Hi Amanda.
Thanks for moving my post to the appropriate area and thanks also to Sears for your advice 🙂
I officially started my taper in late November 2021 and completed it in the first week in June 2021. I say 'officially' as I spent some months prior to that structuring my dosage to get it to a regular amount per day. Until then I had been taking Valium on an "as required basis" which would be often 1x5mg tablet per day, sometimes nothing for a few days, and up to 6x5mg tablets per day when in "a crisis". This was discussed over many years with my treating GP and psychiatrist.
Looking back, and having read more in the past 6 months, I realise this means I would regularly take nothing then something then nothing then a lot. I'm sure this meant that along with underlying, untreated anxiety I was also regularly dealing with withdrawal symptoms before rebounding by taking more. This was not my intention and it took my wife and I many years to figure out that using Valium in this way for so long was not good. I hasten to add that I only got to this point after my treating doctors assured me this was an acceptable way to use Valium.
As a result, when I decided to get off these things I had to first get to a point of having a regular dose that I could taper from. By November last year I settled on around 7.5mg per day (3 half 5mg tablets).
The tapering schedule was agreed to with my treating psychiatrist and I mapped it all out on a spreadsheet with reductions of about 0.5mg every fortnight. I only up-dosed on 2 days (by a total of 2.5mg) and this was early on.
Incidentally, it was my GP who suggested I had to get off Valium but gave me absolutely no advice of how to do so. So much so that I first tried in August 2020 by going cold turkey. 12 days into that adventure I had massive brain zaps etc and subsequently whacked another "crisis" dose into my system when I had one of the worst panic attacks I'd ever had. Anyway, this caused my wife and I to read up on how to get off safely - the first time I came across Prof Ashton's work. And that is now, history. Except the ferocity of the post-withdrawal stuff is not what I was expecting 🙂
Cheers