Has anybody successfully tapered off of lorazepam (Ativan)?

I was originally prescribed it for anxiety due to a health threat. I then began relying on it for sleep and both my gp and sleep Dr recommended getting off it. Benzodiazepines wreak havoc with your brain long term. I wanted to be off it.
I now take a very low dose of mirtazapine which has addressed my sleeping issues.

There are several threads on Ativan/lorazepam and I can’t remember! It may be the one about weaning from .5 mg.
If you can’t find it, let me know and I’ll repost here.
Full disclosure that I am NOT a medical professional and that the weaning schedule I used worked for me

@ljob I am currently working on getting myself off of 2mg of Xanax 3x/day! Thats 6 mg a day. Doctor renewed my script at .25 mg 3x/day 😳😳😳😳😳. I FREAKED OUT. I couldn't get in touch with her. I tried insurance company intervention (I've been on pill for ELEVEN YEARS!) she finally called me back - I was half crazed to go from 6 mg/day to 3/4mgday!!!! I said to her if you give me the 2 mg I can just snap off a 1/4 pc and that will be 1-3/4. No. She had to give me 1 mg and 1/4 mg. So I have to cut the 1 mg in half so I take 1-1/2 1 mg and. 1/4 mg!! So now I am taking 9 pills a day instead of 3! It would have been so easy to just keep snapping off pieces! And she would know I was cutting back because I wouldn't be renewing them once a month but maybe every 6 weeks!!! Now I am out of the .25 mg so I have to cut a small pill into 4 pieces!!! I'm already down 3/4 of a pill every day so that's maybe 4-1/2 pills a week which is great considering the length of time I was on them. A CDC brochure given to me in another group said people in meds over a year should not do more than 10% less A MONTH as it could cause seizures and/or possible death!! Aaannd she wanted to put me on another pill which I started and raised my BP to extreme heights and got me nauseous! I stopped that. Why start another pill when I don't need it, it's getting me sick, and who wants to have to go off another pill in the future????
I hope this hasn't been too confusing. 😳😳 just a nightmare for me.

@ljob per the DEC booklet, not more than decrease of 10% a month if taking over a year!!! I've been taking for 11 years 😳😳😮 and doing my best to work with what she's given me. She will be the death of me. 😫🥺

Is it possible to have withdrawal after using .25-.5 mg 4-5 times a week for sleep for a month or so? I can't tell if what's happening to me now is a symptom of the ativan or HRT. My psychiatrist said the dosage is so low to start and the time frame wasn't long I shouldn't have a problem stopping it, but I'm not so sure about that. How do you even taper off .25mg???

Thanks for the positive encouragement. Can you please re-share that taper schedule here, and given that the lowest available dose of Ativan/Lorazepam is .5mg, how did you get it into very very small doses? Thanks.

It stopped working (brought on depression, insomnia, and far worse anxiety than that originally prescribed for, also I can see some cognitive impact, and I feel 'crappy' all the time). After some pretty thorough research from trusted pharmacological sources, I also have a good understanding now what this drug does to the body and brain. Unfortunately neither my GP nor psychiatrist gave me any of this information, and 'weren't concerned' with continuing to take this for the foreseeable future, and continuing to up the dose (I am no longer seeing either of those practitioners).

I just quit cold turkey without telling my psychiatrist. Not a great idea but it worked for me. 0.5 of klonopin in the morning and 1 mg at 4:00 pm. Both are benzodiazepines and when I quit one benzodiazepine he gave me another so I’m still on it and I hear it’s very difficult to quit klonopin.
I found that out the hard
way. I tried unsuccessfully to get off the klonopin. It was a nightmare!

I'm tapering off Klonopin now. I have done a very slow taper and the first part from 1-1.5mg at bedtime for over 10 years and Xanax prior to that too .5mg was very easy. We did reductions to 1mg, .75, .5 and and .375mg every 6-8 weeks. The last reduction to .25mg was the hardest and I had a lot of irritability and sleepless nights. I occasionally went back to .375mg to help with sleep but only 1-2x per week. My psychiatrist prescribed 90 days of the .125 disintegrating tablets as the last part of the taper and discharged me. His practice does not treat geriatrics (over age 65) and that is why he discharged me. He does not see a problem in continuing the taper. I was supposed to decrease to those last week, but I have not been successful in sleeping at that dose. He prescribed Vistoril (an antihistamine) for sleep but it does not work. So I'm stuck at .25mg and working on meditation and an Emotional Freedom Technique (tapping) for sleep. Those will eventually run out so I will try the .125mg again and hope my brain eventually adjusts. This is a hard process but I am determined to do it as I know my brain will heal in time. I just have to work out a new relationship with sleep as it has always been an issue for me.

Here is my weaning schedule and full disclosure: not a medical professional. I used a pill cutter to cut pills in half, then quarters. Good luck!