurate knowledge. Well,
Shane Kenny:
That's, it, there's definitely a range of reactions to benzodiazepine. So there's no question of that. And you know, one of the things that has helped doctors to avoid doing anything about it, or even accepting that they can cause terrible harm and damage is the, the fact that you know, two outta three people might not have any difficulty with this. At all, in terms of getting off them, they might have some side effects when they stop, but they don't have the really serious conditions. But I mean, one in three being liable to the possibility of this is a very dangerous proportion.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
We're going to take a short break. We've been talking to the creator of the documentary, benzodiazepines, the medical disaster, Mr. Shane, Kenny, when we return Shane, Kenny will share his thoughts on the revised FDA black box warning for benzodiazepines. We'll see you back in a minute.
<Information Break>
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Dr. Patricia Halligan:
And we're back to recovery, the hero's journey. I'm your host, Dr. Patricia Halligan. We're here with Shane Kenny discussing benzodiazepines, the medical disaster. Shane, I wonder if you'd like to comment on the FDA's recommendations for a new black box warning that came out last fall in 2020.
Shane Kenny:
Yes. I, I would certainly like to do that because I developed an interest in what the FDA was up to when I was alerted that they were, they were proposing a black box warning on benzodiazepines. I mean, they already had one of course about the use of benzodiazepines with opioids. But this was going to be about benzodiazepines on its own mm-hmm <affirmative>. But then when I looked into the matter, there were, there was a positive and a negative, the positive I've already spoken about which was that they carried out this research into the complaints that had been given to them under the fears. Isn't that what it's called the, the
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
A E R S.
Shane Kenny:
Yes, yes. Yeah. Yeah. The adverse event reporting system that they have, the FDA adverse mm-hmm <affirmative> event reporting system mm-hmm <affirmative> and they, they found really three central issues in relation to benzodiazepines even from just looking at 104 of these cases, one that the, there was a long term injury being reported that people suffered from, and not only from for weeks and months, but years as well, mm-hmm <affirmative> <affirmative>. They also refer to the fact that people were what getting what they called a physical dependency on, on benzodiazepines and having severe side effects as a result of that, when they withdrew from benzodiazepines and then of course they also discovered, it seemed for the first time that people could have seizures from benzodiazepines, particularly if they stopped abruptly mm-hmm <affirmative> and they, they wanted to warn against that. So you know, they were good things. They they'd looked into the complaints. They'd said, oh, there's evidence of long-term harm here that people can suffer very bad withdrawal effects and become dependent on these drugs. I want to go into the dependency aspect of this in a moment mm-hmm <affirmative> and of course, that there could be seizures, but they, they labeled the whole thing about what they were, they were seeking as they wanted a warning, a black box warning about abuse and misuse.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
They missed the point. So,
Shane Kenny:
Yeah, well, it's almost as if they deliberately missed the point I'm, I'm reluctant to say that. But I mean, it, it, it appears so often in, in their literature about benzodiazepines that, you know, they have this focus on on you know, abuse and misuse. I mean, you know, abuse is a totally separate thing, going to their doctors and, and having a therapeutic prescription for for benzodiazepines as a result of visiting their doctor about some complain or other. But I mean, what, what the FDA is doing is opening the door all the time to consider anybody who has a problem with benzodiazepines has abused the drug,
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
And they treat the patients who come to them and say, I think I'm developing more anxiety on therapeutic doses. And the doctors sometimes interprets that wrongly to the patient's drug seeking the patient wants more drugs. They're blamed the patients are blamed when they develop a problem that won't go away. I think the patient, the doctors feel inadequate if they can't fix the problem, if they don't understand the problem, and then they wanna get rid of the patient or label the patient as either drug seeking or crazy. It's it's really said there's a lot of patient shaming. I think you wrote that in your article, in Robert Whitaker's, "Mad in America."
