Ambien. Ambien happened.
Fucking Ambien. I tried it for a week to help with my insomnia and it did not work at all. I would get a little sleepy for about 5 minutes then I was loopy as hell and very active/hyper. At about the 10-15 minute mark my memory would crap out so all the best stories I canβt even recall just what people told me the next day. Things like laying down on a skateboard and scooting around with my hands, sobbing about the small villagers in the bed that weβre going to lose their culture if the blankets got disrupted, searching the house for the blacksmith and winding up talking to my frog about his sword making. Wild stuff. I threw out the rest of the bottle after a few days because if it wasnβt helping me sleep and I couldnβt remember the high what even is the point
general practitioners hand it out like candy to anybody whoβs having trouble sleeping. mine sent me to a shrink because he wasnβt comfortable perpetually filling trazodone for me but he offered me Ambien
You donβt hear horror stories about it anymore. Who was it that almost drove off a cliff? Jack Nicholson?
what. the. fuck.
The only rationale I can think of is that trazodone has a small risk of causing mania if youβre sensitive to it since technically itβs serotonergic but what the actual fuck. Ambien is waaay more dangerous!
Yes but not often. I actually have patients request it a LOT but I rarely see it prescribed. If the patient has been on it for a while, theyβll at the very least need to taper off of it to prevent seizures iirc, but honestly even then I see most doctors preferring benzos over ambien which is wild because benzos are nasty shit (if you need 'em you need 'em, but you do not want to need them)!
Ambien works almost exactly like benzos, itβs no less nasty. Benzos at least tend to be more predictable than Ambien
