Struggling to come off antidepressants and tranquillisers, and battling withdrawal effects, writer Miranda Levy, 51, thought she was very much alone – until she stumbled on a report officially acknowledging a pill-addiction crisis, and started to find other women with similar stories Prescription-pill addiction is one of the biggest health issues of the day

Eight weeks after I stopped being able to sleep, I had an appointment with an NHS psychiatrist. It was autumn 2010, and the sleeping tablets and antidepressants prescribed by my GP hadn’t worked. I was so exhausted I could barely speak. The consultant was compassionate, but just to make sure, I begged him to prescribe me something that would ‘buy’ me some rest. I was practically hugging him round the knees.

He listened with sympathy to the story of how I’d discovered my husband wanted to call time on our marriage, and then my distress had plunged me headlong into disabling insomnia. He agreed that I needed a bit of extra help, so ‘upped’ my antidepressant and prescribed me a tranquilliser called clonazepam – part of the benzodiazepine drug family, aka ‘benzos’.

The clonazepam initially bought me some snatched periods of sleep, and a pleasant fuzziness in the hours in between. But this relief didn’t last. At my first follow-up, the consultant increased the prescription. I think he then upped it again over the phone (my memories of that time are a bit blurry). Then I had the knotty problem of needing and wanting more, but also knowing that Benzos Are Bad, and I should probably come off them.