Shane Kenny:
Yes. Yes. Well now patient shaming is a terrible thing. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and for a health agency like the FDA and to expose itself to that kind of criticism, I think is stupid on their part. Or it, it may be that there's another, and a more malign reason for it, you know? Sure. Let me have it. Yeah. Well first of all, in relation to the black box warning, they were asked in 2010 by a citizen's petition which, which is open to people to do to the FDA a petition signed by 7,000 people. I understand. And Heather Ashton's name professor Heather, Ashton, probably the greatest expert on benzodiazepines in the world was right at the top of that. She wanted black box warning warnings about all the things that we've been talking about here, long term harm, long term injury you know, the fact that people can get very, very serious side effects.
Mm-hmm, <affirmative> some of which I've, I've listed there, there are dozens more. Yes. and, and people who are suffering really badly from benzodiazepines, the one in three you know, will suffer maybe 12-15 of these different symptoms. You know, it's not just one, there will be a whole plethora of, of of symptoms that they, they suffer. And of course there are people who have had seizures which could kill them, thankfully, my seizures. And, and I've had four in total mm-hmm <affirmative> because of benzodiazepines, they haven't killed me and I didn't kill myself because I got very good advice to go back on the drug rather than you know, continue to try and fight it in my first attempt to stop benzodiazepines. So, I mean, there are people who have stood by all the time.
They refused everything in that petition that citizen's petition in 2015, but not only that for decades, they have been refusing to even act on these hundreds of thousands of complaints that were being made to the FDA about Benzodiazepines. And of course they have refused to limit the use of them to two to four weeks now, even the drug companies in Ireland and Britain, as far as I know, and I think throughout Europe are, are now all used putting that in their information that a strict limit to two to four weeks. And you know, if you're, you're, you're on long term prescription of benzodiazepines, anything over four weeks is long term with benzodiazepines and you're in danger
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
Totally. Now on the black box warning, did the FDA recommend how to taper? Did they give any guidance on what a long slow taper means? Cause I don't think I saw
Shane Kenny:
That. No, no, no. They hedge on that. They want doctors to, to make up their own minds about what the patient can endure.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
That's scary now,
Shane Kenny:
You know, it is scary. And I think the advice should be there that it should, they, they should be willing to take a very long time mm-hmm <affirmative> and they should also this is the patients and the doctors and I'm talking about years, not not you know, six months, which I tried first of all on the second occasion it went from I suppose it went for double that anyway a year. And then I did have assistance from other drugs. And at that stage, I had been two months in the national neurology hospital in London, one of the famous neurology hospitals in the world and they'd they'd looked at all the neurological symptoms that I had and they prescribed medications. I mean, the two that they used with me were Lyrica and and amytriptyline
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
Were they, were they helpful?
Shane Kenny:
No, not really. The, the amytriptyline was just a waste of time. Yeah. but the Lyrica, yes. In the sense that it did take an edge off pain, but only a vague edge. I mean, it, it made it bearable or I think it, it, it, it provided a crutch to lean on,
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
And if you were going to make changes to the FDA warning, if you were writing it, what would you put in, in big capital letters and what would you advise doctors to tell their patients? You know, somebody's coming to you saying doc, I can't sleep, I have panic attacks, I have anxiety. what kind of clear message would you like to deliver?
Shane Kenny:
Well the clearest message I can give is that the black box warning should have nothing about abuse and misuse on it. It should be aimed at protecting the the people who are going to get therapeutic prescriptions of the drugs. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> the black box box warning should say something like do not take for more than two to four weeks, risk of serious long term and disabling injury. And on the other side, it should say, do not stop abruptly... risk of seizure and death
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
And who in their right mind would take it? If the doctors told them, this is what I have to tell you, this is an informed consent. Exactly. who would take that medication
Shane Kenny:
Nobody, nobody.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
I, I certainly wouldn't.
