Ambien. Ambien happened.
general practitioners hand it out like candy to anybody whoās having trouble sleeping. mine sent me to a shrink because he wasnāt comfortable perpetually filling trazodone for me but he offered me Ambien
You donāt 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 youāre sensitive to it since technically itās 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, theyāll 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, itās no less nasty. Benzos at least tend to be more predictable than Ambien
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 canāt 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 weāre 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 wasnāt helping me sleep and I couldnāt remember the high what even is the point
I had a friend whose mom was prescribed Ambien. I think it was the first time Iād ever heard of it. She said she kept having experiences like waking up in bed with empty bags of flour and jars of mayonnaise, so she stopped taking it.
My ex GF had a roommate who was taking this stuff and apparently frequently woke up with empty bags of McDonaldās or Taco Bell on the bed, meaning heād literally sleepwalk to his car, go to the drive thru, order, drive back, and eat, all without remembering any of it the next day. No idea how this stuff is even legal, itās a miracle he never ended up in a car accident.
My mother actually died in a car wreck last week. Weāre almost certain it was ambien related. Luckily there was no other people or vehicles involved.
The first rule of the Loaf Clubā¦
Mild side-effect, donāt worry about it.
Somnambulism actually would explain anonās terrible sleep tho.