Anxiety attacks: When should you get treated?
The White Lotus
. This season saw Victoria Ratliff (played by Parker Posey) spin out of control with anti-anxiety medication, Lorazepam. Posey's incantation of the name even turned into a meme on social media. However, this representation isn't new in Hollywood. In sitcom
Grace and Frankie,
we see Grace, played by Jane Fonda, taking valium (another drug known to mitigate anxiety) when faced with unexpected situations. And in the mockumentary,
Modern Family
, Gloria portrayed by Sofia Vergara is seen taking Xanax to calm her nerves before meeting her husband's ex-wife.
While these portrayals are often humorous, one is oftentimes left wondering about the impact they could be having on viewers here. Beyond that, it also raises curiosity about when should you be really reaching out for anti-anxiety medication.
Mumbai-based psychiatrist Dr Sapna Bangar feels that the situation in India is more complex than in the West. 'There's a significant cultural barrier to openly discussing mental health and greater reliance on alternative therapies. But as awareness rises and more people recognize anxiety as a serious issue, both medication and therapy could gradually become more accessible."
To be sure, work load, family issues and lifestyle stress have made anxiety an ubiquitous problem that's affected different cohorts. A 2017 National Mental Health Survey (NHMS) found that 3.3% of India's population suffered from some form of stress or anxiety-related disorder. According to a State of Healthcare in Rural India Report, 2024, 45% of rural Indians suffer from anxiety issues.
The Youth Mind: Rising Aggression and Anger
, a report released by Sapien Labs' in January, claimed that over 50% of 13–17-year-olds in India and the US indicated that feelings of sadness, guilt and anxiety caused them serious problems in their everyday life.
'Medication isn't always the first line of treatment to treat anxiety, but it can be effective for certain people," says Sapna. According to her, seeking professional help is warranted when you are overwhelmed by worry almost every day; stops you from going to work/school or execute normal tasks; and when your social life or relationships begin to suffer.
According to Santosh Bangar, consultant psychiatrist at Gleneagles Hospitals, Mumbai, your anxiety problem is serious if you are feeling constantly tired even after adequate rest, have a fast heartbeat, and feel anxious or panicky for no reason. He, however, believes that lifestyle changes like including yoga and exercise to your daily schedule can help mitigate the problem without resorting to medication.
But what if getting on medication is unavoidable? Sapna has a checklist that can help. 'Anti-anxiety drugs, like any other medication, come with potential side effects, which can vary depending on the specific drug. So, always consult a qualified psychiatrist before starting or stopping any medication," she advises. Some of the known side effects of anxiety medicines are changes in appetite, weight and sleep patterns, where they can either cause drowsiness or insomnia. Sapna also warns against alcohol and caffeine consumption. 'Alcohol and caffeine can interfere with anxiety medications, potentially increasing side effects or making the medication less effective." Self-medication in the form of CBD (cannabidiol) oil or CBD derivatives or using someone else's medication is also a complete no.
Santosh warns against abruptly stopping medication without consulting your doctor. 'This can further worsen your condition and may lead to withdrawal symptoms or relapse," he says. Being alert to how your body is reacting to the medicine is essential. 'Communicate with your doctor if you experience worsening anxiety, depression, or other symptoms after starting the medication. Additionally, talk to your doctor about the frequency of the follow up you might need," Sapna says before prescribing a safe formula. 'Keeping a journal to record your moods and combining medication with therapy, is a great way to track, and even, expedite your progress."
Sumitra Nair is an independent journalist based in Kochi.