Shane Kenny:
I think there's very little doubt that a lot of people would find another way to get out of their anxiety or deal with their insomnia. Some people who would take them would definitely not go beyond the two to four weeks, you know if it was, you know, put up in highlights that if you go over four weeks, you could get a serious long term disabling injury and further details of that. They include a section which is called protracted withdrawal syndrome way down, of course, in the literature about drug and in some they in in the Ativan case, it says, in some cases benzoin users have developed protracted withdrawal symptoms with symptoms lasting weeks to more than 12 months.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
Weeks to years and maybe never and maybe permanent
Shane Kenny:
And, and, and there's no research to show whether or these symptoms will end. The other thing, of course, the FDA should be absolutely pressing the drug companies to do is to carry out that research. There were lamenting the fact that there's no epidemiological study of benzodiazepines, they should demand it, that the drug companies do that. And in fact, you recall Patricia in, in my documentary, " benzodiazepines, medical disaster," Dr. Malcolm Lader put it up to Roche that they should out of past profits. And of course, Valium was the biggest selling drug in the world.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
Oh, billion dollar industry.
Shane Kenny:
Yep. They made a fortune out. They did, he said out of past profits, they should now consider their position and fund some research into, into, into the effects, the long term effects of benzodiazepines, which of course too, you'll have seen I got the British medical association to sign up to the, to a statement saying that they not enough is known about the long term effects of these drugs. And, and the, the problem with psychoactive drugs is that, you know, they really don't know very much about what the drug is doing on, on to the whole brain. They know maybe what it's doing with receptors or some pinpointed areas, the way benzos, bind to the benzodiazepine receptor. Yes. We have the benzodiazepine receptors in our brains. and what that does in relation to the, the production of these these receptors and, you know, they all down regulate when benzodiazepines come in... Heather Ashton speculated that it's as a result of that, that the central nervous system functioning is damaged by...when the drug is taken away, the brain doesn't recover its production of the right kind of processes which have been managed effectively by the benzodiazepines when they're there.
And when they're taken away the brain's normal functioning does not return.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
And this is 1980s and 1990s that Heather Ashton gave it to them on a silver platter, according to your documentary. I heard it in her own words. She said, I have a clinic in new castle with 300 people on long term benzo prescriptions. And I have 300 of their family members, not on benzodiazepines that can serve as a, the control group. Why don't you take my people? And you can investigate the long term effects of benzodiazepines. Dr. Malcolm Lader said, "Hey, alcohol hurts the GABA receptors in the brain. And so do benzodiazepines probably. I think he had some brain scans showing abnormalities of his patients on long term benzodiazepines. And he suggested as you said you know, further research into long term harm and these proposals by Dr. Ashton and Dr. Later since the 1980s and nineties were totally disregarded rejected, ignored. This is enraging. Yes.
Shane Kenny:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It, it it's, it's really, oh it it's shocking to contemplate you know, what suffering might have been avoided and lives saved if the welcome trust and the, the British medical council had listened to the warnings by professor later. And and professor Ashton I, I mean, it, it is just unbelievable that they couldn't treat this problem as serious. And I, you know, again, it draws in this possibility that people are defending positions that they have been maintaining for you know, decades. Some of the people's hands may be dirty, you know, they'd prescribed benzodiazepines themselves, and they'd had patients, you know, people sitting on boards and all the rest of it. And they had people coming in and they said, oh, no, no, it's all in your hedge. Or, you know, you're imagining this I mean, people were, I no wonder some people must have committed suicide because they, they found that they couldn't even get through to the doctor, you know, to, to understand what a horror, what a nightmare of suffering the, they were going through. It is frightening. And as you say, it's enraging.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
Yes, it is. And I think shame the worst thing, I, I, I'm glad you said frightening. The worst thing that I've ever seen as a psychiatrist is unwitnessed invalidated suffering. So the whole time you're telling us your story, you're telling us the story of a man who's misdiagnosed. The doctor doesn't even know that Valium could harm you. He doesn't understand why you had a seizure. You're lying in bed scared to push the call button for fear that they load up more benzos. They, they don't understand. So you're in this all by yourself. You're becoming your own best expert because the medical community doesn't acknowledge your pain. So you're all alone in this. And, and you feel like you're losing your mind now, we're, we're almost out of time, we've got about one minute left, any closing thoughts?
