First up is a
similarly horrifying story from 2000 - it sounded like the same thing that happened in our household Friday and Sunday nights!
I was prescribed Ambien for at least two years and experienced profound Amnesia with each dose- not every night , but a lot. One day, after a period of increasing depression, I attempted suicide (very nearly successful). I had no plans to do this and as it was happening, I felt like I was watching a movie. I was completely dissociated from what was going on. It was very disturbing for me and my family, so we looked it up in the Physicians Desk Reference (PDR). It outlined that Ambien should be given for a short period of time (7-10 days) and the patient watched carefully. Side effects listed included: Deepening depression, depersonalization, and suicidal tendencies, (among others). I experienced all of these side effects and one or two of the others that escape me right now.
Poor guy. Nobody answered. I hope he stopped taking ambien and lived to sleep another night.
And then I found an Ambien Zombie messageboard at Topix.net having to do with this year old story called,
How Many Ambien Patients Get Up at Night and Remember Nothing?
The comments start out fairly tame, cooking or cleaning all night while sleepwalking, having great sex in new positions and not remembering. But by the last page of testimony, many deadly serious accounts have been told, such as no memory of driving cars or eating meals, and sudden, unexplained suicides by usually content people.
"My mom has commited suicide at 59 years old. She was a loving mother and devoted grandmother to my twins. she lived and breathed them. We spoke 4 to 5 times a day and called to tell my children goodnight each night. After 1 day on this drug, the calls stopped, she became paranoid and said we were laughing behind her back. After a weekend get a way with the whole family, 10 minutes from the time she got back home she shot herself in the head. This is a woman that had no mental illnesses, lived life to the fullest, shopped for her grandchildren DAILY! Lived her whole life in happiness and 8 pills later my mom is dead."
My Husband's Ambien side effects Experience:
Over the past year, he had been getting more depressed over the Iraq War and the lying idiots in the White House; plus his insomnia and sleep anxiety was worse. He takes everything to try and fall asleep: kava kava, Valerian, chamomile tea, melatonin, blue over the counter tabs; the VA prescribed him some kind of old-fashioned sleeping spills, but he didn't like or use them much. He reads, meditates, and listens to soothing music.
About a year ago, he started taking Ambien, the most popular and prescribed sleep medication, and it helped him get to sleep at first, and sleep until morning. He got the prescription through my health insurance, not the VA, and we didn't think much of it, because he seemed to like it. He took one pill at night, probably for two to three weeks at a time, and went for periods of a week or two without using it or refilling it frequently. So it seemed like he was using it safely.
Looking back, I can see he was getting more prone to depression, which was unusual, because he had been doing okay with his PTSD for several years, and we had a really good life together. But he'd occasionally get depressed and go on crying jags, throwing himself onto the ground in despair, injuring himself. I didn't suspect Ambien side effects might be contributing to his emotional pain, even though those are some of the negative Ambien side effects listed: depression, depersonalization, suicidal tendencies. He was seeing a therapist - social worker through the VA, and she was helping him with the depression and other issues, so I thought he was working through it.
Paranoia's much too high: He started getting extremely paranoid and delusional early last week, worried somebody had shot out the neighbors' windows and poisoned their dog's water. It didn't happen, and I had to keep reminding him that it didn't happen. Tuesday he had spilled a little anti-freeze on the ground while repairing his truck radiator, and he thought our dog almost drank it, and he really over-reacted. No harm was done; the spill was cleaned up 100%, all anti-freeze stored in closed containers and transported to the dump center for proper disposal by Wednesday.
But he began to get more and more paranoid about the ground water, then paranoid about the town's water system being contaminated by his anti freeze.... Until by Friday morning he began imagining / hallucinating that he had poisoned our town's water system with anti-freeze and all the babies were killed. And he believed that he had confessed his crime to the police, and implicated his Vet buddy. He believed the police were coming to arrest him over the anti-freeze murders, and that I would be taken prisoner and we'd all be tortured. Crazy Talk, eh? To prove it, nobody poured any anti freeze in the well system, and nobody came to arrest him over it. In fact, the water system comes from a well that is fed by an aquifer, and has little to due with ground water or run-off near our home. He imagined and hallucinated all of it and got more and more paranoid. He started thinking suicide was the answer to saving us from being tortured (although he only said this in tiny bits and pieces over the weekend, I'm just now sorting it all out, trying to get the doctors to listen to me).
At first we thought it was a PTSD flashback, because he got "the look" in his eyes of the lost soldier. Our Vietnam Vet buddy and a Vet's counselor, stayed with him for part of the first night after he had became suicidal for no apparent reason. They felt he was having some kind of PTSD episode, talking about murdering babies. By 10pm, hubby seemed well enough to leave alone with me for the night, although he was not talking and behaving like a zombie with a blank, empty stare. I thought he'd sit there, we'd talk, and he'd eventually fall asleep. But as the night wore on, I realized he was a zombie hell-bent on suicide. He paced the floor, drinking lots of water, planning ways to kill himself, lunging for weapons.
He finally fell asleep at 4:30 am after all the Ambien knocked him out. By Saturday afternoon he came out of it, although still had some paranoia. He was happy he didn't kill himself, but didn't remember anything. He slept well that night, and Sunday morning he seemed back to normal. But then he impulsively took the car out for a drive and didn't come back for 5 hours, and somebody who had seen him said he was looking and acting like a zombie! Finally he came home, fully into his zombie suicide state. I wasn't sure of its whereabouts, but sure enough he found the shotgun later that night. When I finally convinced him to put the shotgun down and I tried to carry it away, he grabbed it back and we did that scene in the movies, where two people struggle back and forth over the shotgun, in this case only one of them desiring to have his head blown off.
Pretty scary stuff went on last weekend, and I think the Ambien had something to do with it. Please be careful if you or your loved ones or co-workers are taking this medication. Lordy. Maybe some of the meta meltdowns we are seeing on the blogs are from people taking Ambien and logging on as as psychotic zombies. Sleep blogging, heh?
Lastly, Suicide attempts / tools I witnessed this past weekend, using the POLL feature (No Need to Answer, it's a really bad joke, that seemd hilarious on very little sleep. The whole suicide scene was like a bizarre movie comedy. However, I apologize for making light of a serious matter and would delete the POLL if I could):
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