Janine and others - I'm desperate for any feedback. I posted before about my son having seizure-type activity. I realize now he may have been having a reaction to the Ativan he's been on for over a year. In January, he kept getting worse and worse. The doctor kept telling us he could take between 2 to 8 mg a day of Ativan if it was stopping the seizures. I realize now it was probably making them worse, and my son (25 yrs old) was becoming more and more confused as the seizures got worse, until in April, he took an overdose, saying he didn't think it was ever going to get better. This is someone who has always had a pretty positive outlook despite dealing with hyperadrenergic POTS for 7 years. Of course, I had to take him to emergency--they would not admit him to the psych/med unit, but only to the psych hospital, where they cut him off of the Ativan cold turkey. He stopped sleeping, and 4 days later was brought back to emergency because of bad convulsions, but sent back. The psychiatrist told me he thought POTS was a psychosomatic illness, and my son has Munchausen's. After frantically trying to get someone to listen and giving them information, trying to get them to call Dr. Grubb, etc. they finally released him to my care on April 27th after a week in the hospital. With family's help, we managed to get him through another week of virtually no sleep (a few minutes a day). Then the nightmares and real withdrawel started. Numb feet hands, tongue, convulsions less in number but more in intensity (I thought he would jump out a window). After speaking to a detox dr. (his primary has bought into the psychiatrist now), I managed to talk his dr into allowing an 8-day taper on phenobarbitol. My son was doing really well at the beginning of the taper (better than I'd seem him in a year) but as it lessoned and stopped, got worse again. The dr agreed to a continuing script of pheno for another few weeks (of 30 to 60 mg a day), but my son has on and off periods of eye and face twitching, jerks, and gets extremely paranoid sometimes. The detox dr told me last Thursday (but said he really shouldn't be talking to me after this- my son is not his patient) that paranoia could still indeed be from the withdrawel but after a few more weeks if he isn't better, maybe it is something more. We are scheduled to see Dr. Grubb on June 9th thankfully after more than a year, but my big fear is that if this is going to take some time for my son to get back to normal, that this will be mistakenly seen as a mental illness, and he will be put on psych drugs that will do him more harm than good. He is still under orders to see a psychiatrist in order for him to be released to my care. They wanted to put him on Depakote and Abilify, an antipsychotic. Before he was put on the Ativan a year ago, he had had two bad med reactions to Adderall (a psychotic reaction that went awy as soon as he was taken off), and seizure type reaction a month later when his beta-blocker was mistakenly doubled by the pharmacy, and he stopped sleeping and was put in the hospital where he was put on the Ativan. Any feedback any of you might have would be very much appreciated. Thanks, --very scared.