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Desperate for a Fix: My Story of Pharmaceutical Misadventure

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Abstract

This chapter describes how a bad reaction to a sinus operation in 1990 led to a series of inappropriate diagnoses and drug treatments. Over the next 20 years, Montagu was given an array of psychiatric drugs which caused a range of negative effects, for which more unwarranted drugs were prescribed. Montagu describes how his career as an entrepreneur was shattered by his doctor’s misguided advice to detox rapidly from a benzodiazepine and the debilitating withdrawal symptoms which still continue several years after coming off. Montagu subsequently discovered a large online community of fellow sufferers providing each other with peer support, often in the face of denial by their doctors and psychiatrists. Montagu then details his experience as he pursued a lawsuit against one of his prescribing doctors, demonstrating how psychiatrists sometimes refuse to accept that their drugs can cause harm and instead seek to blame the patient instead.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    All my doctors’ names have been changed to protect their identities.

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Montagu, L. (2017). Desperate for a Fix: My Story of Pharmaceutical Misadventure. In: Davies, J. (eds) The Sedated Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44911-1_5

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