Benzodiazepines are drugs that depress the central nervous system (CNS). Originally they were developed for their anticonvulsant properties; preventing seizures. Shortly after widespread synthesis they were being used at the early stages of the induction of general anesthesia because they also produce anterograde amnesia, so in addition to calming a person about to undergo a major surgical procedure and putting them on proverbial cloud nine, they are not even going to remember, much less care about, getting wheeled into a cold ass room where there are five to nine people standing over them are preparing instruments to cut them open.
Benzos basically started to replace another class of CNS depressants, barbiturates, because it is a lot harder to fatally dose someone with benzos and they are much more pharmacologically dynamic, meaning clever chemists can play around with them and come up with different variations of strengths of effects.
Enter the later half of the 20th century and the field of psychiatry (distinct from psychology) undergoes a paradigm shift in terms of treatment. The previous domination of psychoanalytic treatment (i.e. Freud) gets replaced by pharmacology and now issues like anxiety and insomnia can get fixed with prescriptions.
So run it back to the late 60s and early 70s when the Boomer generation enters adulthood and the stress of modern life inflicts a host of neuroses on the overworked breadwinners and their anxiety ridden hausfraus. Traditionally, people ameliorated these problems with alcohol abuse, but that gets sloppy real quick and takes 20 years off life expectancy, but there were alternative CNS depressants to be had from the medical establishment that came with a prescription and thus, easier to justify their use to yourself.
There is an entire generation that JP belongs to that were prescribed benzodiazepines for the treatment of anxiety and they spent decades taking them as directed, unknowingly building a dependency with little understood consequences. JP was originally prescribed a benzo for the treatment of acute anxiety related to the failing health of his wife and inadvertently embraced dependency.
JP wants off the benzo train ride, but he has a real problem. Remember that old saying that humans only use 10% of our brains? There is some truth to it, the brain acts as a hub for electrochemical signals and if there is too much signal activity going on, a seizure occurs and eventual death. JP’s benzos are anticonvulsants, they inhibit the volume of those signals being sent and received by interacting with these things called neurotransmitters. This is where benzos give you a buzz, lower your inhibitions, and halt the memory formation process, your brain isn’t able to function normally because it can’t communicate.
You consistently fuck with neurotransmitters and your brain is going to try and compensate and work around the problem; as long as the benzos are routinely introduced, this keeps your ship afloat and sailing, but if the benzos are removed from the equation and now your brain has way too much signal activity and shit goes haywire. You feel pain where there is nothing causing it, you lose control over your limbs, you get “mental blocks” and feel like you have totally forgotten how to urinate or put on your pants, you experience emotions but don’t know how to process or even understand them, you hears sounds that aren’t there, see things aren’t supposed to be, it seems impossible to carry on life like you did before.
Alcoholics experience similar effects of withdrawal (alcohol and benzos work on the same neurotransmitter), but their brains have a shorter period to readjust and alcoholics are given benzos to help control the excess neural activity. People withdrawing from benzos don’t have an alternative to help them weather the withdrawal and so have to undergo a lengthy period of weening, where they slowly work down to micro dosage before going into total abstinence.
JP decides that getting weened off benzos over the course of multiple years is simply unacceptable, he wants to grit his teeth and go cold turkey like a man. Problem is, that is pretty dangerous and no medical professional is going to help him do that. Your brain has to fix itself and you can’t speed the process up, you can’t get around this. But what if JP is placed into a coma and he can spend the entire withdrawal period in an unconscious state? Wouldn’t that be a work around? He goes to sleep one day and then wakes up some undetermined period of time later and the worst has passed. Is that possible?
No. Fucking. Way. No physician in the English speaking world would ever do this because, in addition to losing your license to practice, they’d be going to prison. You couldn’t get this approved by an ethics committee as a form of experimental research either, and you’d be professionally admonished for even submitting the proposal. It is out of the question.
There is simply no credible evidence that even hints that inducing a medical coma and maintaining it would even let the brain correct the specific issue JP is facing. There is an incredible amount of risk and almost no chance of reward. It is an incredibly stupid option to pursue.
But in Russia? Well the Slavs have a different outlook and if some rich Westerner like JP wants to come spend his money and risk his life, why should they talk him out of it? So JP goes to the motherland and gets put under. Surprise surprise, while under JP begins to suffer from various infections (being rendered immobile to the point of requiring mechanical ventilation invites this) and one passes the blood/brain barrier and starts fucking him up real good. The Slavs bring him out of the coma so they can properly treat him and it turns out, more damage was done than could have possibly been healed and the call is made not to continue with this harebrained scheme.
From this point, I think JP accepts the weening off process as being inevitable, but he suffered some kind of brain damage from an unidentified infection that required the sort of therapy you’d see for people coming off a traumatic brain injury. This really shatters his health and begins a long downward slide that he won’t be able to reverse.
