As coronavirus health concerns, social isolation and job-loss stress take a toll, people turn to anti-anxiety medications and sleep aids. 'It can very quickly become a habit.'
By Andrea Petersen Close Andrea Petersen May 25, 2020 9:00 am ET Prescriptions for anti-anxiety medications and sleep aids have risen during the pandemic, prompting doctors to warn about the possibility of long-term addiction and abuse of the drugs.
“ ‘If you’ve lost your job, if you’re worried if you’ll have enough food for your kids, that will keep you up at night.’ ” “This kind of chronic stress brings about, for all those people who have never had anxiety before, it sort of overwhelms them,” says Charles B. Nemeroff, professor and chair of the department of psychiatry at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin and president-elect of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. “If you’ve lost your job, if you’re worried if you’ll have enough food for your kids, that will keep you up at night.
Because benzodiazepines can reduce the body’s drive to breathe, overdoses can be deadly. That is especially true when they are combined with alcohol and opioids. Overdose deaths involving benzodiazepines more than quadrupled between 1999 and 2013, according to a study published in 2016 in the American Journal of Public Health.
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