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Hindustan Times
2 days ago
- Hindustan Times
Stronger Than Fentanyl: A Drug You've Never Heard of Is Killing Hundreds Every Year
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At least 400 people died in the U.K. from overdoses involving nitazenes over 18 months until January of this year, according to the government. 'This is probably the biggest public health crisis for people who use drugs in the U.K. since the AIDS crisis in the 1980s,' said Vicki Markiewicz, executive director for Change Grow Live, a leading treatment provider for drugs and alcohol in the U.K. Particularly worrying, she said, is that most people take nitazenes unwittingly, as contaminants in other drugs. The U.K.'s National Crime Agency has warned that partly due to nitazenes, 'there has never been a more dangerous time to take drugs.' In the U.S., where fentanyl dominated the opioid market, nitazenes had as of last year been found in at least 4,300 drug seizures since 2019, usually in fentanyl mixtures, and have led to dozens of deaths. But reporting on the drugs is sparse and relies on self-reporting. Many overdose toxicology tests don't include nitazenes. The Drug Enforcement Administration has warned that Mexican cartels could use their existing relations with China-based suppliers to obtain nitazenes and funnel them into America. The most common street nitazenes are roughly 50 to 250 times as potent as heroin, or up to five times the strength of fentanyl. They are likely much more prevalent than official statistics suggest, due to limited testing. Authorities say official death tolls are almost certainly undercounts. On an early summer morning in 2023, police arrived at Anne Jacques's door in north Wales. Her 23-year-old son had died in his sleep in his student apartment in London, they told her. Her son, Alex Harpum, was a rising opera singer and healthy. Police found Xanax tablets in his room, and evidence on his phone that he had bought pills illegally, which Jacques said he occasionally did to sleep while on medication for his attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Yet, the coroner established the cause of death as unexplained cardiac arrest, known as sudden adult death syndrome. Jacques, not satisfied with the explanation, researched drug contaminants and requested the coroner test for nitazenes. Seven months after her son's death, police confirmed that his tablets had been contaminated with the potent opioid. 'I basically had to investigate my own son's death,' Jacques said. 'You feel like your child has been murdered.' Harpum wasn't alone. While most known overdoses affect heroin users, nitazenes have also been found in party drugs like cocaine, ketamine and ecstasy, in illegal nasal sprays and vapes, and detected in benzodiazepines like Xanax and Valium. In May, two young Londoners died after taking what authorities believe was oxycodone laced with nitazenes upon returning home from a nightclub. 'I basically had to investigate my own son's death,' says Anne Jacques. Dealers aren't trying to kill customers, but the globalized drug trade leads gangs to traffic a wider variety of increasingly potent substances, partly because smuggling gets easier as the volumes involved shrink. U.K. National Crime Agency Deputy Director Charles Yates said dealers are driven mainly by greed. 'They buy potent nitazenes cheaply and mix them with bulking agents such as caffeine and paracetamol to strengthen the product being sold and make significant profits,' he said. Nitazenes are also ravaging West Africa as a prevalent ingredient in kush, a synthetic drug that has killed thousands of people and led Sierra Leone and Liberia to declare national emergencies. 'It's an international concern. They have been detected on every continent,' said Adam Holland, an expert on synthetic opioids at the University of Bristol. 'You can produce them with different chemicals that are relatively easy to get a hold of, and you can do it in an underground laboratory. And because they're so potent, you need less for the same size of market so they're easier to smuggle.' Chinese suppliers sell nitazenes openly on online marketplaces sometimes using photos of young women as their profile picture. They list phone numbers, social-media handles and business addresses linked to China or Hong Kong. The drugs are sometimes labeled as research chemicals but also often explicitly as nitazenes. The Wall Street Journal found nearly 100 profiles on the Pakistan-based web marketplace TradeKey selling different types of nitazenes, including etonitazenes, estimated to have 15 times the potency of fentanyl. Four suppliers told a Journal reporter they could send any quantity to Europe, including the U.K., and promised they could evade customs. A spokesperson for TradeKey said the company has a 'zero-tolerance policy toward the listing or sale of any controlled substances, including synthetic opioids such as nitazenes.' It said it had added various types of nitazenes to its banned products registry and blocked hundreds of accounts seen to violate its compliance rules. On 'rare occasions,' a prohibited product may pass initial approvals and get listed, but the company worked to routinely clean the site, it said. 'We take this issue very seriously and are fully committed to ensuring our platform is not misused in any way. We also cooperate with regulatory and law enforcement bodies as needed,' the spokesperson said. Nitazenes were never approved for medical use in Europe. Developed in the 1950s, they were found in trials to cause fatal breathing problems. They were detected sporadically over the years: in a lab in Germany in 1987; in 1998 in Moscow, where they were linked to a dozen deaths; and in 2003 in Utah, where a chemist manufactured them apparently for personal use. Nitazenes appeared in drug seizures in Europe and the U.S. beginning in 2019, and began spreading quickly in Europe in 2023, their high potency leaving a trail of fatal overdoses even among seasoned drug users. In Scotland, whose population of 5.5 million has the highest overdose death rate per capita in Europe, nitazenes have been involved in 150 to 200 drug-related deaths in the past two years alone, said Austin Smith, head of policy with the Scottish Drug Forum charity. 