‘I didn’t look like a typical drug addict. But prescription pills took over my life’

It’s mid-afternoon and a young mother is lying under her duvet. Zonked out by the little blue pills in her bedside drawer, she’s unable to collect her children from school: increasingly, she has to rely on favours from a neighbour. Her hair is like straw, she’s skinny and pale, as if she hasn’t seen the sun for months.

Viewers of the new series of BBC One drama Happy Valley, the next episode of which is on Sunday Jan 8, might recognise the character of Joanna Hepworth. Joanna is the struggling wife of PE teacher Rob and mother of two little girls. Watching her, I felt a sickening jolt of recognition; 10 years ago, that tranquilliser-addicted spectre was me.

For five years in the 2010s, while in my mid-40s, I was desperately dependent on the same drug as Joanna: diazepam – also known as Valium, and one of a class of drugs called benzodiazepines. I was prescribed it aged 42 at the end of an unhappy marriage, rather than in the throes of an abusive one like Joanna. I didn’t get my pills from a dodgy pharmacist, as in the show, but from a legitimate high-street chemist at the end of the road. 

However, like Joanna – and millions of other perfectly respectable people who have suffered because of this and similar drugs – I was initially prescribed my diazepam for insomnia by a family GP. 

Valium sounds like a relic from a bygone age. The “Mother’s Little Helper” of the 1965 Rolling Stone song (“Doctor, please, some more of these/ Outside the door, she took four more”), GPs started prescribing it in the 1950s, tranquillising a generation of miserable women (and they were mostly women). 

In the Eighties, research started to flag serious issues of addiction and abuse, and the number of prescriptions fell. It went out of fashion. But diazepam – and its close “benzo” relatives – is still out there. In fact, according to an April 2022 report by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), approximately 300,000 adults in the UK have been taking benzodiazepines or related drugs for 12 months or longer. More research from Public Health England found that 1.4 million people in England had received a benzodiazepine prescription in the past year. “Given the possible adverse effects of such use, this represents a potentially serious public health problem,” said the report.

Most of these patients were described by NICE as “older”, but benzos are also a problem for younger people. Xanax – a newer variety – was a factor in more than a third of fatal prescription drug overdoses in the US last year. Valium-type drugs were implicated in the deaths of singer Whitney Houston and actor Heath Ledger. So dependent was the writer and psychologist Jordan Peterson on doctor-prescribed benzos, he took himself to rehab in Russia for a year. “I don’t remember anything. From December 16 of 2019 to February 5, 2020,” he said recently.

I didn’t look like a prospective addict when I turned up at my GP surgery in June 2010. I was the editor of a women’s magazine and the mother of two primary-aged children, with a large circle of friends. But my husband had recently “called time” on our marriage. Distraught by this sudden change in my previously secure existence, I stopped being able to sleep. Wired and upset, I told the doctor my tale of woe. He didn’t even look up, but reached for his green pad and prescribed me a benzodiazepine for sleep. There was no offer of therapy, no attempt to solve the root of my distress.

When, after a few weeks, the pills stopped working and I was struggling to sleep again, I was sent to an NHS psychiatrist who added in all manner of other pills, including a “daytime” benzo similar to diazepam, then, later, diazepam itself. Somehow, in the recesses of my squeezed-lemon brain, I knew that Valium was “bad”, but I was so exhausted, overcome, and desperate for sleep, I simply didn’t care.

On the next visit, in response to my description of continuing insomnia, my psychiatrist doubled my dose of benzodiazepines. He later upped it again over the phone.

Diazepam feels brilliant when you start taking it. You feel calm, detached, the world is slightly fuzzy at the edges. The problem is that you can’t be bothered to do anything. Though my insomnia was still the main debilitating issue, the benzos hardly helped. Within a fortnight, I was on sick leave from my job – I wouldn’t actually work again for another eight years. Thankfully, my kids were mostly being cared for by my ex, their grandparents and the neighbours who’d drop them home from school while I hid upstairs in bed. 

