The tsunami was insomnia, and the nuclear meltdown was the prescription.” “The first was having a child with Down syndrome. In hindsight, Bond said, she calls it something else: Her own personal Fukushima, a reference to the Japanese nuclear reactor damaged in a natural disaster in 2011. I’m going to give you a sedative, it’s totally safe.”īond said she remembers thinking, “Oh, it’s all solved, like he knows exactly what’s happening.” “We need to get you to sleep,” Bond quoted Dr. Amazing in the book - prescribed her Ativan. The problems persisted, she said, and her doctor - whom she calls Dr. Bond quit Ambien cold turkey, she said, because she wasn’t told it was unwise to do that. “So, when the drug is pulled out really quick, the are disabled for a period of time,” she said. Ambien is not a benzodiazepine, Bond noted, but it halts the normal function of neurotransmitters in the brain. The first prescription, she said, was for Ambien, a sedative used to treat insomnia. The DEA says the street names for this class of drugs are “benzos” or “downers.” Some of the brand names may be more familiar: Valium, Xanax, Librium, Halcion, Ativan and Klonopin, among others.īond said she was relieved when her doctor prescribed two drugs when she had severe insomnia while pregnant with her second child. Drug Enforcement Administration, are “depressants that produce sedation and hypnosis, relieve anxiety and muscle spasms, and reduce seizures.” Her own private Fukushimaīenzodiazepines, according to the U.S. (Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Melissa Bond, a Utah journalist and poet photographed in her home on Wednesday, May 31, 2022, recounts her multi-year struggle with benzodiazepine dependence in her book 'Blood Orange Night,' to be released June 14, 2022. Writing her book, “ Blood Orange Night: My Journey to the Edge of Madness” (to be released Tuesday, June 14), was a way, she said, of informing a larger audience of people about the side effects of benzodiazepines - which Bond called the next big drug epidemic of which people are not aware. “For me, personally, it was a way of taking this really traumatic experience and stitching it into a new kind of story.” “Art has a way of taking pain and transforming it,” Bond said. They urged her to keep going, she said, because they had lost a brother, or their mother was disabled, and Bond’s story made the topic concrete for them. But as she was blogging about her experiences with dependency on benzodiazepine drugs, she said she received hundreds of responses from people. Melissa Bond laughs when she says something that’s odd to hear from an author doing publicity for her new book: “This is not the book I ever wanted to write.”īond’s plan, the Salt Lake City poet and editor said, was to write about raising a child with Down syndrome and autism.

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