'Imagine mixing salt in sand on a beach, it's impossible to do that evenly,' he said. Europe's medical practices have protected it from fentanyl, which first took off in the U.S. in the 1990s due to private prescriptions and aggressive marketing. However, Europe is vulnerable to opioids in ways that echo the American experience. The second big boost in fentanyl usage in the U.S. came in the 2010s, when drug cartels began adulterating the heroin supply with fentanyl. So far, nitazenes appear to be supplied by individual brokers and sellers, but Europe is rife with international drug gangs that could turn to nitazenes. 'Synthetic opioids in the U.S. have not been driven by demand, they have been driven wholesale by supply,' said Vanda Felbab-Brown, senior fellow and expert on the global opioid trade with the Brookings Institution, a think tank. 'If large criminal groups such as Albanian mafia groups, Turkish criminal groups or Italian or Mexican groups get into supplying nitazenes to Europe on a large scale, we can anticipate a massive public healthcare catastrophe.' They may be prompted to do so. Since the Afghan Taliban most recently banned in 2022 the cultivation of poppies, which supplied about 90% of the world's heroin, experts have warned that a heroin shortage could lead gangs to cut the drug with other, more dangerous substances. Nitazenes are at the top of the list. 'If the heroin supply is interrupted, that will have a knock-on effect on drug use within Europe, and on things users can turn to in the absence of heroin, such as synthetic opioids and synthetic crystal meth,' said Andrew Cunningham, expert on drug markets with the European Union Drugs Agency. The tiny nation of Estonia has firsthand experience of what that is like. When the Taliban first banned poppy cultivation in 2000, fentanyl flooded the Estonian drug market as a replacement for heroin. Drug-related deaths grew fourfold in two years, and put the Baltic country in a fentanyl grip that it was unable to shake. For a decade, from 2007 to 2017, Estonia had the highest per capita overdose death rate in Europe. And Estonia is already feeling the influx of nitazenes, which since 2023 have been involved in nearly half of all drug-induced deaths in the tiny Baltic nation. When a batch of drugs contaminated with nitazenes hits the streets, it often results in a cluster of overdoses. Late last year, about 80 people overdosed and needed medical treatment in Dublin over a weekend. In March of this year, at least 31 users overdosed over a few days in Camden, north London. One of them, Tina Harris, 41, who has been using heroin since her early teens, said she bought a £5 bag of what she thought was fentanyl from a drug dealer in Camden. 'He told me, 'be careful because it's strong.' I thought he was just chatting sh—,' she said. After smoking the drug, she passed out, and survived only because a friend administered shots of naloxone, an antidote that users carry for emergencies, until the ambulance arrived. Harris woke up in the hospital, rattling from withdrawal. Since then, she has twice saved the life of friends who mistakenly took nitazenes, by providing naloxone and CPR. She has become increasingly worried about the drug supply in London, but said her addiction is impossible to kick. 'It's a devil's trap,' she said. Write to Sune Engel Rasmussen at and Ming Li at
Time of India
25-07-2025
- Time of India
8 medications that should not be mixed with alcohol
We all have heard that alcohol should not be mixed with antibiotics. However, do you know that apart from antibiotics, there are many other medicines that do not mix with alcohol, even if you take them hours apart? Alcohol alters the effectiveness of medications while making their adverse reactions more severe. Here are eight types of medications that must never be consumed with alcohol. 1. Painkillers (Opioids and NSAIDs) You should never combine opioids with NSAIDs when taking pain medication that includes codeine, oxycodone, morphine, ibuprofen and naproxen. When opioids combine with alcohol, the breathing rate of patients decreases to dangerous levels which may result in death. Consuming NSAIDs with alcohol heightens the risk of stomach bleeding, along with ulcers. 2. Antidepressants and Anti-Anxiety Medicines SSRIs and benzodiazepines together with antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications including Zoloft, Prozac, Valium and Xanax require alcohol-free use. Their deadly combination results in severe sleepiness and dizziness, together with confusion. This further aggravates depressive episodes, and the risk of overdose increases manifold. 3. Antibiotics Metronidazole (Flagyl) and tinidazole along with isoniazid, react negatively when combined with alcohol. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Indonesia: New Container Houses (Prices May Surprise You) Container House | Search Ads Search Now Undo The combination of these substances leads to nausea, vomiting, headaches, flushing as well as heart-related problems. Avoid drinking alcohol throughout your antibiotic treatment period, (make sure you do not have it at any time during the course), and even several days after finishing the medication. 