The other issue with Valium is that you become tolerant to it – meaning you increasingly have to take more to get the same effect, so you run out early. I would “hide” my blister pack in a pair of boots in the wardrobe, promising myself I would only take an extra pill in an “emergency”. But it was always an emergency. Consequently, I soon learned about the joy of withdrawal symptoms.

If you stop Valium suddenly, you are thrown into a vortex of stomach-churning anxiety, insomnia and unbearable jitters. You also feel very, very sick. I eventually became agoraphobic (another common side effect), and barely left the house for three years. My only trip out was on Monday mornings to pick up my pills from the chemist. There I would stand in the street, waiting for the shop to open, hopping from foot to foot in desperation. If the pharmacist was even 10 minutes late, I was beside myself. I’ll never forget her looks of sympathy and concern, dealing with this unlikely junkie clutching her Chloe handbag. But there was little she could do. I was on a consultant’s prescription. 

At one point, I was on 50mg of diazepam a day. The standard dose is 5-10mg. I knew I needed help. Unfortunately, while there are helplines and organisations out there for people hooked on heroin, cocaine, and alcohol, there is very little help for people hooked on prescription drugs. And so, finally, in October 2014 – utterly at the end of my tether – I took myself to rehab.

As is common with most rehab facilities, this one was run on the basis of the 12-step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous. We were all told we were “addicts” and treated accordingly. The problem was, I never identified with this description. I was able to stop at two glasses of wine without finishing the bottle – I still can. I had tried the odd recreational drug in my early 20s, not liked it much and never done it again. I’d never even smoked. 

I knew AA had helped millions of people over the decades, but I couldn’t engage. I felt lonely and isolated.

The nightmare really started when the counsellors – who didn’t understand the way Valium works – withdrew me from the drug way too quickly. This should actually be done very slowly over months, if not years. They did it in a couple of weeks. I was in a frenzy of agitation; the best way to describe it was that I felt I couldn’t “live in my skin”. I was running up and down the stairs, unable to sit still. I felt sick and dizzy, my head pounded. I couldn’t even see properly. 

So, at the end of my sixth week, the owners of the rehab put me in a car and dropped me at the psych ward. There I was to stay for the best part of a month, before going home to live with my dad – at the age of 47. But at least I was off the diazepam.

The journey to my recovery was long, slow and painful. I was unable to work, socialise or even hold a coherent conversation. But over the next three years or so, during which I basically sat on my bed and watched Netflix, the effects of the diazepam – and the ravages of its withdrawal – began to recede. I slowly started exercising again, eating properly and rebuilding my relationships – particularly with my children. 

By 2019 – something I never dared dream was possible – I started work again, as a freelance writer, eventually getting a job at this newspaper. For a while, I volunteered at a tranquilliser support charity, helping those still in the throes of addiction. Then, this time last year, I bought a beautiful new flat. I have a wonderful new partner. My children and I have rebuilt our bonds and are closer than ever. I have never taken another Valium. I am well aware that this all could have ended very differently. 

The medical profession does, on the whole, have a more responsible approach to diazepam these days. It tends to only be prescribed short-term and the NICE guidelines are stricter, especially since a 2019 Public Health England report reminded people of the drug’s addictive potential. But some time-stretched GPs still dole out benzos too readily. And, as the Happy Valley storyline highlights, many patients who can’t get their “fix” on prescription resort to buying the pills from illegal sources. 

The main issue is for patients who’ve been taking these drugs for decades. There is a woeful lack of support for the real and distressing issue of managing withdrawal. Despite talk of helplines and “deprescribing” clinics, nothing has yet materialised.

Let’s hope Happy Valley brings the issue back into the spotlight. I’m thinking again of Joanna Hepworth, in her afternoon drug haze. Though she’s only a character in a television drama, I fear for her and what lies in store. How will it end for her? How, also, will it end for the hundreds and thousands of people in real diazepam addiction as they suffer and stumble from doctor-supplied prescription to doctor-supplied prescription? 

The Insomnia Diaries: How I Learned to Sleep Again by Miranda Levy (Octopus Books). Buy now for £9.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514