Shane Kenny:
Well I think we've we've covered the the story as well as we can for the moment. But, but that is true. You know, people are still looking the other way. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and I, I wonder if the campaigners are going to have to have different tactics, you know, because the it's all been carried out in a very gentleman fashion for the most extent you know, there's the world Benzodiazepine awareness day every year, mm-hmm <affirmative> you know, some events are staged for that. I, I, I think more direct action may be necessary to, you know, beat on the doors of these people and say, what are you at? You know, I mean, where is your head been for the last 50 years? And, and, you know, for instance Leo Sternbach and I don't blame him, you know, he's a, he was a scientist, but he's the man who who, who, who discovered the benzodiazepines, which led to Librium and Valium and all the rest of them.
He, he, he's now in some museum, you know, there's a museum of, of industry success where he's, he, he he's being celebrated because of the financial reward to the makers of of Valium and to the fact that this drug became such so widely used and so widely prescribed, I mean, that's an insult to, yes, it is those people who ha ha ha have been really seriously injured and harmed their lives ruined by, by, by these drugs. And these I ha hasten to had again and again, the, these are the patients who were prescribed the drugs by their doctors and they took them as prescribed and they never had informed consent. They never knew what the dangers were of, of taking these drugs. The other thing as a final thought which I'd like to add to this is that, you know, the language around which these drugs, the, the language around these drugs needs a bit of review as well.
for instance, the, the FDA does about people forming a dependency of a physical dependency. What actually happened to them is that they have a physical damage done to their central nervous system. Yes. and that is causing the myriad of all these side effects that I've been managing to, to tell you about. There are many more anybody who's wants to know about the, the, the, the symptoms read, Heather Ashton's work, they'll find it all there. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and you know, we shouldn't be using campaigners, shouldn't be using this kind of language either, you know, dependency, addiction, addiction addiction has a terrible stigma in, in the public mind, you know I wonder if people who suffer from fibromyalgia, which is very similar to the side effects of benzodiazepines have been taking benzodiazepines and are, are suffering side effects of benzodiazepines. Nobody has done a study of that.... it's egregious and deserves it.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
I can't thank you enough for coming today and telling us your story. I will never forget the picture in my head of the man in the hospital bed, having had a seizure and afraid to push the call bell button, because the doctors didn't know how to treat him, or they were gonna do more harm. This is a problem indeed of overprescribing of medical ignorance turning the other way. It is useless unnecessary suffering of masses of people that is caused by physician prescribing. So thank you very much for your thoughts for your insights, and thank you again for being a heroic, strong, bold, brave voice advocating for judicious prescribing and standing up for all the people across the, the world that have been harmed by benzodiazepines.
Shane Kenny:
Well, thanks for your kind words. Patricia <laugh>. Yeah, I'm not so sure a hero is the word but survivor
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
That's heroic in my eyes. If you can survive the world of we're prescribing and, and survive benzodiazepines you're heroic in my eyes. So thank you so much, sir.
Shane Kenny:
Okay. Well, thank you very much for, for you know, talking to me about the subject. It deserves a lot of airing.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
My pleasure. This is recovery a hero's journey, and I'm your host, Dr. Patricia Halligan. Thank you for joining us today.
Shane Kenny Bio:
Shane Kenny is a broadcaster and a journalist who worked for 30 years as a frontline presenter and editor for RTE, the Irish national broadcaster.
In 1989, he won the Irish national media award for Supreme contribution to Irish journalism. During the years, 1994 to 1997, he served as press secretary for the Irish government before returning to RTE. In 2003, he established his own independent media and production and training. From 2005 to 2011, he was also director of public affairs and member of the executive board of Dublin city university.
The last three years, unable to work because of serious illness caused by being treated with Valium, Shane started working on his unique documentary, "the benzodiazepine medical disaster" in 2014, while still very ill and continues to suffer from the disease caused by the drug to this day.
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