4. Blood Thinners The effectiveness of warfarin blood thinners becomes less stable or their use becomes riskier, when patients consume alcohol. These medications become less safe when alcohol consumption occurs, because it elevates the danger of bleeding complications while forming blood clots. Before taking blood thinners, you should consult with your doctor regarding alcohol consumption. 5. Antipsychotic Medications The consumption of alcohol remains prohibited for patients who take antipsychotic drugs, used to treat schizophrenia alongside Quetiapine/Seroquel. The combination of alcohol with these medications leads to severe side effects including dizziness and drowsiness, as well as concentration issues and heart-related complications and seizure risks. 6. Diabetes Medications Taking insulin or diabetes pills with alcohol consumption will lead to harmful blood sugar reductions. The inability to detect blood sugar symptoms such as dizziness or confusion due to alcohol, makes it more likely for patients to experience severe complications. 7. Seizure Medications The combination of epilepsy and seizure medications including phenytoin, gabapentin and clonazepam should never occur with alcohol consumption. Using these substances together leads to excessive sleepiness and dizziness, and abnormal behavior and higher seizure risks. 8. ADHD Medications Adderall and Ritalin along with other stimulant medications used for ADHD, interact negatively when consumed with alcohol. The combination of these substances produces heightened side effects which include dizziness and drowsiness together with heart complications and decreased concentration abilities. Why Mixing Alcohol and Medication is Risky Medicines undergo altered absorption or breakdown processes in the body due to alcohol consumption, which leads to reduced effectiveness or increased toxicity. The consumption of alcohol enhances medication side effects including drowsiness and dizziness while simultaneously inflicting severe damage to liver function and stomach health and heart systems and nervous system tissue. Certain dangerous drug interactions can even be fatal. Sources PubMed The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) WebMD Healthdirect Australia
Time of India
24-07-2025
- Time of India
Tulsi Gabbard fuels Hillary Clinton tranquilizer rumor: What's behind the viral claim?
So, tranquilizers. Also known as sedatives, chill pills, or if you're a stressed-out human temporary life rafts. These meds are designed to quiet the chaos upstairs, helping folks deal with anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, and even muscle spasms. Sounds helpful, right? Well, they can be but they're also not something you want to toss around like Tic Tacs. Enter: Hillary Clinton, tranquilizers & the political plot twist Now, let's talk about the wild twist no one saw coming. On July 23, 2025, during a White House press briefing that already had eyebrows raised, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard dropped a bombshell: newly declassified documents from the House Intelligence Committee claimed that Russian intel had files suggesting Hillary Clinton was on a daily regimen of 'heavy tranquilizers.' Yes, you read that right. Gabbard alleged that these files were kept quiet during the 2016 election by the Obama administration to protect Clinton's campaign and were later used to shift the narrative in Trump's favor. She even quoted leaked DNC emails referring to Hillary's so-called 'psycho-emotional problems,' mood swings, and fits of anger. Now whether this is fact, fiction, or something in between is still being debated. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like 15 most beautiful women in the world Undo Critics say it's a desperate rehash of an old smear campaign. Supporters say it raises legitimate concerns. Either way, tranquilizers are now trending for all the wrong reasons. Why do people even take tranquilizers? Picture your brain like a web browser with 37 tabs open and one playing music you can't find. Tranquilizers hit the 'force quit' button. For people battling intense anxiety, spiraling thoughts, or mental health issues like mania, these meds can offer serious relief. We're mostly talking about benzodiazepines here, think Xanax (alprazolam), Valium (diazepam), and Ativan (lorazepam). They're not miracle workers, but they can take the edge off when your brain is in full stress mode. But here's the catch: they're not a long-term fix. You can build tolerance fast, and before you know it, you're relying on pills just to feel normal. Withdrawal? Nasty. Memory issues? Common. And if you mix them with alcohol or other meds? You're playing with fire. What these meds actually do to you Let's be real: if Clinton was taking tranquilizers (and that's still a big if), she wouldn't be the first high-profile figure managing stress or anxiety with medication. But these aren't harmless little helpers. Side effects can hit hard like drowsiness, memory fog, sluggish thinking, and sometimes feeling like a walking emotional pancake. Long-term use? Even messier. The body can get used to them, so the calming effect wears off unless you up the dose which is how dependence creeps in. Suddenly quitting can spark everything from tremors and insomnia to full-blown panic. And if someone's using them while juggling a packed schedule, media scrutiny, and political pressure? That's one heck of a tightrope. The internet loves a good health conspiracy, especially when it involves politicians looking a little too chill (or zonked out) on camera. From "doped-up debate performances" to "secret meds to keep them upright," users go wild with speculation. A weird cough? Must be serious. A sleepy stare? Definitely drugged. Throw in blurry videos, medical jargon, and voilà—viral chaos. It's part obsession, part paranoia, and part meme-fest. And honestly, with 24/7 coverage and a million eyes online, even a yawn can spark a theory. Are they tired... or tranquilized? The internet will always have thoughts.
