Hi [...]
I feel like we already had a conversation about your psychiatrist tapering much too fast, and I think you recognise that. The fact that you’re agitated before your next dose says you are experiencing interdose withdrawals, so I think that’s something you need to remedy. You are only 2 days post reduction, but one of my main concerns (if I’m correct about your thinking) is that you seem to be heading towards removing doses until you’re left with only one dose, and this is not the way to taper because of the short half life of Ativan. You will end up having severe interdose withdrawals. The idea is to maintain all your doses as best you can, and simply taper a certain percentage of each dose away whilst maintaining all dosing times. You may need to split your doses into 3 or 4 doses a day and taper a small amount from each until all daily doses are much lower. If you are only dosing .25 twice a day, you may instead need to dose .166 three times per day or .125 four times per day. It can take some time to adjust to splitting and spreading your doses out, so you would have to allow yourself that time to adjust. The end goal being to avoid continuous interdose withdrawals so you feel more comfortable and balanced throughout the day. Then you would taper more slowly than you have been, as symptoms tend to become much more challenging the lower your dose, especially if you’re tapering too fast, as your brain doesn’t have time to adjust to the large reductions in dose. We can talk about this more if you like. You may have questions about how to taper smaller amounts and the various methods and potential options at your disposal.
