Jessica Mendoza

Others have agoraphobia, I guess the fear of just going out, going outside of the house and being around people.

And what happens when people tell their doctors about this?

Often, I found that, you know, it was often they would go to the doctor and describe their symptoms and the doctor would say, you sound more anxious, you probably need a higher dose.

And so many of the people we talked to were put on dose after dose, sometimes switched to another benzo, as people thought that their anxiety was just rising and they needed more medication.

And it's only after coming off the medication did they realize that as some of their symptoms got better afterwards, they realized, oh, it could have been, it was that.

So that's why many people who experience benzodiazepine withdrawal, when they stop taking the drug, they're suddenly in these states of intense agitation.

And they call it a chemical anxiety that wracks their body.

And she was hit with these brain zaps, like electric shocks, and she couldn't even shower.

She would have these hours-long panic attacks because of how the shower water felt on her skin.

She would sort of writhe in pain.

And she wrote her daughter a note because she thought she might die amid her journey to get off the drug.

Most of them had no idea, were never warned.

Whether it was primary care doctors or psychiatrists, they were not warned that there could be this potential for long-term risk.

But what seems to be the gap we're seeing now is that long term use was never studied.

And now there's these advocacy groups and things that are trying to get the word out that there's a subset of people for whom there is potential for long-term neurological damage.

So in the last probably seven, eight years, there's been more people who've experienced this banding together saying, holy crap, this is terrible, and like flobbing the FDA and raising the awareness about this to researchers.

So that's kind of where some of the data is coming from now.

Valium was very well known and heavily marketed by pharmaceutical companies.

I mean, we've all heard of the Xanax.

It's in pop culture, like, it's in Gossip Girl, it's in, you know, The White Lotus.