Author: Caboose128
Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 2:10 am
I feel ya, TC, trust me I feel ya. I also suffer from intense anxiety and depression, and it seems like subs actually made these a lot worse for me. I’m in your same boat. It seems nigh impossible to start weaning down when feeling like this. Supposedly you’re supposed to feel "normal" while on subs. We’re already feeling bad, and purposely making ourselves feeling even worse, day after day, month after month, seems really hard.
I dont have any great advice as I’m going through this as well. Just hang in there, you will get off of this and your life will improve after you do so, granted you stay clean and sober and give your brain and neurotransmitters time to heal. Keep posting in this forum as your bound to eventually run into someone who’s been in your same situation and they can tell you how they got through it.
Also, maybe try out Clonidine for the anxiety. It also helps with withdrawals too! Most sub doctors prescribe this on the side towards the end stages, however mine put me on and i’m still at 4mg. It helps to lower your blood pressure, which in turn lowers your heart rate making you less anxious.
Oh and on the topic of weaning and jumping off, my advice (though I havent test it yet, just basing this off reading tons of posts) is to get down as low as you can go, as slow as possible. I figured out that I can cut the strips and the Subutex pills down to .06mg. I have a feeling that if i slowly lower my dose down to that, staying at each dose for a period of 2 weeks or so, that’s when there will truly be no withdrawals like most doctors promise. My tentative taper schedule would be as follows: getting down to 1mg should be the easy part, then after a period of time drop down to .75, stay on that for at least 2 weeks, or as long as you deem necessary until you feel your body has been accustomed to that dose, then go to .50mg and do the same process, then .25, followed by .125, then .06, and maybe even .03 if your still feelings nervous/mild withdrawals. Oh, and also I heard it was good that once you get down to the lower levels that i just listed, to try and get into a routine of skipping days in between doses. If you can get into a pattern of taking it every other day, in theory it should make it easier. And I’m hoping that it will be possible to reduce that even further and take it once every three days after that stage.
Ehhh..got a long road ahead of us. Hang in there though!