Sorry for your problems. Ativan is a Benzo and all Benzos cause depression while taking them and more as you cut back. Just as all of the anticholesterol drugs cause depression( this was in the Lancet Journal of medicine in 2018 and that cholesterol had nothing to do with heart attacks. Wonder if anydoctor read that.).About a third or more of all prescription drugs are made with fluoride( that stuff they put in toothpaste) and it interferes with and prevents iodine from being absorbed so messes with your thyroid, besides the fact that fluoride is more poisonous than lead but slightly less than arsenic. I am sorry to tell you that the only help for Benzo withdrawal is slow withdrawal and then time to heal. The Ashton paper on benzo written by a professor Ashton in Great Britain in the 1980's or 1990's has the most information. The AMA refuses to say that prolonged Benzo withdrawal syndrome is real but you can get a lot of info from wickepedia on it. Some advice, do not drink any beverages with caffeine, no alcohol, no NSaids which means no prescription arthritis medication. Do not think that marijuana will help, it won't and might make you manic and out of our head for a few hours or a day and a half as it did my husband. The Benzos mess with the Gabba receptors and so do a lot of things that is why no alcohol etc. Opiod pain medications supposedly affect the my site, so are suppose to be ok. I doubt that. My husband began taking more opiod in Jan and FEBRUARY into early March and his withdrawal symptoms, which are many, have gotten a lot worse. There is no help from the medical people. My husband is going to a pain clinic because of all the pain that he has since weaning off of Xanax but the doctor told him that if it was really the Xanax, he should go back on it. His own doctor gave him Klonopin, another Benzo, which he mistakenly took one at two different times and it might have prolonged it more. It is like telling an alcoholic that he should stop hard liquor but go ahead and drink wine. The stupidity that you are faced with in a physician's office is mind boggling. You can find a lot of people on utube talking about their withdrawal from Benzo experience and it can be awful. Just make sure that you have the support of at least one person or more if possible because you will have suicide thoughts which you should NOT act on. It will pass with time. One woman had terrible pain in her teeth, which my husband has, and so she had her teeth pulled. It did not help her and when she eventually got over all the withdrawal symptoms, she regretted pulling her teeth. Good luck and pray a lot.